Trash to cash

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

- CHIT U. JUAN

A lot of people think that composting is just for farmers or those who have land to cultivate. But you can compost any food waste, especially fruit and vegetable discards. These make good material for composting while reducing your trash that has to go to landfills. I myself thought it would be such a cumbersome thing to do, but now we are able to practice waste segregation, taking organic matter back to the soil and reducing our other wastes to less than half of what we used to throw away.

Last year, I invited Olive Puentespina to our farm to teach my staff how to make and maintain compost piles. Olive is an agriculture graduate who is better known for Malagos Cheese, as she is the original innovator who developed local cheese using goat's and cow's milk. After handing the business over to the next generation, Olive had time to go to another part of the business, which is making "super compost" and helping restaurants reduce their "landfill-bound" waste. She drove me around Davao where we saw banana peels dumped in vacant lots, and never to decompose properly. She then toured me to her facility where your "fastfood" discards are "melted" and decomposed to make "super compost."