With summer upon us, you're no doubt tending your garden. Which hopefully means you're composting too.
Using food waste to enrich your soil benefits the earth in a number of ways, including reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and decreasing methane emissions in landfills. And while it's difficult to recycle things like cans and plastics yourself, composting is something you can do at home pretty easily. Collect food scraps, add some water, stir the mix to provide oxygen, let it all sit long enough to decompose, and voila: Your plants have never been happier.
But not everyone has space for keeping a compost heap, and not everyone's got a green thumb. Some cities have mandated composting services that collect food scraps from residents and do all the dirty work at a central facility. But until composting is mandated everywhere, you might have to get creative and team up with neighbors to make and share compost.
That's something the team behind ShareWaste[1] wants to facilitate. Launched in 2016, the app uses a digital map to connect individuals with food scraps to nearby neighbors who have a compost system like a heap or a bin. Users accepting compost scraps can mark their compost site on the map for other users to find. Nearly 6,000 users are currently signed up for ShareWaste across the globe.
To become a user, ShareWaste asks for an email address and a first name. Next, you can add your compost station to the map. Specify if you'd like scraps for garden compost or for a chicken run (many chicken owners use the birds to help process food and yard waste), and whether your operation is for an individual household or a larger community. On the map, sites are...