Design Conference Adds Composting to Agenda

By KARA KAUFMAN/ecoRI News contributor

PROVIDENCE — For the past three years, the student-run conference A Better World By Design has brought together the nation’s top thinkers to tackle global issues through design. This year, for the first time, the conference will showcase another, more local level of sustainability: composting. Between panels ranging from health research to zero energy architecture, conference attendees will compost their food and dining ware on-site. In this way, the conference organizers will create dining environments that produce minimal waste while providing an example for the larger composting movement throughout New England.

Better World organizers plan to illustrate and overcome logistical hurdles facing an industrial composting program in Rhode Island. For instance, Rhode Island has few collection sites large enough to handle the volume of food waste produced by the residents and businesses. According to Greg Gerritt, co-chair of the Green Party of Rhode Island, it will take two years to finish constructing an adequate facility to handle the volume of compostable waste the state creates each year.

Mike Merner of Earth Care Farm in Charlestown runs Rhode Island’s only large-scale composting program. Gerritt adds that, unfortunately, Merner has “limited capacity to expand, so he has not set himself up to take all the food scrap in the state.” Earth Care Farm also lacks capacity to compost plastic ware, including the plastic PLA in the conference’s cups and cutlery. Thus, a Better World By Design will send its food scraps and compostable utensils to a composting facility run by PF Trading in East Freetown, Mass.

A Better World by Design will also provide an example of the potential for increased composting programs at both Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Currently, Brown ships post-consumer waste to a pig farmer and recycles used cooking oil through Newport Biodiesel. Some of its salad waste is composted at a local apple orchard. However, the university provides no programs for students who buy food off-campus or cook for themselves. A Better World By Design plans to work with Brown dining services to ensure that the packaging of drink containers and food items are recycled or composted, and to provide an example of the potential for composting food waste for on-campus events.

RISD has compost containers, and is searching for farms to take the full volume of its finished compost. A Better World by Design will highlight examples of innovative compost containers like the Mobile Organic Resource Procurement Hub (MORPH) composters.

Organizers are planning the conference as an example of sustainable, zero-waste catering. According to Brett Anders, the conference’s catering and social events coordinator, student volunteers will station themselves near composting bins educating conference attendees about composting and providing visual examples of the decomposition process.

“The people who are coming to this conference are the kinds of people who want to be excited and involved in composting,” Anders asserts. “I hope our composting at Better World will inspire other zero-waste events.”

The conference will also feature food from local farms and caterers, including Narragansett Creamery, Schartner Farms and Hill Orchards. Organizers partnered with Real Time Farms to create an interactive online menu showing exactly what is being served and the source of menu ingredients.

ecoRI News provided consulting on the composting initiative for this year's A Better World By Design Conference.