Better Living Thorugh Garbage

I have a suspicion that if I suggested that one of the keys to many health problems confronting urban neighborhoods lies in the bags, trash cans, and dumpsters strewn about the city, I might not get second consideration.

Yet, consider this: A significant amount of the solid waste coming out of the Cleveland includes food waste, yard waste, coffee grounds, cardboard, newspaper, and other bio-degradable materials that can be composted and turned into topsoil. In fact, these materials can be stacked through a process called “sheet mulching” to quickly convert vacant lots, turf lawns, or even blacktop into productive beds of growth. What’s more, installing these gardens can bring people together, build community, sequester atmospheric carbon, and add to the available food supply in neighborhoods that have lost grocery stores.

So, before you jump right into that classic American practice of just throwing things away, look at what Maurice Small from City Fresh and some sturdy volunteers did to begin to turn a turf lawn at the Jones Farm house into a productive edible landscape in just two hours.

On Friday, May 30th from 10-1PM, a sheet mulching installation will be hosted at the Huron Hospital in East Cleveland. This event will demonstrate the same techniques, showing how the abundance of wastes generated by a city can be used to grow food. Delicious, hearty, healthy, organic foods nourished by the stuff that we go through so much trouble to bag up and have hauled away.

It is fitting that Huron Hospital will be hosting a garden installation. It shows a larger connection between health and food access. Like many urban neighborhoods, East Cleveland suffers from poverty, loss of population, and declining infrastructure. Additionally, East Cleveland is a food desert. Grocery stores have left and many residents lack access to the foods needed to support a healthy diet. In fact, the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission recently completed an assessment that determined that residents travel an average of 2.5 times more distance to get to a grocery store than a fast food establishment.

Installing a garden sends a signal to residents for how health can be woven into the very fabric of our neighborhoods in the form of gardens and green space. Not only do gardens provide a source of food and a place to process waste, but they also promote physical exercise and create healthier bonds between residents.

As many communities grapple with the emotional and physical costs of diabetes, heart disease, or other diet related ailments, we can find that one major part of the solution lies in changing how we think about garbage. In nature, there is no such thing as waste. The waste of one organism becomes food for another. In the city, much of the waste that we throw out actually can be consumed by micro-organisms or worms to make “compost” which makes soil more workable and fertile. Consider these gardens as slow-release garbage disposals with the capacity to absorb and convert garbage into abundant growth- designed and tested by millions of years of evolution.

In a recent interview for the upcoming film Uprooted: Reconnecting Food and People by LESS Productions and the New Agrarian Center, Cleveland State University Professor Norm Krumholz notes that there are about 17,000 vacant lots in Cleveland. Krumholtz also notes that Cleveland, like many so-called “shrinking cities” in the industrial mid-west and northeast face many common problems.

Shrinking population, shrinking investment, loss of jobs, growing percentage of poverty in resident population, old infrastructure that is extraordinarily expensive and difficult to replace. All of them are suffering from the same kinds of problems. In the face of those problems, these cities are simply going to have to respond. They are in the same grip of forces that transcend the city itself. The people who will be able to deal with these problems best will be those that face the future with some reality and do the best they can in a creative way in dealing with the problems.

A major part of responding to the many challenges that we face is looking at new combinations of previously disparate issues. Addressing both solid waste problems and health problems by creating gardens takes two problems and creates a multitude of solutions- better health, stronger community ties, reduced fuel use in distant transport, aesthetically pleasing urban spaces, storm water absorption, and chemical free food.

As with many things, the solutions often lie in that space between things.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Brad Masi bradmasiATearthlink.net

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