Are you good at composting? I certainly haven’t been in the past. But with the help of a community composting group called YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) I have become a kitchen scrap saviour, a leaf collecting ninja and I make steaming hot compost.
In today’s episode I talk to Lucy Young, Joel Meadows, Mikaela Beckley and Claudia Lang about what this group is all about and why they are passionate about compost. (Spoiler: reducing greenhouse gasses, connecting community, building beautiful soil)
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This episode was created in 2023 and was created with support from MAINfm and the Community Broadcasting Foundation.
Transcript
Note that this transcript was generated by AI and may contain mistakes.
Allie: Welcome to Saltgrass, a show about how local communities can engage with the climate crisis at a grassroots level. My name is Allie Hanly, and you know what I’ve grown to love in the last two years? Compost.
Compost used to be my nemesis. I’ve always wanted to compost, but until recently, I’d never really been successful.
I’d read about the different methods and I’d tried a couple of them. I’d done specific things like starting a worm farm and using a bokashi. I have also just chucked my food scraps in a pile in the garden with some leaves and stuff, and hoped for the best. I’ve done workshops, I’ve had friends show me how I’ve watched things, I’ve read things, and really none of it worked very well, or I wasn’t consistent enough perhaps for it to work very well, and it always ended up. Neglected and kind of stinky and just not very successful. And I have over time felt slightly ashamed of this, and it seemed like it shouldn’t be that hard, and it kind of felt like one of those basic life skills that somehow I just couldn’t master.
But two years ago, all of that changed. I heard about a new trial run of a community composting program that was gonna happen locally. And they were calling it YIMBY, which is an acronym for Yes. In My Backyard. The proposition was to ask your neighbours if they already compost and if they didn’t, would they like us to come and collect their kitchen scraps and compost them for them?
If you signed up as a composter, you would try and collect about 10 neighbours who are happy to donate their kitchen scraps each week. And that was enough to build a hot compost, which is a method I had never attempted before. So the main attraction for me was the promise that if you signed up as a composter, you’d get trained in the hot composting method with ongoing mentorship.
And the thing about it being locally run was that I knew and liked the people running it. Lucy Young is someone I’ve worked with in lots of different capacities over time, but you might remember her from the episode in series one of Saltgrass about the Plastic Bag Free Castlemaine campaign. Joel Meadows is a well-known local permaculture teacher, and I’ve done workshops with him over the years from apple pressing to other types of composting, so I already had some trust.
That there would in fact be knowledgeable, kind, and supportive people in charge. And I was not proven wrong as we entered the process, I also knew I couldn’t really do it alone. I felt like that amount of labour each week would become a burden. So I asked my neighbour and friend Gemma, who you might remember from episode one of this season with her wheelie bin waste reduction efforts, and she was totally into it.
And we’ve been composting together as a team now for almost two years, and we’re getting some steaming good results. And what we actually do is that we’ll collect at my place for two months and build up a nice big pile. And then while that sits and matures after it’s been turned, we go to her place and collect and wash buckets at her place for a while, and then we come back to my place and it works really well.
Anyway, what’s all that got to do with climate change, as Joel will explain in this episode? Organics to Landfill is a major contributor to greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and by helping people in our community to reduce the amount of organics that they put in the bin each week, we’re actually making a significant.
Improvement to the amount of emissions our shire is emitting. It’s a huge challenge that all levels of government are now talking about is green waste and organic waste in landfill. The state government has declared that they’re gonna mandate that local councils have to provide an organics service, and the one that most councils will sign up for is called.
FOGO, which means Food Organics Garden Organics. So, it’s not just kitchen scraps, it’s raked up leaves, prunings, logs, weeding, you know, whatever people are doing in their gardens, as well as their kitchen scraps, all in the same bin. So, later in the episode, you’re going to hear Lucy and Joel explain why the FOGO system is not as great as it sounds and why YIMBY is better.
So today’s episode is a chat with the founders of Yes In My Backyard, or YIMBY, along with Mikaela and Claudia who’ve also come on board to help run the show. I’ve also had a little chat with a couple of people in my neighbourhood who have been donating their kitchen scraps to Gemma and myself for the last couple of years, and what their reasons are for having signed up.
Of course, as ever, I want to acknowledge that Saltgrass is produced on Djaara Country, the home of the Dja Dja Wurrung. They’ve been zero waste ecosystem guardians and custodians of this land for countless generations, and they continue to lead the way and generously share their wisdom on how to live here better.
I give thanks to them and honour elders past and present. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
(Saltgrass theme song)
Lucy: When I was in New Zealand and wandering down a street, I tend to be quite curious. I saw buckets by letter boxes and went, oh, what is that? And it was a simple thing saying that this is a compost pickup service. And so of course I took a picture of it and then searched for it on the internet. Yeah, it was a neighborhood based system in Wellington where people subscribed and then someone came and picked up their compost.
That was then taken back to a central like community garden, and I was really inspired. ’cause it wasn’t just that in New Zealand there was so many things that just seemed local, simple, low tech. And doable And community based, I guess. Community based. Yeah. And each time I looked at them, because I was on a partly holiday, partly training, I had time and so I looked at all of them and they all just seemed to have a lot of integrity and people just doing something that they thought was worthwhile.
Yeah. And so then you got back to Castlemaine, and how did the idea kind of not fester, manifest? Yeah,
Joel: Manifester.
Lucy: Well, it seemed like, like a lot of ideas, it seemed to be bubbling in other people’s minds. And I can’t quite remember the bridge. Maybe Joel remembers between Bill, Terry White
Joel: Terry. Yeah.
Lucy: Yourself and myself.
Joel: I mean, I, I think ’cause you’d been doing the Plastic Bag Free Castlemaine stuff and as a part of that you’d asked me to do a composting workshop.
Lucy: Yeah. ’cause they’re related, aren’t they?
Joel: They are. Well, to a certain extent they are. Yeah. So we, I think we’d already done that. That worked.
But anyway, we’d, we’d worked together on doing some compost education and I put together a video because it was covid times, ran the video and then did online question and answer, and we got like ridiculous number of people interested in it. ’cause it was. It was early pandemic days and everyone was feeling hopeful about the future and how we might all gather together and do great stuff.
And then
Allie: we’re also all baking bread and homesteading.
Joel: That’s right. That’s that’s right. Really sort of like really clumsy ways. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.
Yep. And then not long after that, I think Terry White got you and me and Bill together. Here, and he had the name YIMBY (Yes in my Backyard) and the idea that the composting could actually just happen in a distributed way.
He liked the idea that there were these composting support people who would ride around on bicycles and help people with their compost and they’d be composting the neighbors compost. So I think that concept and some of the inspiration of what you’d seen in in New Zealand and our realization too, of the fact that we.
Well, may we, we had this idea that we could actually teach people to compost as well. So it was a part of it that there would be this community resource, this growing community knowledge of how to compost well and how to hot compost well too. ’cause that was the other thing, the, the video that we’d done was specifically around hot composting and we were showing people that you can actually hot compost in a continuous method, which is not out there as generally acknowledged.
Mm-hmm. So, yeah, out of that. And, and that brainstorming, we kind of came up with the basic. Concept.
Lucy: Yeah, and I think that the other important part of that for me is coming off the back of the Plastic Bag, free Castle, Maine idea that Heather and Neil Barrett from the Hub Foundation had requested that I run a campaign around that.
And having been involved in that for a few years and becoming very aware of the limitations of individual action within that and how many systemic barriers there are to us really. Doing that and, and having a direct influence. I just thought, you know, it was time to do something just really grounded,
Allie: a bit more community building rather than asking individuals to take action in their own lives.
Lucy: Yeah. Something that no matter what, if all that we end up with is a bunch of people that know how to compost really well and therefore feed their gardens and grow more food locally, then that’s a really good outcome. And I personally am still really inspired by the transition town model, which is all about re localizing and making economies much more direct and local.
Mm-hmm. And for me, it kind of ticked all of those boxes. So it, I was in a very privileged position of being able to. Influence the Hub foundation to support the idea, and so that meant that we could put some resources into it.
Allie: Can I backtrack up a little bit and just talk about how this is not the first time you’ve worked together to do workshops and things?
Lucy, you used to be much involved in Growing Abundance in its early iteration, and I remember doing all sorts of workshops. Joel, I was doing workshops back then with Growing Abundance, so sort of like this continuation of, I don’t know, there’s these, and I find that a lot in Castle May, and these relationships, like Terry White’s been active for decades doing stuff, and so have you both.
Do you wanna talk at all about your background just a little bit?
Joel: Most of my work is in adult education, so around permaculture and environmental related issues. But I’ve also worked for local government and not-for-profit sector and the profit sector. So I’ve kind of done a little bit, but most of my paid work has been with her.
Environmental focus. But yeah, more and more I’m interested in that interface between how you live it and then sharing what you’ve lived and know something about. So the compost absolutely comes out of that. It’s like I’ve developed a. Particular way of composting. I think it’s pretty good. I’m keen to share it with people.
And I suppose there’s been a number of crossovers that we’ve had over the years of doing some work together. We’d also just in a moment of absolute stupidity, considered job sharing, uh, a waste management job as well before this. So that was interesting that we’d even considered that we could actually potentially work together and share a job, which I’m sure we would’ve done well, but geez, I’m glad we didn’t get that job.
We actually talked to the, to the people about it and they just went, no, not job share. No. Straight up, which was kind of good.
Lucy: I think what we both share in that sense. Which speaks to my background is a healthy scepticism of these systems that are in place, like the dominant paradigm, if you like. And so my background, I trained as a social worker, but apart from my initial, first job, I haven’t really worked as a social worker. I’ve worked as a community development worker, but my social work training was through what was the Philip Institute of Technology, and it was a slightly different social work degree in that it very much focused on systemic thinking. So it wasn’t about what’s wrong with the person and how can I think about how to help that person. It was like, what is the influence of the system on that person? And then how do we take action both in a personal life and how do we affect the systems around it? So it still very much influences me and also the action research model that I learned, which was about doing something, seeing how it works, and then adjusting, which is all very much, I guess, grounded in relationships.
With people observing. So it’s not really any surprise that after working as a community development worker at the community house for, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years, that I wanted to continue that work of building community and being very interested in how people come together and the change that they can affect outside of systems that are perhaps perpetuating.
Some of the problems that we’re seeing and have been seeing for a long time. I’m also very interested in how we actually collaborate. I don’t see any technological fixes. I see technology as a tool, but I get very frustrated with. Technological fixes that are being proposed for the way that we live, which is broken.
I remember in the, we kind of had a, a research phase where we threw ideas around and then I did things like starting to look at the Share Waste app, which is an app that is designed to bring people together and share. And I contacted everybody in this area that was registered and consistently I found that.
The people that were registered were the ones that wanted the food scraps, and there wasn’t really any way that was gonna lead other people to them. So people were putting out the request, but unless you were motivated enough to sign up to share waste, how would you find them? So they kind of became a focus group, if you like, and I asked some questions and then we put.
The word out.
Joel: So I think from the start, it’s always been about distributing the workload in the community, finding people who are motivated to compost and trying to find the households who aren’t motivated to compost and linking them up. So that model. Really has been there from the start, and that hasn’t changed.
Lucy: The other piece to that is that, I guess both having had experience over the years, we had a slow and cautious start. Mm-hmm. We started with three compost composters. That was our target. We wanted to be able to test the idea properly because we both had. In our minds from the outset that this could be an alternative waste collection service for want of it a better way of saying that because it’s more than that.
And so if it was gonna have real legs and be applicable across the Shire, we needed to test it carefully and not just get a whole lot of people composting and end up with a huge mess.
Allie: Stinky compost mess. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s. Talk a little bit about the context of that in terms of our local council and state government and how organic waste into landfill is a bad idea.
Can we give a bit of context about why it’s important to compost? Not just because some people love composting and love to grow their own veggies, but the bigger context of that.
Joel: A huge amount of what goes into our. Rubbish bins is organic material, and when the stuff gets buried in landfill, it breaks down anaerobically ’cause there’s not much oxygen in those squashed landfill sites.
And so it produces a lot of methane. So that then bubbles up to the surface. It’s a potent greenhouse gas. It’s sort of somewhere around the 30 times. CO2 potency as far as its greenhouse trapping qualities, although it’s, it’s tricky because it’s, it’s worse than that, but it’s shorter lived than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
So it’s sort of averaged out at about 30, but it’s actually, it’s impact right now is really bad. It’ll dissipate quicker. So it’s kind of bad from a greenhouse perspective. And we’re tracking out of the shire a whole lot of stuff that actually is. Garden gold. And most people who are serious about their veggie garden want that stuff.
We want the nutrient that’s in those food scraps being cycled back through our food system. So the way we do it currently is bad on lots of levels, and what YIMBY provides is good on so many levels. Of course, there’s an intermediate system that a lot of councils are moving to. Which is to add another bin.
It’s called FOGO, which is Food Organics Garden Organics. That’s what it stands for. And so lots of councils have already jumped on the FOGO bin option. So people have their waste bin, their FOGO bin, their recycling bin, and now they, a lot of people are getting a glass bin. So there’s a lot of places that now have four separate wheelie bins somewhere on their property.
But when that happens. A few things happen. One of them is that people throw out a lot more organics than they used to. So they tend to add a lot of garden organics to their, to their bin that they weren’t previously adding. That stuff would’ve just broken down actually in a reasonably benign way in their backyard.
But now they’re putting it in the bin because they’ve got a bin and they’re going, oh, the bin’s half empty with, you know, a tiny amount of food scrap. So they pile all the leaves and the garden stuff into it. So councils are finding that, that when they put on a FOGO bin, they’re moving about 80% more stuff than they used to, which means then a lot more trucking, so it’s another set of trucks going through collecting bins.
It’s another plastic bin per household. It’s then all of that additional resource that previously was just been processed in people’s yards and gardens. That’s now going somewhere. And then. There’s now another industry set up for companies who are taking that stuff and doing industrial scale composting, and they’re taking stuff that’s got a certain amount of food scrap in it, but a huge amount of garden organics, and they’re blending it all together and hot composting.
But in our experience and in in the experience of all of the people that we speak to who are trying to buy quality compost. They’re not producing good compost, so they, they’re producing pretty low grade. It’s, it’s a bit more like potting mix of heat processed mulch. Now, because there’s so many councils doing this, there’s a huge amount of this product out there, and not many people really want it.
And definitely our experiences that no gardeners want to put it on their veggies. Some of them might wanna put it around their fruit trees, but that’s about it. So we’re creating another problem, which is a. An industry that’s producing product that people don’t really want and then spending a whole lot of energy trucking and moving it around to then make something that’s, um, it’s not awful, but it’s just not very.
Valuable. Yeah. Which is a terrible waste given what we can do with it from the YIMBY angle.
Lucy: We are not anti FOGO, but what we want to do is separate FO and GO, there’s food organics and garden organics. We often think about what’s happening with happened with our recycling system where we’ve had glass and cardboard in together, all in the same bin.
We now know that that created problems right from the get go. What our information says, if you put. Faux and go together mostly because there’s a lot more go, a lot more garden organics, as Joel explained earlier, then you’re actually creating a problem that is gonna have to be solved later on down the track.
So we also know in this shire that we’ve got a fantastic, really well subscribed garden pickup system already Greenaway, and as Joel said. If you provide a FOGO service demand or the amount that people put out goes up by 80%, and we also know that garden organics in landfill aren’t as problematic. They don’t create as much methane in landfill.
So we know that our main problem is actually the food organics, the really high nitrogen. So we are interested in how we don’t. Create a problem and we’re heading down that path. The other part of that is that a lot of people have heard the slogan from places like Sustainability, Victoria, when we talk about throwing things away, that there is no way, and yet here we are as a one size fits all, being encouraged by state government to throw out.
Nitrogen and carbon rich materials away to another place when we need them right here.
Mikaela: Add a personal aspect to that, like my journey with it. Like I was that person that took you kitchen scraps out, put it with all the other kitchen scraps and just went, oh God, supposed to look and smell better than that.
And then you’d sort of forget about it and. Then as I’ve got into soil and compost now I just see resources everywhere. Like leaves are no longer a problem that they, you know, they fall and we’ve got to get council or someone to get rid of them. I like now know every type of tree and when they’re gonna drop their leaves because you know, it’s a huge resource and we have leaf collection.
Afternoons in which we try to get as many leaves as we can to last us for the year. And in just in my backyard, I don’t have a pile of those sticks and the weeds and stuff because all of that I see the texture of them and how they’re gonna contribute to the compost pile. So I feel like that’s a huge shift to see everything as a resource, not as a, as a problem.
Lucy: I was reminded that one of the first names. I was advocating for was Castleman Gold. ’cause I love acronyms and YIMBY of course is an acronym, but the, the acronym for Castleman Gold was: Growing Our Local Destiny. So it, it reminds me that there are so many parts to this. The council part of it is that they have a waste problem that they need to deal with.
And we know Joel’s articulated why it needs to come out of landfill, but we don’t see food scraps or garden. Organics as a waste problem, and I guess they’re more of a resource, but even the resource language is problematic because it turns nature into a resource for exploitation. Commodity. Yeah. So the philosophy that’s reflected through YIMBY is that is about life and that we’re cycling life.
Back into life. We’ve got stuff that was previously alive and we wanna cycle it back to create more life, both for ourselves because of the food that’s been grown locally and the growing of food is fundamental to life. If there’s something we all share, it’s the need. For food and the closer we can bring that to home, it’s not only good for the environment and can have an effect on climate change, but it means that we start to shift the focus of how we all live and how we spend time and, and bringing it much more into connection with life generally, connection with other people and connection with the cycles of nature that are.
Creating life
Allie: and speaking of life, I might bring you in Mikaela to talk about the microbial life.
Mikaela: YIMBY appeared in my life at the perfect moment because I’ve always enjoyed growing vegetables, but I was getting more and more. Serious about it. And my garden was becoming a more and more important place in my life.
And of course, if you’re growing vegetables, then it leads you to the soil. And so I went on a deep dive into learning as much as I could about. What soil is and discovered that it’s alive and that it’s amazing and that it has all these microbes doing amazing things in the soil, eating each other, recycling all the nutrients that we have from our kitchen waste.
And so right at that point I was. Getting into composting and thinking, gee, I really need more nitrogen. I can’t find enough kitchen scraps or other things that are high in nitrogen. And then about five people in the same week showed me the article that Joel and Lucy put in the newspaper about. Do you wanna be a YIMBY composter?
And I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. So it was perfect timing. And so when I went to the information night about YIMBY and learned that we would actually be door knocking on our neighbours to find people who are too busy to compost, don’t know how to do it well, there’s so many reasons why people. Are not composting or not doing a good job with it.
And then from that, I’ve got 16 neighbours that I now compost for. So every bin night they put their bucket out by their letter box, and then we go around the next morning and collect all the buckets and give them a clean one for the week ahead. And then we all take it back to our backyards and compost.
And process all those kitchen scraps there into our compost piles and get it nice and hot. So it’s fantastic for us because we get paid in compost and once you get up and running, you’ve almost got a, a fresh batch of compost every month to two months.
Allie: And what was your experience at door knocking?
Mikaela: I learned very quickly that it was really important to tell them that I was their neighbour because I think we all have a healthy suspicion of anyone knocking on our doors.
So I learned very quickly to tell them that, hi, I’m your neighbour. I’m the house with the monkey bars. And from that point on, you can see that they’re more open and receptive to what you’re saying. But even that ’cause of the sort of society we. Live in, they’d be like, well, do you want some money? And you’d be like, no, no.
I want your, I want your kitchen square. Like, and so, yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting thing to be asking for, but people really appreciate it. And it’s not just the people that I collect from that I now know, like. From just doing that door knocking. I got to know a lot of my neighbours that enjoy composting.
Some of them are now becoming YIMBY, composters. Other neighbours that think of me when they’re cleaning up their leaves and contact me if I want the leaves for the compost pile. So it has really made me far more integrated into the neighbourhood.
Allie: So I thought this might be a good time to introduce you to two of the people who’ve been donating their kitchen scraps to me and Gemma over the last couple of years.
Alex and Annabelle both have very different reasons for taking part in YIMBY. We’ll start with Alex as she explains what it was like to have us knock on her door and ask for her time and her kitchen scraps.
Alex: I think because I knew you, I was immediately more open to the idea. But that’s the beauty of a neighbourhood!
In the past if someone comes knocking, I’m always sort of clam up inside and go, oh my God, how do I get out of this? Like that kind of thing. And then once. We’d given the space and time to talk about it. It was just this wonderful, no brainer because we hadn’t put a compost system in here. And the main excuse I kept using was that my labrador has gotten into every compost, and I’ve ended up with vet bills because she’s had distended wind pipes and things like that.
So I’ve got this like deep fear of my Labrador getting into compost. Having a really new baby. Young family, all those stresses, and having someone just come and say, Hey, we’ve got this system. Do you wanna be a part of it? It’s like, yeah. Totally. Yeah. Easy. And I mean as well for Jessie, she sees us doing that all the time.
She’s two and a bit now. She is putting her scraps in there today. I lifted her up and popped it in, so like it’s beginning. Yeah. It’s one of the most beautiful things and that I’ve said to the friends and stuff is how the community’s become more connected with it. And even just the beautiful reminder texts that both you and Gemma send, it just makes you feel like you’re, you’re part of something in your neighbourhood.
And I suppose it harks back to a time when people were more connected and I think we’re all becoming more connected again through these great systems that are happening. But. I think there’s been a lull for a while, maybe in the last decade where people haven’t talked to their neighbours as much as like when I was a kid and stuff like that.
So it’s a lovely thing knowing that you guys are coming on a Tuesday morning, early in the morning or like when I’ve forgotten and I’ll be like, I’ll just pop it at your gate. But I think it is that neighbourly feeling that warms my heart the most. And then, you know, it’s a bonus. Either way. You get the, the lovely connection and then you also are like, oh, I’m doing something great to reduce waste and return it to the earth and yeah, it’s wonderful.
Allie: Now here’s Annabelle.
Anabel: I wasn’t sure what YIMBY was all about. Initially said no, but then I was like, sometimes I dunno what to do with all my compost material. I’ve only got a little compost and I thought, oh, that might be a good idea. Look, I’m a single person. I’ve got my little pooch with me, a keen gardener, so I do still keep a compost going, but I sometimes have too much and I might as well share it.
Allie: So Annabel, when we knocked on your door, one of the things YIMBY got us to do was ask everyone a bunch of questions about their composting so that they could gather data about how many people were composting and how they did it. And I, I seem to recall, you said you did cold composting, which is basically just the heap in your backyard and you’ll add to it occasionally.
And generally people who do cold composting or with worm farms and stuff, they don’t put too much citrus and, you know, stuff like that.
Anabel: I don’t put any onion peel. I wouldn’t put meat in it. Certainly wouldn’t put citrus in it. Yeah. So the idea of putting all that stuff in the bin just didn’t go well with my head really, and then ending up where it ends up. And I’ve been out to the tip recently and I’ve seen all those pipes. That let off the methane and it was just like, I didn’t even know this was going on. I feel like I should be doing more. You know? It’s really bizarre.
Allie: So then once we started dropping buckets to your door and you got into the swing of it, how has it been since then?
Ah,
Anabel: it’s funny ’cause sometimes I go, ah, I gotta put it out. I’ve gotta put it, have I got anything to put in it? And I’ve always got something to put in it. Sometimes very light, but sometimes quite heavy. Uh, no, I really like putting it out. I like seeing all the bins out and going, oh, I’m part of that. It’s just really great.
All that waste is not going into the tip, you know, and it’s being utilized in people’s gardens. That’s pretty cool. I think it would be great if it grew. I know it’s growing and I see it wherever I walk the dog, and I just think, oh, I’m part of that.
Lucy: The community aspect is really important to me. I think that we really have to learn how to work together. I think part of the foundation of the way that YIMBY operates is that we don’t expect everybody to be passionate about compost. We all have different interests, different skills, and a different part to play in community.
And so figuring out that there are some people that wanna play the part of composting and that that’s what they have to contribute to life in their community is really valuable. I think that previous approaches to getting people to composting their backyard is the idea that ‘it’s simple everybody can do it’. And what we discovered is that it is basic. There are some basic ingredients to becoming a good composter, but that not everybody’s having the same focus in their life. And so if, if we lived in a village context, for example, we wouldn’t expect everybody to go about doing the same things every day.
Everybody has their own part to play and to figure out ‘What is mine to do?’ like as part of our work in life, is to figure out where do I fit in the tapestry of life? And so part of YIMBYs thing is to find the people that want to compost and then hopefully free up others to have more time to do the thing that is theirs to do.
For example, I loved speaking with our wonderful mayor Rosie and near the other morning who said, I really wanna learn how to compost more, and I, I do it, but I do a pretty crap job, and then I feel guilty about it. And I just said to her, Rosie, hang on a minute. You’ve got a far more important job to do right now.
Or not necessarily more important, but I see that right now your value is in being a voice articulating the things that you are articulating in public that is really valuable. How do we actually learn to collaborate in a really good way rather than expecting everybody to be the same? We all know that.
We are living in an age of individualism, and a lot of us have the language of interdependence and knowing that this is something that we are striving for. And what the microbial world teaches us is that everyone has their little bit and that it’s all dependent on the other bits. It’s all connected.
Yet as humans, we are struggling to understand what interdependence looks like and the fact that people feel guilty for not doing something like composting. So they’d rather put their secret bag in the landfill and, and put it there, speaks to the, the difficulty we have in just saying, Hey, I can’t do it all.
But maybe someone else can and, and being able to ask.
Joel: For the most part, all of our composters are women at the moment so far, and a lot of our composters are probably over 50 years old, not all of them, so Yeah, over 40. Over 40, yep. So, yeah, we were aware that there’s some very physically demanding parts of composting, particularly the, the turning, the compost, the weekly build.
Is usually not so physically demanding, but every six to eight weeks we’re needing to turn piles. And that can be quite physically demanding. Not that women in their fifties can’t do that at. Absolutely they can. Most of these people have a house of their own, so they’ve got the stability to go, yes, I can put up compost bays and I know that I can commit to something happening here for a couple of years, or whatever.
So we realized that we weren’t necessarily. Tapping into younger people. We weren’t necessarily tapping into people who might be in, in rental situations, and we went, well, what’s something that those people could contribute to the YIMBY process?
Allie: And so this is where Claudia comes in. Claudia has recently joined the YIMBY team to manage what they’re calling.
YIMBY Gymby, which is a catchy rhyme with YIMBY and a play on the concept of the work and the job that they’re asking of people who wanna sign up to YIMBY Gymby. It’s kind of like a workout. It’s like you’re going to the gym and they brought Claudia on board to help create and organize this new branch of YIMBY.
Claudia: Yeah. So we’re currently setting up a team of young people under 30 in Castlemaine to fit that gap between where YIMBY is currently reaching it, but also what YIMBY needs in terms of the physicality of composting really, because it is really quite a physical process. And so we’ve Yeah, started to get some young people on board and they’ve done a little bit of training and they’re gonna do some more training.
Because when speaking to young people about what makes this really appealing is also like actually learning how to compost and compost well. From my experience in share houses, there’s often a compost bin, but all the food scraps just get thrown in it, and it’s a bit of a stinky, wet mess. And so there was real appeal amongst the people we’ve spoken to, to know how to do it really well, and also to have access to that knowledge and that embodied learning even when you don’t necessarily have like the stable housing or long-term access to land that enables our composters to do this. And also a big thing is the community connection and how amazing it is for mental health to be outside, engage with these like incredible life processes. To be engaged with the magic of composting really, and actually like to step away from the screen, step away from devices and be engaged with something real and tangible and beautiful.
And to be connected with community at the same time, especially at a time when. Particularly youth mental health is, it’s a real crisis. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, we’re really excited about what’s gonna happen with Gymby So my role is really to set up this team, to set up the process of like, what is Gymby? What are we asking of our volunteers?
Recruiting and bringing people on board and supporting with the training process. Joel and Mikaela will mostly be doing the nitty gritty of actually the compost training, but, and then the coordination process between the YIMBY composters and our young Gymby crew, what that looks like to connect them.
So I’m setting up a process for that and we’ll be part of that coordination.
Allie: How have you tried to reach out to young people or have these conversations or get them interested?
Claudia: At the moment it’s been through our own social networks, so, um, people that we’re already connected to that might be interested in this and there’s been a really warm response to that so far.
And now we’re just about to start reaching out to other places where. We might reach just to people in the community like TAFE or the football and Netball club. Yeah. Just other areas of the community to start, um, broadening the reach and getting other people on board.
Lucy: Yeah. And I think like with how we started with YIMBY with starting with three householders, we have a target for having 10 people involved. And that the whole idea of Gymby, it’s a trial. Again, is this something that’s gonna fly? Mm-hmm. Is it helpful? How can it be helpful? So yeah, Claudia’s work is the way she’s going about it in asking people that she knows for their feedback, I think is really, really valuable.
Mm-hmm. That’s that. Is it gonna work?
Joel: And we’ve tried from the stat to try and not to make it too prescriptive, like we’ve kind of got this need, which is the sort of the physicality bit. And we feel like there’s a desire there, but we also want to like let it. Blossom. However, there’s interest.
So as the, the people who Claudia engages decide how they want to run with this and what it looks like, we don’t wanna decide what that is like from the start.
Lucy: For me, that’s a real segue into, we have great team meetings and debates and conversations, and one of the tensions that we hold is wanting to have consistency.
Of practice and methods, but also whilst this is local in the Mount Alexander Shire, we also want it to be local in neighbourhoods. So if something works well in the West end, but people in the East end want do something a bit differently, we want to be. Adaptive to that whilst having some core things, like knowing that our compost needs to be monitored to get to a particular standard, knowing that we need to be regular with the pickups, but if we’re gonna design a system that is not one size fits all, we wanna be open to what each compost room, what each neighbourhood is offering us.
And the same with Gymby. How is it gonna work for people to just come in and help? How are they valued? What do they offer and what’s their part to play in the web that we are weaving? Mm-hmm.
Joel: Just a little example of, of what Lucy’s talking about too. A lot of our composters go round and collect buckets from their neighbours and take them back to their place in compost, but in a few places.
Other people in the community do that transporting work. So there’s a bunch of kids down one end who take the buckets to our composter. And our composter actually doesn’t do much bucket collection. And in another area there’s a bit of that happening. And the, the composter gives away about half her compost ’cause she’s just got a small garden space and that’s all she wants.
And so she shares that backed out to some of the households. But not all the composters have to do that. So it it’s iterations. Yeah. As long, as, long as. People are still hot composting and they’re doing it well and there’s a reliable system we are happy for people to work at, however, works for them and their street and their area.
Mikaela: There’s a particular reason why we need to hot compost, and that’s the time factor. So hot composting processes a lot faster than cold composting. And because we’re collecting buckets every week, we need to make sure that it’s not taking too long in our piles because the heat itself comes from all the bacteria and the fungi actually multiplying.
So it’s when we get up to those temperatures. It’s telling us that they’re very happy and they’re all reproducing and doing their work well. The other reason why we wanna get above 55 degrees for at least three days is because that selects for the beneficial bacteria and fungi, and it kills any of the potential pathogenic bacteria that might come into the pile through the manure that we use, or on the, the scraps that we’re putting in there.
And so that’s a safety concern. That’s a safety issue. So we are not selling the compost, so we don’t have to technically meet EPA standards, but we want to be producing a quality product that’s also safe. And yeah, so at that temperature as well, it, it, it kills any weed seeds. So we’re not putting it on the garden and spreading anything we don’t want.
And another key aspect is that when our piles are that hot, none of the rodents. Want to live in there, it’s too hot for them. And we’ve found that that’s a really important and effective way because there are rodents in the community and this is our most effective way of keeping them out of our compost.
Allie: Let’s talk about the future of, you started with a three person trial, which was your very first attempt, and you learned from that, and then you invited 10 people in of which Mikaela and I. We’re both participants and now you’ve opened it up to another round and you’re also in this round looking at really consolidating your choices of people and, and really thoroughly cover one particular.
Joel: Because yes, our, our first three were in different locations and sort of dotted around the town, and then our next 10 was similarly sort of spread. I think the thing that we learned really clearly from particularly the second round, which was the 10, was that once you got outside of the. Tight confines of the township.
It was very hard for our composters to find enough neighbours to warrant doing the INB system because most of their neighbours, once the density spreads out, most people have gardens. Most people are already composting or they have chooks, or they’re feeding to other animals and stuff. So actually just finding people who even want.
A YIMBY bucket to put food scraps in is really hard. So as a result of that, we did set up a drop off system. So we’ve got a drop off hub in the center of town that, that people who want a YIMBY bucket but don’t have a composter in their street can drop off to. And the idea being that it’s not. Out of the way so they can combine it with a trip into town anyway, so we’re not sort of encouraging extra car trips.
And then we’ve got very enthusiastic composters on the edge of town who have very few neighbours who want to contribute to them and they pick up from that drop off hub and, and that gives them enough material to compost with. So in doing our third round, which is what we’re up to, what we’re trying to do is infill.
Composters right next door to existing composters. And in, in Mikaela’s case, we’re actually trying to fill between two existing composters to see if we can create a, a sort of a continuous service across a whole area so that no matter where you live in that grid of Castlemaine. There’ll be a YIMBY composter to meet your needs if you want it.
And yeah, so for us, each time we’re learning different things about our processes and how to do that. So one of the things that we’ve tried to do this time is actually. Target our promotion for composters in specific areas. So we’ve actually done postcard and door knocking right down to sort of block level where we really need a composter in this block and seeing whether we can actually find them and they’re there.
Hooray. So, so far, yeah, that seems to be working, but yeah, we have to be careful of. Overstretching our resources too much. If we try and put on too many people all at once, we can’t get around to them and meet their needs. But also, Lucy, you’ve been talking to people in Maldon about maybe starting YIMBY in Maldon, and it might be that it just grows organically that Maldon picks up and starts doing something that’s very like there with maybe some help and ideas from us.
But yeah, it’s got the potential to grow quite organically.
Lucy: I think one of the things that we grapple with is a real tension that both supports us and creates difficulties with our three pillars. So we have reducing carbon emissions in landfill, building strong resilient communities, and I guess being part of the regenerative soil.
Movement of increase and increasing our capacity to grow food. So they’re our three bottom lines. And it means that the amount of buckets that we can collect and the amount that we can reduce in going to landfill is equally as important to the relationships that we can build in communities. So it’s our point of differentiation from being just a, a service, a waste disposal service that has no connection to community, is not concerned with that at all.
But it does mean that we’re in this, this tension place of trying to have integrity with all that we believe about. The way that systems need to work in communities in a localized system and you know, just upping the numbers and collecting as much as we possibly can. And it may well be that we need to go to some kind of hybrid system where we have people that can process as much compost, but because they’re picking up from a whole lot of drop off places and then figuring out other ways that we can connect people that is not about.
Collecting the buckets, but I think all of our decisions hold those three pillars very preciously.
Allie: And I guess that’s the question around the future of YIMBY. One of the dreams perhaps, is that we convince our local council not to adopt the FOGO bins and create that poor quality result that Joel was talking about earlier, but.
Talk them into supporting YIMBY and if they put as much funding into YIMBY as they would into the FOGO system, you might be able to employ any number of people and have a well oiled machine. But the risk would be losing potentially that that focus on that community connection, which is kind of a delicate balance.
People trust it because it feels grassroots and authentic, and as soon as you get all that big money in it might change
Joel: YIMBY sells out and what that looks like? No, I think, I think it’s, it’s very true. I think when we started, I was kind of, I’m gonna still have a spreadsheet that kind of does the, the money calculations of how much time we need, how much money it would cost to sort of replace a council contract and stuff.
But the more we get into it, the more I kind of don’t care about that side of things because it’s like, it’s so good what we are doing and it has so many mixed benefits that actually to reduce it down to waste management. Just like I don’t want to devalue what we do to, to call it waste management… it’s not, it’s not, yes, we would keep the stuff out of landfill.
But what we are doing is linking neighbors with neighbors, finding people who want to grow food, keeping nutrient cycling in the community. The benefits of it are just so good and, and so multilayered to kind of reduce it down to dollar amount for a service, I think would devalue what we’re doing. I mean, what we’re doing is participating in something that’s a radical departure from the way that people think about what needs to be done in the community.
And in some ways it’s, it’s not entirely dissimilar to the way that we think about firefighting in the country, which is that we don’t expect that there’s this service that just comes along and does something for us, that actually people need to participate. You need volunteers, and that we sort of all take responsibility for fire management in our own way, but then we’ve also got this service that is there as a last line of defence, but it’s still got this big centralized body.
There’s this struggle between the volunteers and the state government. How do we do it where we don’t even have that? That sort of horrible layer of bureaucracy that becomes a problem. Like can we actually keep it quite organic so we will see. We’re trying.
Lucy: Local council, from my experience, is very supportive of the idea.
Since some amendments to the local Council Act, they’ve moved into a space of more thorough community engagement, and they have a whole lot of regulatory barriers. One of the biggest barriers that I’m aware of is that people want a lot. And they don’t wanna pay for it. Nobody wants a rate rise. Nobody wants to pay for a FOGO bin slash YIMBY yet.
They want the council to be carbon negative or whatever it is. It’s like, we want our cake and we wanna eat it too. So I’m really pleased at the engagement that we have with local council and it’s not perfect and one of the most difficult things in any big system like that. Is that our three pillars sit in different pillars of local council.
And so one is in waste, one is in community, and so how they speak to each other is, it’s a whole paradigm shift, but I do see a willingness to engage with that conversation and to bring the community along. The council can only really. Reflect the community that is active with the council. That’s kind of my take on it.
So yeah, I like to think about the local council as part of our. Microbial network. They are part of the solution. And yeah, just how that works is, you know, I don’t know what the future looks like. Mm-hmm.
Claudia: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, uh, young people look to the future now and you kind of go, well, like, where on earth are we going?
And. That can bring a huge sense of despair and questions around what in my life has purpose and what’s actually worth doing in these times. And I think always coming back to the earth and to the ground. And, and is it just like a source of connection and. I think where we’re at in terms of using mostly devices and social media to communicate with one of another, like the sense of disconnection in my generation and younger generations is profound.
And so having. In person connections with neighbours who, you know, where they live. And it’s all very tangible and grounded and real. You know, it’s, it’s not imaginary or online. It’s actually real in person and textual and sensual. And you’re engaging with, yeah, with the compost and with your neighbors in very real ways.
Mm-hmm. And yeah, just have a immense amount of hope for the impacts that can have. For our sense of belonging and purpose and hope. So prior to this, I’ve been working out at Harcourt with Gungho Growers who grow incredible food, and the work that they do is so centered around how we look after the soil and working there.
Really opened my eyes to the, similar to what Mikaela was saying, like just to how alive our soil is and the kind of food that beautiful, alive soil can grow. Mm-hmm. And then how amazing it is to eat that food and be a part of that loop, and to really know yourself as part of a cycle. Again, kind of comes back to that thing of grounding, of like knowing your place within a bigger system.
And so, yeah, the work that I was doing out there has really inspired me to, to be a part of YIMBY.
Joel: I think the other thing I’d add, which was sort of has come up with a lot of our composters, which again, we wouldn’t necessarily have expected when we started, but we had a few early gatherings of our composters.
They were beautiful gatherings and people valued them and wanted more of them, and then were sharing a whole lot of things about. Their compost. That wasn’t just technical stuff about compost. It was about how for them, their compost is their mental health time or that the connection with their neighbours through this has been really beautiful for them.
And so, yes, I think there’s a whole lot of things that happen when we do things well. That link people up with stuff that’s important. It’s probably amplified for young people, but I think it’s there for everyone and, and when you do something that is grounded and real and connects you with both the cycles of life and with other people, it feels good.
It’s a good thing to be involved in. It’s hard work. It’s, that’s the other thing too, is it’s hard and good, and I think that’s where we’ve, we’ve been looking for easy and good and. Uh, easy and good’s really unsatisfying, hardened good’s. Great.
True. It’s true.
Allie: Thanks for listening. I hope you’ve been inspired by Lucy, Joel, Mikaela, Claudia, and YIMBY Generally, links and notes about YIMBY and the things we mentioned on the show are on the episode page, on the website, and should also be available in your podcast app. Don’t forget to get your Saltgrass ethical merch.
Jump onto the Saltgrass website and follow the link to merch. If you’re as excited about compost as we are, you might like the various. Compost related designs that have been uploaded there. For those of you listening on the radio, please note that you can listen to all episodes of Saltgrass on your preferred podcasting app or at saltgrasspodcast.com.
You can follow us on all the socials and you can subscribe to our email list and get reminders and updates about the show. This program was made possible with support from MainFM and the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Find out more at cbf.org au. My name is Allie Hanly. Thanks for listening.
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