I Just Couldn't Stand Putting The Scraps In Rubbish Bin Anymore

Mika lives in Inner West Sydney. When she moved to an apartment, she had to rethink her values. She joined ShareWaste a couple months ago and reached out to us to share her experience with urban composting in a big city. Here's her story.

Before I moved to an apartment, I lived in a number of Sydney Inner West houses with a backyard. I always had a worm farm or a compost bin. When my housemate wasn't interested in setting up a compost, I placed a plastic bucket with a broken bottom behind a shrub and used it as my personal compost bin. The content just organically reduced its volume and disappeared into the garden soil.

In my new sunny, top-floor apartment, I immediately got into trouble. My kitchen bin got full of veggie scraps and it attracted fruit flies. My little balcony was too sunny to set up a worm farm and once I got used to placing recyclable materials into the recycling bin, I just couldn't stand putting the fruit and veggie scraps in the normal rubbish bin any more.

I received a friendly reply

In desperation I yelled out for information on the local community Facebook page where I learnt about ShareWaste. After a few clicks, I sent a hesitant message to Ann, who has a compost and lives in a walking distance from my place.

I received a friendly reply from her and in a few days I turned up at her doorstep with a bucket of scraps in my hand. We had a brief chat about my experience with composting, how I miss it, how I'm excited to discover this community movement - and meeting another like-minded person. How cool is that!

Ann reminded me of the rules of her compost - which was basically the same as when I was composting. More than anything, I was sincerely touched by her gesture to trust me as a fellow community member and to let me into her backyard.

It's become my weekend ritual to have a 15 minutes return walk to feed the earth

Our arrangement is simple – I just text her in advance to let her know that I am coming over. There is no fixed time window like some schools or community garden have. I rarely dump fruit and veggie scraps in the rubbish since then. It has become my weekend ritual to have a 15-minutes return walk to feed the earth.

I feel very grateful to have the ShareWaste community to support my valued and I hope it will grow and bring more people closer together.

Thanks so much Mika!