Hi
I am doing some work for my city council to try and come up with an alternative system to the rubbish chutes they have in all their council flats.. I will also be doing some waste education with the tenants. The tenants are keen for their rubbish chute system to stay but the Council wants it to go because it causes all sorts of problems and they also want the tenants to recycle and compost. Does anyone know of any programmes that have worked with low income tenants in apartment blocks to introduce recycling and composting? All the Council blocks in the city are being redeveloped so there is scope to work with the architects to build in room for recycling and composting receptacles within the apartment and do other structural work. Any ideas or examples of other such projects would be gratefully accepted!
With thanks
Sarah Pritchett
Low Income Apartment Block Recycling/Composting
Sign in or Sign up to comment
Hi All
I would be interested in this too, as we are about to engage with another State government agency to look at ways to improve waste management and recycling in multi storey accommodation at a corrections facility (some extra challenges there!).
Cheers,
Sharon
...
Hi Sarah
I haven't seen many examples, but the one that I have is brilliant. Have a look at the East London Community Recycling Project. http://www.elcrp-recycling.com/ They use combination of effective micro-organisms (EM) in the form of Bokashi (www.livingsoil.co.uk) with worm farms, and a small in-vessel composting unit called 'the rocket' (http://www.quickcompost.co.uk/). The system that they run is cheap (they just use cheap plastic buckets with lids, not the pricey ones on the livingsoil site), provides employment and fertilizer for local gardens. They did a lot of work on getting the community on board, but have a lot of support in 3 large council tower blocks. The key hook was reducing the immediate environmental problems that affected the estate - lots of rats and the smell of rotting garbage in the summer. Once residents could see the reduction in rats & the lack of smell there has been a good deal of self-enforcement & peer pressure as no-one wants the rats back (they have all found homes on other estates that didn't take up the service!) The system works like this: - resident collects organic food waste in the bucket, adding bokashi as they do (the EM stops the bucket smelling) - buckets collected a couple of times a week by ELCRP, using shopping trolleys to go up & down the lifts & along the corridors! - contents of buckets are put through the rocket in-vessel composter (they have 3 systems in a small shed on-site - Compost that comes out of the rocket is then put into worm farms for maturing / final pathogen removal. They should be able to send plenty of information about it. They also run the dry recyclables collection and a 2nd hand shop in the estate which is popular as it is a very low income area.
Good luck
Alexis