Check out The Exchange Calendar for upcoming Zero Waste events.
Home Composting Classes
These events are intended to get more folks successfully composting at home so we can keep food scraps, garden and yard materials out of the waste stream. By doing this, we avoid the creation of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is negatively affecting our climate and environment, and instead are creating high quality compost and keeping a valuable resource here on the island.
Wormapalooza!
Worm composting is one of the best ways to reduce your personal food waste, contribute to helping climate change, and to enrich the soil in that beautiful garden of yours.
Wormapalooza is an annual event where we teach you the whys and how’s of worm composting.
Here’s what you’ll learn at Wormapalooza:
- How to set up different types of worm bins, choose the right type of worm bin and how to keep worms happy and healthy
- How to convert kitchen and garden scraps into worm castings, the coveted and potent black gold of compost
- How to get started with this interesting and fun adventure – from indoor or outdoor bins to simple, inexpensive or more involved system
Micro-plastic Awareness and Beach Clean-Ups!
Each summer, The Exchange hosts a series of micro-plastic beach clean-ups at the Eastsound Waterfront Park. Our goals for these beach clean-ups are to bring awareness to the growing problem we are facing with microplastics, to help educate our community on ways they can stop using plastic in their everyday lives, and to start cleaning up the overwhelming amount of microplastics that cover The Eastsound Waterfront Park beach.
During past beach clean-ups we have found nurdles, a variety of sizes of plastic in all colors, and hard and soft plastic. We’ve discovered layers of plastic where it appears the plastic is breaking into smaller particles, leading one participant to recommend targeting larger plastic first on an ongoing basis to prevent future breaking down. This is time-consuming work so your help is appreciated. We have found that just removing all the plastic from a 2-foot square area takes many, many hours.