Composting

Goucher has two composting systems.

1. The larger system involves composting waste produced by Stimson and Heubeck dining halls.
 
The Campus Agriculture Co-op collects buckets of raw fruit and vegetable food waste weekdays from the Stimson kitchen. The waste is taken to the co-op's composting site in the woods behind Stimson.

The composting site consists of six cinder block bins, enclosed on three sides. Wood chips and ground leaves are mixed in with the vegetables to create a balanced mixture of materials that contain carbon and nitrogen, which is necessary to produce nutrient-rich compost.

Co-op members measure the temperature of the piles every day and estimate the amount of food they add to the pile. It takes about a month to fill up one bin, and the scraps turn into compost in about six weeks.
 
2. The smaller system allows Goucher community members to compost their own food.

Goucher community members can drop off fruit and vegetable scraps at three collection sites -- outside the Hoffberger Science Building, Pearlstone Café, and Stimson Dining Hall. Community members can place their scraps into one of the white plastic buckets found at each of these locations. As the buckets fill up, their contents will be added to the tumblers beside them for composting.
 
Things that can be composted at Goucher:

• Fruit scraps
• Vegetable scraps
• Coffee grinds
• Yard materials (leaves, grass, and woodchips)

Things that cannot be composted at Goucher:

• Meats
• Dairy
• Cooked food

Community members with a lot of compostable waste (i.e. faculty with yard waste) should contact the co-op's leaders, who will let them know where to drop off the materials.

For more information about composting at Goucher, contact co-op leaders Jared Margulies at jmarguli@gmail.com or Maggie Wood at mwood@goucher.edu.