Notes

Meeting with George Reis, NYU Gardener

10.18.06

Proposal to implement campus-wide composting should come from students, who are "consumers" at the university, and have more clout. His recommendations:

• Create a proposal with manageable scale, so you can show successes
• Present data that shows benefits
• Present solutions that require lowest possible maintenance

Ideally, George would like to implement a setup similar to the bins at the NY Botanical Garden http://www.nybg.org/. He has photos on NYU Garden Blog, but site appears to be down http://www.nyugardens.blogspot.com/

Useful Deets for Proposal

NYU Garden Shop

• Maintains several gardens: Schwartz Plaza, Warren Weaver, 22 Washington Square North, President's Penthouse Terrace, Coles
• Estimates that they would use about 20 cubic yards of compost per year (about the size of a car)
• They normally purchase compost wholesale from a local nursery ($6/bag) They just purchased 30-40 bags in addition to the 10 cubic yards they received from the city program.
• Another resource to rope in for composting is Campus Dining
• George knows Ralph Snodsmith, a gardening celebrity, who never stirs his compost. Worth looking into as another avenue of least maintenance.

Other Schools Are Doing It - Why Aren't We?

• Rutgers has an urban agriculture program. Containerized vegetation?
• Harvard has 6 green roofs.
• Carnegie Mellon has 4 green roofs

Green roofs' big strength for a setting like NYC is control of stormwater runoff. Right now, after storms, the city is required to skim raw sewage from the river. Gross! Enough green roofs could possibly eliminate, or at least help in controlling this issue.

Contacts:

Jeremy Friedman
Senior @ Gallatin, Co-President of Green Arch

Deborah Lloret
Building Manager - Coles
181 Mercer St. - 115A (7911)
Telephone: (212) 998 - 2042
Email: deborah.lloret@nyu.edu
She's plant friendly, supported the new gardens surround the Coles facility. Discuss getting permission to use site behind building for setting up compost bins.

Christine Datz-Romero
Lower East Side Ecology Center
She helped coordinate the program with City's Sanitation Dept. to allow NYU to be eligible for free compost (10 cubic yards). The LES Ecology Center has a big compost program, community based.

Patrick Lawton
Solaire Building, leads tours of the apartments, green roof.