Athens, Ga. – Compost 101, a University of Georgia class that will teach participants how to successfully transform kitchen scraps and yard waste into a nutritive soil amendment, will be held April 10 from 3:30-5:30 p.m. in Room 1501 of the Miller Plant Sciences Building. Compost 101 is free and open to the public.
The class will be taught by Suki Janssen, Athens-Clarke County waste reduction administrator, and Amanda Tedrow, a Clarke County Cooperative Extension agent, who are co-instructors of the Athens-Clarke County Master Composter course.
Compost 101 is organized by graduate students Aaron Joslin and Holly Campbell of the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and Greg Skupien of the Odum School of Ecology and is part of the Warnell and Odum Pilot Compost Project funded by the UGA Office of Sustainability. The students’ goal is to reduce the amount of solid waste on the UGA campus by promoting composting.
The group’s first class, a workshop on vermicomposting—a method of composting using earthworms—had more than 25 participants.
Besides educational workshops, the project includes developing a system for collecting compostable waste from the Odum and Warnell schools and delivering it to the UGArden for composting. Joslin, Campbell, and Skupien hope that this pilot project will demonstrate the potential for composting on a larger scale.
“We’ve been collecting kitchen scraps from Warnell and Odum for a little over a month and we’ve managed to divert over 300 pounds of organic matter from entering the landfill,” Skupien said. “If the entire university participated, just think about all the compost we could create.”
For more information about Compost 101 or the Warnell and Odum Pilot Compost Project, email ugacomposting@gmail.com.