Wesley Wiggins

Composting at Home

Author: Claire Wayner ’22

Stuck at home and tired of your garbage can getting stinky? A full 22% of your trash (or more) is likely food, and food waste doesn’t smell too great after a couple of days. There’s an easy and environmentally friendly solution to the odor – start composting!

By breaking down the food in combination with leaves and water, the process yields a rich, nutrient-filled soil additive called compost that can be used in your home garden beds or gifted to your neighbors (here is an article on the benefits of compost for your garden). Composting at home is really easy to start up and doesn’t require a ton of resources. My family has been composting since I was in middle school, and since then, we’ve learned a lot of helpful tips which I’ll share with you below.

During the day, we collect our food scraps indoors in an old yogurt container in the fridge to prevent it from smelling up our kitchen counter. We then empty the scraps into our outdoor composter whenever the indoor container is full. Our outdoor composter is a tumbling, elevated version which we keep in our backyard. It’s definitely worth the investment to buy a model like the one we have because it keeps food scraps contained and elevated (to prevent us from attracting unwanted pests like rats, as we live in a city) and also makes it easier to regularly turn the compost (moving the scraps around is important to promote breakdown and aeration). You don’t need a shiny new container to start composting, however. In a pinch, you can build your own out of anything from milk crates to recycled lumber.

Home compost collected in an old yogurt cup
Photo Credits: Claire Wayner

Keep in mind that you can’t compost all of your food scraps at home – things like dairy, meat, prepared foods/dishes, and disposables marked as “compostable” should stay out of your home compost, as they won’t break down unless put in a more industrialized composting environment like Princeton’s S.C.R.A.P. Lab. Stick to things like fruit and vegetable scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds, or clippings from your yard (raked leaves in the fall are great!). Try to get your ratio of “greens” (e.g., grass clippings, fruit and vegetable scraps) to “browns” (e.g., leaves, eggshells) right.

There are plenty of tutorials online on how to get started (check out this one from NPR). If you live in a dense city and can’t easily set up a compost bin, there are always countertop composters for apartments, or you could check to see if your municipality offers curbside composting pickup (ShareWaste has a great directory of where to drop off your compost if you can’t use it in your home).

*Elevated, tumbling outdoor composter*
*Photo Credits: Claire Wayner*

By starting to compost, you can make a big difference. Most greenhouse gas emissions from landfills come from the breakdown of food. Composting can reduce these greenhouse gas emissions and give us a usable product at the end of it.

Learn How to Recycle Right

Author: Claire Wayner ’22

Many of us are living in very different locations because of COVID, so it’s important to get familiar with your area’s recycling guidelines for curbside pickup. Each municipality has their own rules, which sounds frustrating at first, but trust me – it won’t take you very long to get used to them, and you’ll save a lot of carbon emissions and resources in the process (recycling aluminum cans, for instance, saves 95% of the energy originally used to manufacture them!). Recycling correctly is also key to reducing contamination, which can cause whole bags of recycling to get thrown out.

Start off by Googling recycling rules for your city or county. Many municipalities create “cheat sheets” for you to print out and stick on your fridge to remember which items are recyclable and which are not. For those items that aren’t accepted for curbside recycling, some might still be accepted at grocery stores or special recycling centers (a classic example is a plastic bag – most grocery stores have plastic bag collection bins by the entryway). I encourage you to go the extra mile and collect and drop off those items that your municipality doesn’t accept at the curb.

*Recycling Center in Park City, Utah*
*Photo Credits: Claire Wayner*

This fall, I’m living off-campus with friends, and we discovered that our house doesn’t get any curbside recycling service. You might be in this boat, too! In these cases, there is usually a recycling center nearby where you can drive your materials on a weekly basis. I found a local recycling center in town, and every week, when we go grocery shopping, I bring our recycling with me and drop it off at the center, where I have to sort it by the material. I know this sounds tedious, but I actually really look forward to visiting the recycling center – the act of sorting teaches me where my recycled materials are going. It’s not a lot more work, as it’s right next to the grocery store, and in some states, you can even make money from dropping off your recyclables (like states with beverage container deposits).

Send us photos of you recycling, and know that it makes a difference. Only 9% of plastic, 25% of glass, and 50% of aluminum cans are recycled. You can help increase those numbers!

Claire Wayner ’22 at a Recycling Center in Park City, Utah.
Photo Credits: Claire Wayner ’22

The Value of Shopping Local

Author: Claire Wayner ’22

This fall, I’ve been experiencing a lot of hopelessness about environmental work. From the wildfires in California to the rampant deforestation of the Amazon, it seems as if our planet is collapsing around us. COVID-19 and the lockdown has made me feel even more like a small cog in a big wheel. What can I possibly do to make amends, to heal this planet and our crumbling climate, when I’m stuck at home?

To my surprise, being at home has taught me a lot about how I can reduce my own impact on the planet through personal lifestyle changes. One small example of that is my increased efforts to shop locally. I’ve been visiting a weekly farmer’s market and farmstand, buying items like in-season tomatoes, peaches, and eggplant. In many cases, what we’ve bought has been cheaper than at the grocery store – not to mention that it is fresher and tastes better. In other cases, like the occasional meat we’ve bought, I’ve felt better about my personal carbon footprint, knowing that the meat traveled less of a distance and wasn’t raised on deforested land in the Amazon.

Park City Farmer’s Market in Utah.
Photo Credit: Claire Wayner

Shopping for local food has also helped me to feel more supportive of my community. Grocery stores are large, brightly lit, and often sterile-feeling. Especially during COVID’s lockdown, I’ve been itching for social interaction. By shopping local, I feel more connected to the food production process, knowing where my food has come from and knowing that my payment is going to directly benefit farmers in my area.

Buying local is also not limited to food. Many businesses near you are probably suffering because of the economic lockdown. By patronizing local establishments instead of ordering what you need online, you’re helping to keep your city alive while minimizing your carbon footprint (online shopping adds a lot of emissions when it comes to transporting the goods to you). Check out your local bookstore, or order a meal from a local restaurant (in my next blog post, I’ll talk about how to recycle a lot of the single-use takeout waste you get).

So how have you been shopping local? Leave us a comment with a photo or two!

It’s Hard to Be Green Right Now

Author: Wesley Wiggins ’21

This year has been collectively deemed the worst by most people around the world. With the coronavirus limiting our mobility, racial justice at the front of our minds, a foreboding presidential election around the corner, and the effects of climate change ramping up it is hard to not feel like there is too much to deal with this year. For me, this has manifested itself as a severe lack of motivation in my daily life and has crippled many habits that I have tried to form this year. This lack of motivation has also come with the feeling that I have to do more than ever because it looks like I have more free time than ever. This has caused increased feelings of disappointment in myself because I always think I can and should be doing more while ignoring the fact that I’m dealing with a tremendous amount of loss. This all results in a feedback loop that makes trying new things really difficult and at points demoralizing.

Example of my vegetarian lunches. This one is roasted vegetables mixed with scrambled eggs. *Photo Credit: Wesley Wiggins*

Earlier this year, I attempted to reduce my meat consumption for both ethical and sustainability reasons, and for the first few weeks, it was going well. I started limiting my meat consumption to once a week for a month in May and continued through the month of June. But at some point, I slipped up and started having meat multiple times a week. By the end of August, it was as if I had never tried to change my diet at all which led to the unforgiving cycle of beating myself up about it. But the truth is while we all have a personal responsibility to take care of the Earth that does not mean it is going to be easy or that you will get it right on the first try.

Recently, I’ve tried to take things slower by sticking to non-meat lunches and breakfast while being more conscious about what I eat for dinner. The biggest change I’ve made is not setting myself an all-or-nothing rule about what to eat and starting to look at sustainability less as a lifestyle and more as a series of choices that I can make to heal the Earth and ensure a better life for future generations.

There are a lot of systems set in place in our society that make it hard to be sustainable. Pandemic or not, we can’t beat ourselves up for slipping up. Being sustainable in our daily lives is a choice we have to make every day. Even though we slip up and make mistakes we can still look at our lives today and make a new choice to be more sustainable.

Bringing Together Algae, Food, and Compost

Author: Wesley Wiggins ’21

In the Fall 2019 semester, I worked on a project which incorporated the S.C.R.A.P. Lab (our campus composter, fondly known as Scrappy) for my class ENE321: Resource Recovery for a Circular Economy taught by Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Z. Jason Ren. This class discussed the topic of a circular economy which is the idea that resources should be reused and repurposed instead of how our linear economy simply puts items into waste. Our final project for this course was to create a business idea and pitch for a company that incorporates elements of the circular economy, and when I first heard of this idea my mind immediately turned to compost.

Composting takes food scraps and uses it to create a soil additive that enriches the earth which can assist in growing new food and/or keeping the environment healthy. My team also wanted to incorporate a new element and produce something from compost. Through our research, we learned that the process of composting emits biogenic CO₂ and we wanted to repurpose that gas and produce something new. Our minds turned to the process of photosynthesis in which water and carbon dioxide contribute to building organic matter so we wanted to find a product that we could grow easily and then sell to consumers. This is when we came across the algae species, Arthrospira maxima and Arthrospira platensis more commonly known as Spirulina.

Spirulina (Arthrospira platensis and Arthrospira maxima) contains 55-70% protein by dry weight, as well as high amino acid content and nutrients. It grows best in environments with high CO2 concentrations, a high pH, and high temperatures.

Spirulina are a globally cultivated algae species for food production because of their high protein content and nutritional value. We decided that the nutritious algae would be an excellent food product to sell as our business product and the only thing left to decide was how to grow the spirulina. We decided that the best way to grow them and incorporate the compost would be to use a photobioreactor which is a closed system that would allow us to control the inputs and outputs of the spirulina growth mixture. We could also take the CO₂ from an industrial composter like Scrappy and feed it into our photobioreactor to cultivate the spirulina.

After settling on an idea, my team had to settle on a company name and company roles. The members of my team were myself as the Chief Technological Officer, Jivahn Moradian ‘20 as the Chief Financial Officer, and Gabby D’Arcangelo ‘21 as the Chief Executive Officer. When deciding on a name we wanted something that represented both the algae and the use of carbon dioxide from the composter. So the name we settled on was AlgaeHG or AlGHG. The GHG in the title is short for Greenhouse gases which we are using to create our product in the form of CO₂.

Gabby D’Arcangelo ‘21, Wesley Wiggins ’21, and Jivahn Moradian ‘20 (from left to right) presenting the AlgaeHG business pitch and presentation in ENE321: Resource Recovery for a Circular Economy.
Photo Credits: Professor Z. Jason Ren

Though the company was created for a class project, the three of us had quite a fun time brainstorming the science, engineering, finances, and algae puns for our little class project. And we were thankful to Gina Talt and the S.C.R.A.P. Lab for letting Gabby and Jivahn visit the Lab during my shift, and for all of the other assistance, we were able to receive.