Lincoln Station
ExcessNYC’s collection of food waste from small businesses in Brooklyn began today! We are collecting and composting the coffee grounds from Lincoln Station, a new cafe in Prospect Heights. Yeah!!!
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Coming Soon
We will be posting here the food we reclaim. We will itemize it and record the amounts in pounds. The success of this project will be in part reflected by how much organic waste we can divert from landfill. We are still in the process of setting up our compost site in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and hope to have it fully operable in Spring 2013.
Interested in vounteering? Please email us at INFO AT EXCESSNYC DOT ORG. We are looking for helpers with the compost site & riding the bike for pick up and deliveries in Prospect Heights/Crown Heights.
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Bagged
Ready for delivery. Batch #001. This was coffee, food scraps, Brooklyn Christmas trees, city park leaves… and it’s now Brooklyn Gold. Heading out for drop off.
Finished Batch #1
Here is some of batch #1, screened and ready to bag for our friends & volunteers. We are using the rest of this batch to remediate the soil in the lot where we are composting. Like a lot of NYC soil, it has high levels of lead. Batch #2 is cooking and we just started batch #3.
Hot!
Our first batch is hot! This is very exciting. The insides of the pile were a nice, rich black color. Not too much longer till it’s done!
Bronx Zoo
We presented ExcessNYC to a high school class at the Bronx Zoo taught by the great Jacob Ciocci. They are focusing on the issue of climate change and making videos for social change. So we talked about both. Our room was above the Congo Gorilla Forest, so we of course had to visit where Iggy got a fist bump from a furry friend!
Excess New Video
We just finished a short video about Excedentes/Excess to be included in the group show “Strange Invitation” that opens at the Franklin Street Works Gallery in Stamford, CT, this Saturday. Later in the spring, we will be doing a food waste survey of small businesses in Stamford, visualizing our results in a storefront (location TBA) and taking the bike out for collections. More on that in May!
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Another reason to compost
Yet another reason to compost! “First, the overall biodiversity of my gut community was significantly higher than that of the typical Westerner, which I put this down to gardening, composting (I keep worms too) and also the fact that I was fermenting kimchi and making raw-milk cheese, “live-culture” foods teeming with microbes.”
From New York Times Magazine
Fungi Broadcast System
Ok, this is so cool (BBC). We knew that mycorrhizal fungi were amazing at getting nutrients to the plant roots, but now a study shows that they serve as a sort of emergency broadcast system to defend against aphids. Wow.
NYC Organics
On WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show today, Ron Gonen, NYC’s first-ever deputy commissioner of sanitation, recycling and sustainability, talks about the importance of organics recycling in NYC.
The Hidden City
While searching for footage for our new video (we will post soon!), we found this old PBS documentary The Hidden City from 1989 on YouTube. It is so GREAT. Take a look. The quality isn’t so hot but it doesn’t matter. While video technology has advanced considerably in the last 25 years, our bad garbage practices unfortunately have not.
Just Food
ExcessNYC is thrilled to participate in the 2013 Just Food Conference. In our session, MAKING ART WITH FOOD IN MIND, artists will offer practical advice on using food as medium or material when working to foster social change. The panelists are Atom Cianfarani, Jason Gaspar, Lisa Gross, Tattfoo Tan, and ExcessNYC (Brooke Singer & Ricardo Miranda Zuniga). All of these artists are responding to the challenges and concerns of feeding populations sustainably by creating local, community-oriented, and aesthetically conscious models. Details: Saturday, March 30 from 10:30am to 11:45am at the Food & Finance High School in New York City. Purchase tickets here.