This is the 1st and 2nd things we can do to live smarter, on my list of 12.

Compost – a simple process that continuously occurs in nature, often without any assistance from us.  Eliminate food and yard waste with compost bins, piles and worms. The average New York City household discards two pounds of organic waste each day—adding up to more than one million tons of organic material a year. When we discard this "waste," we lose a potential resource that can help beautify our parks, gardens, and blocks, even our window boxes and houseplants. That's why the NYC Department of Sanitation set up programs to recycle organic material through composting.

Start a compost pile easily with a chicken wire “U” against a fence or wall. Even if you just toss it into a pile in the corner of the yard and throw leaves on it every now and then, you will be reducing waste you have bagged, picked up and incinerated, while adding essential enzymes, nutrients and minerals back to our starving soil.  You will notice seeds sprouting up all over, tomatoes, eggplant and squash from your compost.  I plant and grow these “volunteers” with good results.  Some people have issues with “volunteers” from non-organic food; these seeds could be genetically modified to produce sterile plants and seeds.

Keep a container in your kitchen with a tight fitting lid and empty it everyday.  We use a large yogurt container. You should compost everything except red meat, including fruit and veggie scraps, pasta, coffee grounds, tealeaves, eggshells and yard waste.  DO NOT USE your animal’s excrement, grass clipping that has been sprayed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides or newspaper (all of these have harsh chemicals which will leech into your food if used in compost).  Create a different pile for those items to use on non-food items in your yard.

I first heard about worms in Woody Harrelson's "Go Further" and have been hooked ever since.   Start a worm bin with a used plastic rubbermaid container or something similar you have lying around.  Search on youtube for how to.  Worms eat our compost and turn it into the most nutrient rich soil in the world. Redworms can eat about 3 times their weight a week. Redworms reduce the volume of that waste by about two thirds. Worm composting or vermiculture is a method for recycling food waste(garbage) into a rich, dark, earth-smelling soil conditioner. The great advantage of worm composting is that this can be done indoors and outdoors, thus allowing year round composting. It also provides apartment dwellers with a means of composting. The state of California is actually encouraging employees of both public and private sector businesses to "keep worms in your office". At the CA EPA offices in Sacramento, there's a waiting list for the sixty worm farm bins that are available.

Look for #3  Water Conservation  coming next.

This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.