Community composting project sees success at Mocha, Friendship

The Clean Green Guyana Campaign has said that its soil composting initiative is gaining momentum and residents of Mocha Arcadia and the Marfriends Cooperative Society in Friendship were recently able to reap the rewards of their labour under the community composting project.

The project is being conducted by the Clean Green Guyana Campaign as part of the Community Partici-pation and Public Aware-ness Programme being administered by the Ministry of Local Govern-ment and Regional Deve-lopment, funded by the Inter-American Develop-ment Bank, a press release from Guyenterprise said.

According to the release, “Composting may be described as nature’s way of recycling. It is a process in which organic waste, or waste derived from living things – such as leaves, yard trimmings and kitchen waste like vegetable skins, among other things – is broken down or biodegraded by micro-organisms into compost…. Compost is a rich soil-enhancer that can be applied to the soil to add the nutrients that may encourage healthy plant growth.”

Rufus Lewis, local composting expert and former head of the Solid Waste Management Department, teaching residents of Mocha/ Arcadia how to compost organic waste
Rufus Lewis, local composting expert and former head of the Solid Waste Management Department, teaching residents of Mocha/ Arcadia how to compost organic waste
Friendship residents collecting compost
Friendship residents collecting compost

About half of the waste typically produced by households in Guyana is organic and by choosing to compost this waste the public is reducing the amount of waste collected from their homes for disposal at the Haags Bosch Sanitary Landfill.

The release said residents who participated in the community composting project were happy to engage in an activity that was good for the environment and would benefit the entire community. They have already put the compost they produced to good use in their kitchen gardens. Many of them will now work with the Clean Green Guyana Campaign to start composting in their own backyards. In this new phase, of the project, co-ordinators will provide interested residents with composting structures in which to compost their organic waste.

In addition, the Clean Green Guyana Campaign is about to start a similar project in La Reconnais-sance-Mon Repos NDC.