WE KEEP ALAMEDA COUNTY GREEN®

WHO WE ARE

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Here's a summary of who we are, how we're organized,
and why we do it that way. You can also see:
details of our current operations,
our plans for the future and
a bit about our past.

We're a nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation (in the legal, 501(c)(3) sense), and also folks who don't mind getting stinky once in a while and love magically transmogrifying food waste into beautiful, rich soil amendment.

The money we get goes towards paying our (small) salaries, maintaining the van, repairing the bins, researching new technologies, and so forth. We aim for self-sufficiency, but our primary objective is to help close the cycle of food production by waste diversion and composting education.

We make all the decisions -- obtaining funds, operations, future plans, hiring, and so forth. We try to operate without a hierarchy -- to do this, we don't have bosses, and the decisions are made by consensus.

We do composting. You could also say we do "organics recycling", or "divert waste with high-volume decomposition systems", or "rot stuff." We use natural processes to turn food waste into a nutrient-rich, soil-building material, "recycling" all that effort the orange tree put into each peel. Composting reduces waste entering landfills, reduces our dependence on the petrochemicals used to make chemical fertilizer, and rebuilds our disappearing topsoil. Not only that, but composting is fun (like having a pet), and keeps your trash from stinking. Sometimes it boggles our minds that not everyone composts.

Students, huh?

Well, not really.
We are a more of a citizens mixed with student mixed with ex homeless mixed with outcasts and academics.

Neat, huh?

Where did you come up with your methods?
People have been composting for millennia. In the spirit of modern technological servitude, we use a few innovations. During the first years of the collective, food waste was collected in 30-gallon plastic non-wheeled bins, picked up in a dump truck, manually chopped and mixed with sharpened shovels, and shoveled into the bins. Those were the brave old days, when everyone got filthy and loved it. Today, we collect food waste in wheeled Toter© bins, use a hydraulic lift to dump it into our specially designed (by Brian Matthews) mixer truck, where rotating augers (designed for processing and dispensing animal feed) chop it up. There’s even a hydraulic chute to kick the mash out into the compost bins. The collective designed and built some forty worm bins (or vermitopias). We revised the design in 2004, and we are in the process of building 10 new worm bins.