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Why the City needs you to bring your compostables to De Smidt Park
Well, the City hasn’t said that in so many words, but there’s a growing urgency to find new ways to manage organic waste. Currently most people routinely toss their food scraps in with the rest of the refuse, which has a number of negatives associated with it:
When recyclables become contaminated by food waste, they are no longer recyclable, which means the whole lot goes to landfill.
Cape Town is heading towards a landfill crisis. We currently have two landfill sites: one at Coastal Park in Muizenburg, which has four years of life left; and one at Vissershok, near Table View, which cannot meet the entire landfill needs of the city without also filling up very soon. The City is looking to identify another landfill site, increasingly important as Cape Town’s population grows (it is about to overtake Johannesburg as South Africa’s most populous city). Read more here.
Organic waste in landfill generates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which contributes to global warming. As part of fighting this, the City has instituted a phased ban on organics going to landfill. By 2027, it will no longer accept organic waste – which includes food waste, and garden waste – in its landfills. Read more here.
Some Etiquette
Please keep all plastic or inorganic material out of the bin: if you’ve collected your compostables in a plastic bag, please empty the plastic bag into the composter, and dispose of the bag in the general refuse bins in the park.
Please note what’s in and what’s out below:
What you can put in:
Garden cuttings, both green (full of nitrogen and add to the moisture content) and brown (rich in carbon). If they’re diseased or infested with bugs, rather put them in your wheelie bin
Houseplants at the end of their life, as long as they are not diseased
Wood ash
Tea leaves (bags have hard-to-break-down components), coffee grounds
Eggshells
All fruit and vegetable ends and peelings, or items that have got old or mouldy. Also OK of they’re cooked as long as they’re not full of oils (which makes them slower to break down)
Nutshells
Paper napkins
Brown cardboard if it’s broken up into small pieces – it might be easier to put this in with your recyclables. The same goes for newspaper and egg cartons. White paper products have been bleached and introduce chemicals, so rather recycle these.
Leave out
Weeds that are in seed, or diseased / infected garden or house plants
Ready-made foods
Cheese and other dairy products
Fish, egg or meat products
Animal faeces
Commercial bread (worryingly, it seems not to decompose)
The Measures We Take to Keep Rats at Bay
Rodents can be attracted to compost – it’s warm, and fresher food scraps provide a source of nutrition. But we’re doing all the right things to keep the rats at bay:
They don’t like to be disturbed, so the fact that we are busy every day adding things to the pile, or turning it, or even walking around, is a deterrent
Rats like things to be dry, but composting is speeded up by moisture, so we keep things moist, another deterrent for rats
We keep meat products out of the mix, along with cooked foods and breads
Find out more about our De Smidt Park Composting efforts HERE
For Villagers, there’s a partial solution: we have an active composting campaign at the De Smidt park, managed by the DWCA’s Park subcommittee. Our compost can’t take all forms of organic waste, but it can take much of what you and I would routinely generate. In time, with some watering and turning, this turns into rich compost, which we sieve to bring to the right texture and use for lawn topdressing, or to feed the soil in the park beds.
All are encouraged to collect and bring their compostables to the park, and drop them into the bin provided. What most of us do is keep a lidded bucket somewhere handy in the kitchen, drop all the compostable into it, and when it’s full, take it up to the park to tip into the bin. Time it right, and it’s a good excuse for a catch-up with a neighbour.
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