Press Release: May 2006
Breathing Life Back into the City
A crack composting team will swoop upon Manchester in the next two weeks, improving public grot-spots and breathing life into suffocated soils.
During Compost Awareness Week, the team at Fairfield Composting will be targeting areas of land in Manchester city centre for rejuvenation and soil improvement.
Highly visible pink wheelbarrows will be darting around the city centre, feeding compost onto barren sites administered by the Fairfield staff; they’ll also be on hand to answer your composting queries.
Composting offers enormous benefits to the quality and life of soil; flowers, fruit and veg flourish – it also protects the environment.
Fairfield wishes to invite general public `informants’ to advise the team about any areas of land in the city centre they believe require a nutrient-rich kiss of life or soil lift.
Notes:
Compost Awareness Week – 7-13 May 2006.
Compost Awareness Week is an annual showcase for composting in the UK. Organised by The Composting Association, it aims to raise the profile of compost and composting amongst the public and the media.
Composting brings dead soil back to life, improves drainage, helps with water retention (ideal for dry summers), encourages vital nitrogen release and provides a range of nutrients to the soil - all good news for grass, flowers, fruit and vegetables.
Compost should be encouraged – over half the contents of the average dustbin can be composted.
Composting means that less household rubbish is sent to landfill, which means less harmful liquids and greenhouse gases are produced.
It also means less fuel is used on transporting waste around the country.
Fairfield Materials Management (FMM) is a Manchester based social enterprise based at New Smithfield Market, and is focused on bringing real social and environmental benefits to the city.
FMM researched, developed and installed the UK’s first in-situ composting system on a wholesale market.
The UK produces more than 434 million tonnes of waste every year. This rate of rubbish generation would fill the Albert Hall in London in less than 2 hours.
Every year, UK households throw away the equivalent of 3 ½ double-decker buses (almost 30 million tones(, a queue of which would stretch from London to Sydney and back.
On average, each person in the UK throws away seven times their body weight (about 500kgs) in rubbish every year.
