I’m not the most green-living oriented person I’ve ever met, but I try to do my part. I go out of my way to recycle (there’s no collection in my apartment community), I’m a vegetarian largely because of energy concerns, my lightbulbs are funky-shaped, I pay an extra $5 on my electricity bill that presumably goes towards renewable energy, etc. Today I decided to take it a step further and contact Louisville Green Guide to see if they could recommend someone to help me with my compost dilemma. It’s not a terribly complex dilemma—I’d like to compost, but I live in an apartment. I’m not quite ready to make fertilizer on my patio yet. So I sent an email to the webmaster of LGG and was surprised when Terri Holze replied within the hour, with a handful of contacts for me. One of which was Breaking New Grounds, a cool local organization dedicated to growing organic, sustainability, and community development. I sent another web-based email to that site, and got a reply mere minutes later. These hippies are prompt, let me tell you.

So the gist is, Breaking New Grounds deals mostly with large-scale food waste from organizations in town (namely, Heine Brothers coffee), but they kindly accept individual food scraps as well, as long as they’re properly bagged or contained. Sweet.

My mind is racing with the possibility of becoming a compost collection impresario and maybe even a middleman collection site. I realize it’s a little nerdy to get excited about my friends dropping off their banana peels at my apartment, but still. If I can play some small part in changing a few people’s habits, I wouldn’t just be encouraging earth-friendly behavior, I’d also get a cheap elitist thrill of superiority. And you really can’t beat that.