Community composting schemes provide a communal composting bin to make it easier for neighbourhoods to reduce their food waste. Adur and Worthing now have two new composting schemes, one in Victoria Park in Worthing, and the other in Buckingham Park in Shoreham.
Victoria Park
Rita was initially inspired to set up the community composting scheme after moving home and not having a suitable space for home composting. She also hoped to encourage others in the local area to compost their food waste.
The scheme is funded by the Community Infrastructure Levy fund and 50 people immediately signed up. The bin can be used to compost uncooked household food waste, most uncooked food can go in, apart from things that take a long time to compost, like egg shells and avocado stones; this is to make it quicker and easier to turn the compost into a beautiful crumbly fertiliser and ensure there’s enough space for the next lot of food waste. The compost is used on the raised beds in Victoria Park and Rita turns the compost a few times a month. Neighbours access the compost bins with a code, and Rita manages a list of community composters.
Buckingham Park
During the 2020 lockdown, the Apron Project, an arts and craft initiative in Shoreham by Sea, decided to create a safe outdoor space. They’d always wanted an outdoor space for a long time, and the pandemic was the push that was needed to begin working seriously on their plan to build a community garden.
The composting scheme at the community garden currently has 40 households signed up and is managed by community garden volunteers. The scheme is currently at capacity, but Apron hope to install another bin soon. Lis, who pioneered Apron community garden, has noticed that the composting scheme encourages people to visit the community garden more often.
The Future
Both composting schemes have been extremely popular and inspired an enthusiastic response from the local community. Composting schemes are easy to set up and are fairly easy to maintain if you have a few volunteers with some time. We hope to see more schemes like these set up in Adur and Worthing in the future.
Huge thanks goes to Brighton & Hove Food Partnership who provided lots of resources and insights in setting up the scheme in Victoria Park.
