With help from the community of Carson City, Full Circle Compost received all sorts of green waste from residents in the first year of Waste Management’s green-waste recycling program. The 2019-2020 year has been a huge success, in fact, Full Circle received 23,844 cubic yards of usable green waste from Carson City. To put this in perspective, the numbers amount to a football field stacked 11-feet high with yard waste that stayed out of the landfill, that’s equivalent to 19,200 cars worth of CO2 kept off the road!
Happy one year of green waste recycling, Carson City!
The program started just over a year ago, and since July of 2019, Waste Management has been collecting residents’ ‘Yard Waste’ bins (those new Brown Lid bins) filled full of earthy-friendly green waste and hauling it away to the Full Circle Compost site in Carson City where it’s turned into wonderful Nevada-made products like compost, soils, and mulches.
Only items made by Mother Nature can be composted–materials like pine needles, grass clippings, branches, and leaves, all sized to fit in the brown lid yard waste can. Mother Nature isn’t a big fan of plastic bags, trash, cans, bottles, and anything she doesn’t grow herself. Before all the waste in those green waste bins can be composted, the Full Circle crew has to pull out any waste that’s not green, something this awesome crew does all by hand, which can be very time consuming. The Nevada Department Of Environmental Protection made a great infographic that explains this entire from your yard to Waste Management to Full Circle process. Check it out!
In this green waste year, the crew at Full Circle pulled out over 5,000 large trash cans full (that’s 250,000 gallons!) of garbage from Yard Waste bins, that’s about 5% of contaminated materials that don’t belong in those green waste bins. To combine efforts with Carson City residents to keep trash out of the yard waste bins, Full Circle launched a “Clean Your Green” informative media campaign, which had great impact and there’s still work to be done to keep yard waste separate from trash. This is a wonderful recycling program that benefits our community (and our gardens) tremendously, so Full Circle Compost continues to need your help. As we head into the fall season, please spread the word, keep your green waste as clean as can be; “Clean Your Green!”
