GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Don’t throw away your pumpkins — that’s the message from two groups in Green Bay.
Instead, your Halloween jack-o’-lanterns can help nourish local soil.
Cory Groshek is putting the Greater Green Bay’s rotting porch pumpkins and gourds to use.
Groshek started Greener Bay Compost in August and has already collected more than 3,100 pounds of organic waste from the households that pay and subscribe to his service.
But for the next few weeks, he’s taking people’s pumpkins, gourds, straw bales and corn stalks for free.
“Trying to gather as much of this stuff as possible so it doesn’t end up in the landfill. And instead ends up in my compost piles where we’re going to make some really great soil amendments for next spring,” said Groshek.
Groshek’s back yard has a pile of old jack-o’-lanterns and it’ll be more than he can put to use this fall.
“That’s okay. They will freeze, then thaw in spring and they will be a really great source of nitrogen for me to mix with a lot of other things,” said Groshek, “The main reason we don’t want it in the landfill is it creates methane, which is a greenhouse gas which is 20-28 times more toxic for our environment than (carbon dioxide).”
Dean Haen, director of Brown County Port and Resource Recovery, says if you can handle composting, do it, but methane gas isn’t all bad.
“Those landfills generate significant revenue by managing methane. In the past we’ve produced electricity, we’ve powered 1,000 homes on the east side of Green Bay from our landfill,” said Haen, “Twenty-five to twenty-seven percent are organic materials that could be taken care of in a different manner.”
Haen says a recent composting operation pilot in Brown County didn’t work out because there wasn’t a market.
Groshek and Haen agree, as you ride out your Halloween sugar rush, think about how you can reduce your waste and save a few pumpkins from the landfill.
The extra product from Greener Bay Compost will be donated back to Green Bay Botanical and other local community gardens.
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