Mission Statement

The mission of Zero Waste Lancaster:

To educate ourselves about our use of natural resources, including land, water, and energy;
To reduce consumption of scarce or non-renewable resources;
To develop structural systems that enable and encourage our neighbors and our cit to use resources more wisely.

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Minutes of the September 17, 2019 Meeting

Here are the minutes of our first meeting. Participants noshed on fresh baked bread, baba ganoush, and sun-dried zucchini chips. The conversation range widely, from the Backstreet Boys to bus routes. We shared our interest and experience -- and lack of experience -- with reducing waste. Here two of the successful experiences people related (the ones I remember most): One participant described a dry well she's had installed in the front of her house in her front lawn to significantly reduce rain runoff. She noted that it turned out to be harder to get contractors and she thought; there were enough questions about this topic (both how to go about reducing rain run off, and about how to engage the city "Save It Lancaster" program, that we thought this would make a good topic for a future meeting. Another participant shared a particularly clever technique for reducing mis-sorted trash in her six-child household....

Minutes (way too long) of the October 22, 2019 Meeting

The meeting of the Zero Waste Lancaster group on October 22nd began with eggplant parmesan, because that's what I happened to have a lot of at the time. The topic for the meeting was "How to get things out of the house". We talked about this in two parts: first, sharing things that "could be useful someday" (and getting them to be useful now); and secondly, getting rid of things that nobody wants anymore (that is, trash). We had a bit of a show on the computer, and added to it as we went along. The notes are below. Our next meetings will be November 19 (with luck, we'll get to talk about Lancaster's Climate Action plan and our city's water use) December 17 (how to avoid bringing stuff into our home in the first place). If you know someone who'd like to be on the Zero Waste Lancaster mailing list (getting two emails each month!), please have them send their email addresses my way! - Annalisa Notes:...

Commercial and community-level composting, March 17

March 17 (Tuesday) 7-8:30 p.m. 346 West James Street (the house with the purple bench) Our guest expert this month will be Professor Eve Bratman of F&M's Earth and Environment department, who will describe a project her students did in 2018 assessing the viability of commercial/community composting for Lancaster. Composting food and yard waste creates a beneficial carbon sink, removing carbon from the atmosphere; but landfilling the same waste creates atmospheric toxins. In spite of that, large-scale composting is a topic often lost in the buzz of plastic-straw mania. For example, in the most recent issue of the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen writes about New York City's garbage: "Paper and plastic are separated, but recycling of organics--food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots--remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York's trash. . . . But recycling of organics is arguabl...

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