I have to admit, I was unprepared. I showed up on a blustery and chilly Monday afternoon to help a fellow student with the campus composting wearing flip-flops and a white sweater. And me a girl whose grew up in a family who composts everything from banana peels to grass clippings to shredded credit card applications. But I rolled up my sleeves and began tearing open plastic bags of seeping chunks of tomatoes and greasy napkins and dumping them onto the pile of squishy and smelly compost.

As I helped, I began to sympathize with the members of the Environmental Concerns Organization (ECO) and the irritations they had shared with me. In every conversation I had with members such as Kate Jacobson and Anne Peterman, they would mention how annoying it was to have to pick out Styrofoam containers and plastic cups from the compost bags and how frustrating to have to mix entire bagels or unpeeled oranges in with the miscellaneous food scraps from the caf’s kitchen. Simple education of the student body, they said, would make things much easier and much more successful.

Jacobson, who helps to organize and run composting on campus, explained to me that the current composting program at Luther has been in haphazard operation for about five years. Originally, when the barn by Baker Village was actually used for livestock, the campus’s compost was used there as food for pigs and chickens. When that was no longer an option, small amounts of compost were collected, but only for a few months each year. In fall of 2002, ECO took control of the program. That first year all of the composting was done by student volunteers, but it has since become a paid work-study position. The finished compost, or “hummus”, is used throughout campus in flowerbeds and will become an important part of the student run garden currently in development.