Livable Buckhead + composting = true love

If you’re a friend of Livable Buckhead, chances are someone from our team has talked your ear off about composting. But why are we so obsessed, you might wonder? Why, thank you for asking!

Composting is one of those small lifestyle changes you can make that has a BIG impact. Composting is the practice of creating organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. When we compost, we keep organic material out of our landfills, where it would otherwise take up precious space and release methane as it decomposed in the absence of oxygen. Most of us tend to think of carbon dioxide when we think of climate change, but methane is another greenhouse gas to keep in mind as it is at least 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

What we’ve found to be the easiest way to compost is through a valet service that picks up our compost and does the dirty work for us. We use CompostNow in our office – and a few of us love their service so much that we use them in our own homes as well (myself included). Just as we’ve all gotten into the habit of separating our recyclables from our trash, we’ve simply added the habit of also separating out our compostables. Along with the convenience of using a valet service, there also comes the added benefit that commercial facilities are able to take more materials than you might think. We’re able to put our pizza boxes (those aren’t recyclable, folks!), paper towels, compostable plastic cups, and much more into our compost bin since they have the capacity to compost those materials for us.

Let’s check out our composting stats:

• To date, the Livable Buckhead office has diverted 599 pounds of waste from the landfill by composting. That’s created 150 pounds of rich compost, avoided releasing 78 pounds of methane at the landfill, and is enough to offset 3,403 miles driven by a car!
• Let’s add to that the 1,149 pounds of waste that three of us from the Livable Buckhead office have diverted by also composting in our own homes.
• And here’s another fun fact: Buckhead businesses have diverted over 80,400 pounds of waste through CompostNow.

We even have a superstar in our office who has taken on composting his own organic materials himself! Kip, Livable Buckhead’s Mobility Concierge, composts in his backyard. Since he started composting, his weekly garbage ritual involves taking out a minuscule amount of trash for landfill, and he says that he finds the whole affair of taking out his trash to be far less sloppy and unpleasant than it used to be. He keeps a large bowl on his kitchen counter where scraps of organic matter can be discarded, then after dinner he takes that bowl out to the compost bin in a far corner of his backyard where it decays into rich soil. He also mixes in yard waste, like leaves and hedge trimmings, to round out the mix. He says his trash can is no longer a source of rotting food smells or a forbidden treasure to his dog, and combined with recycling the total volume that goes to landfill is a fraction of what it was before.

Come join us on the composting train! It’s so easy and is great way to make a meaningful impact.