Celebrate spring with Green Mountain Compost

After a long Vermont winter, the folks at Green Mountain Compost are as excited as you are about the arrival of spring. As soon as the snow goes away and the ground warms up enough for spring gardening, we’ll open our doors and offer our fabulous bulk compost for sale. It’ll be available by the yard and — new this year! — we’re offering a Bag-Your-Own option. We supply the bags, you supply the elbow grease and shovel it in.

We have lots of high quality compost just waiting to help recharge your garden, lawn, or flower beds, and we’re once again offering free High Mowing Organic Seeds with every cubic yard of bulk compost — including deliveries! — or for every 5 bags of Bag-Your-Own compost purchased this season.

Speaking of seeds, we invite you to participate in our Seed of the Week give-away!  Every Monday, we’re posting a High Mowing “Seed of the Week” on the GMC web site and Facebook page. Here’s how it works:
– Find out the Seed of the Week.
– Visit our location at 1042 Redmond Road in Williston and name the Seed of the Week.
– Purchase of at least half a cubic yard of bulk compost or 5 bags of Bag-Your-Own compost and receive a free packet of High Mowing Seeds plus one 20-quart bag of Bag-Your-Own compost! (Offer redeemable in person at Green Mountain Compost only.)

Combining High Mowing’s quality seeds with Green Mountain Compost is the perfect way to get your garden to produce lush, healthy plants this growing season. There are over a hundred varieties to choose from, so take a look at the list of available seeds. If you’re ordering a delivery, you qualify for free seeds! Just fill out our online delivery order form and choose which seeds you’d like with your order.

Happy Gardening!

 Celebrate Earth Day with a tour of the recycling and composting facilities!

Celebrate Earth Day by touring CSWD’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) and Green Mountain Compost’s (GMC) composting facility! See first-hand how your blue bin recyclables are processed and sent to market at the MRF. Come to the tour at GMC and see how your food scraps become rich, beautiful compost!

DATES: Monday, April 21 or Tuesday, April 22
MRF RECYCLING TOUR TIME: 11:00-12:00 at the MRF
GMC COMPOSTING TOUR TIME: 1:00 -2:00 at GMC
REGISTRATION REQUIRED! These are popular tours and space is limited, so sign up early! Sign up for one tour or both by sending an email to mkeough@cswd.net. If you are attending both tours, feel free to bring a bag lunch to eat at the picnic tables at GMC.
OTHER IMPORTANT INFO: You must provide your own transportation to and from facilities. Tour-goers must be at least 10 years old and adhere to these requirements: MRF requirements / Green Mountain Compost requirements. Note: Tours are conducted partially outside, take place regardless of the weather, and involve some steps and tight spaces.

 Earth Day is a perfect excuse to start composting at home.

Want to do a little green multi-tasking? Here’s a way to celebrate Earth Day and get your grocery shopping done all at once: Healthy Living Market (222 Dorset St., South Burlington) is holding an Earthstravaganza with events throughout the day that will set you up with information to add a little heath to your diet and a little green to your lifestyle.

Most notably, from our point of view, CSWD’s school and youth outreach coordinator, Johnny Powell, will present a fun-for-all-ages composting workshop where you’ll learn how easy it is to keep food scraps out of the landfill, whether you have a backyard composting bin or not (hint: if you want to keep food scraps out of the landfill but don’t have the space at home, you can bring your food scraps to one of our Drop-Off Centers or Green Mountain Compost — and it’s free all year ’round!).

Earthstravaganza runs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on April 22, with our Johnny-on-the-spot composting workshop at 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. and our info table up until 1:30.

Winning entries for the “Name That (Local) Color” contest

Last month, we asked our readers to propose a name for any or all of our four new Local Color Paint colors. We received a delightfully wide-ranging selection of names, making it a challenge to chose only one for each color.

What the heck is Local Color Paint? It’s fabulous, Earth-friendly paint that we make from the cream of the crop of leftover paint that gets dropped off through our collection program at CSWD’s Environmental Depot. We carefully process it and repackage it for purchase. The paint isn’t wasted and you get quality paint at a great price! Find out where you can get your hands on some here.

 And now, without further ado, here are the colors:

… aaaaaaaaaaand here are the winning names:

Blue Moon

Grazing Green

Sunflower Yellow

Udderly Pink

A huge thanks to everyone who entered. The winners will receive two gallons of Local Color paint and a $25 gift certificate to the local farmers market of their choice. Congratulations!

Point Bay Marina leads the way in boat-wrap recycling

It’s spring. Finally. But will it be face-bitingly cold tomorrow or balmy enough to think about unwrapping your boat for the season? Reliable weather has been in short supply this year, but here’s one thing we can rely on: Point Bay Marina in Charlotte is the high tide that lifts all boats when it comes to recycling boat wrap.

“We’ll start unwrapping boats in early April,” says Steve Gutowski, Yard Manager at Point Bay. “Last year we recycled 7.2 tons of shrink wrap, which included 100 percent of the scraps from fall boat covering, ten boats’ worth from the general public, and about a ton from Marine Plus.”  Marine Plus in North Ferrisburgh provides boat storage services for many Shelburne Shipyard customers.

Like Point Bay Marina, Shelburne Shipyard is a certified Vermont Clean Marina, which means that they have been recognized as going above and beyond in their efforts to contribute to safeguarding Vermont’s waterways. Shelburne Shipyard uses only durable canvas covers for boats stored on site.

This will be the fifth year of the partnership between Point Bay and Canusa Hershman Recycling Company in St. Albans. Canusa provides storage containers at no charge, and Point Bay pays only the trucking fees for delivery to St. Albans. Together, they keep more than 28,000 pounds of plastic out of the landfill each year and recapture all the energy, labor and fuel invested in manufacturing that material. Point Bay’s boat wrap recycling program costs less than half of what it would pay for landfilling the material.

Steve Gutowski, Point Bay Yard Manager, has developed a simple step-by-step guide explaining how to remove your boat wrap in a way that ensures it can be recycled.

If you would like to know more, or get a copy of the boat-unwrapping how-to guide, contact Steve Gutowski at Point Bay (802-425-2431; yardboss@pointbaymarina.com) or Don Bortz at Canusa Hershman Recycling (802) 527-1707; DonB@chrecycling.com) for more information.

If your Chittenden County marina is already recycling this material, please contact Michele Morris at mmorris@cswd.net or 872-8100 x237 so we can recognize your efforts!

 What’s your garbage-in:garbage-out ratio?

Stuff. High-end or low-end, our lives are filled with it. How do you make sure the stuff you buy with your hard-earned buckeroos has a low garbage-in:garbage-out ratio? The gi:go ratio is a way of gauging how much packaging there is compared to actual usable, consumable product. You’re paying for a product as well as its packaging, and if there’s a lot more packaging than product, you’ll pay a higher price — and you’ll send a bigger pile to the landfill.

These days, it’s easy to find products with low garbage-in:garbage-out ratios. For example, the convenience built into a twenty-six juice box pack or single-use yogurt cups results in high garbage-in:garbage-out ratios. Reduce that ratio by buying a package that contains many servings, and simply divvy it up into convenient, daily servings in a reusable cup or bowl.

You can also reduce your garbage in:garbage out ratio through reuse. Look for pasta sauce that comes in mason jars, for example, so you can use those jars for storage for all those bulk items you’re now buying, such as flour, sugar, grains, popcorn, nuts, and chocolate-covered-candy-coated sunflower seeds (yup — there’s a lot going on in that bulk aisle!).

Got a tip to help balance the garbage-in:garbage-out ratio? Got a great system for keeping your home from being stuffed with stuff? Bring it on! Email us at info@cswd.net and we’ll share the best tips.

 Prescription drug take-back day April 26

Leftover medicine poses a serious safety threat in the U.S., with more people dying each year from overdoses involving prescription painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If you have leftover medications, bring them to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s annual National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day.

WHAT: The 8th National Prescription Drug Take Back Day
WHEN: Saturday, April 26, 2014, 10:00 am – 2:00 pm
WHERE: Visit the DEA’s National Take-Back Initiative page for locations. CSWD facilities are not participating in the take-back program.
INFO: Inquiries can also be made at 1-800-882-9539

The DEA offers this program to provide safe, convenient places to bring your leftover drugs, and offers information on how to prevent drug abuse. Due to the abundance of take-back locations offered by the DEA, Chittenden Solid Waste District facilities will not be taking part in this event.

The Product Stewardship Institute, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the health and environmental impacts of consumer products, has created a Go-to-Guide that offers a clearinghouse of information about safe pharmaceutical take-back initiatives in each of the 50 states, the dangers of improper medicine storage and disposal, and other helpful information.

Green up your Easter basket

Where did the tradition of giving Easter baskets come from? Many traditions feed into the way we celebrate this holiday, but you can be sure that none of them started out using fake, plastic grass!

Just as we suggest choosing tea towels, bandannas, or other useful and meaningful items to wrap gifts for all occasions, you and the Easter Bunny can apply the same reasoning to Easter baskets.

We’re not the only ones who wince at the thought of all that plastic Easter basket grass ending up in the landfill. A helpful CSWD resident suggested using shredded recyclable paper, a colorful cloth napkin, or an item of clothing to line Easter baskets.

There is an abundance of ideas for a greener Easter online. Give this site a peek and have fun interpreting the holiday in your own, unique way, introducing greener options for observing the old traditions.