The First Ton is the Hardest.

Getting started is the hardest part of any project.

Phase I.  We had to find a place to start the piles.  As a society, we have more
and more dense communities and the places to so something like the project as we have envisioned it have to be close by.  Residential areas are populated with diverse groups of people.  There are those who believe in what we do and those who are not so so interested in it.

We have been fighting a number of battles slowly and quietly and the acronym NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) has come up quite a few times.  People like the idea as a whole but we have encountered a number of people who do not like where we are planning to locate these sites for various reasons most of which are easily solved with a little time and education.

Smell:  People are concerned that the piles will bring strong odors to their area.  The smell is very easily taken care of with our base "ingredient" which is coffee grounds.  Coffee grounds keep heat in the pile, add large amounts of nitrogen to the mix and best of all cover any smells.

Pests:  People are concerned that the piles will bring pests like deer and raccoons and rats. A well managed pile will not bring pests.  Daily attendance to get the heat up and keep the piles aerated will drive out any pests that may appear.  As well, coffee grounds again, go a long way towards deterring as well.
Most animals do not like the strong smell of coffee grounds.

Feedstock:  Feedstock is the "mass" that goes into the pile.  Whether it be coffee

grounds, lettuce bottoms, whatever, we are establishing a method of gathering it.  The methodology, in order for this to be successful, has to be consistent. People are going to seek routine service to make this work in the form of daily pickups. There are people who are running businesses and need to be able to rely on this being picked up on a regular basis.  This is why we are keeping our collection to a minimum so that we can develop a more consistent system.

Structure:  The key components of the venture is the accumulation of coffee grounds so this is going to constitute the majority of the feedstock.  Also, buckets are going to be another key component.  Businesses throw out  a great deal of useful things simply for lack of any other place to dispose of them.  We rescue this stuff and put it to a very specific purpose and give pickle buckets and mayonnaise containers a second life.

To date, we have collected nearly 1500 lbs of matter, but the first ton is the hardest.  We are moving a lot faster now.

Political Battles and Big and Medium Sized Businesses.

We are out to start asking some pretty big questions.  South Carolina currently recycles and sustainably manages only 29 percent of its waste.  At this point, Washington state is at 59% and California has set a goal of   That means that there is a lot of hard work to do to get South Carolina to this level or for that matter, even in contention.

Moncks Corner versus Genearth Bioenergy
Trash is beginning to build up in Charleston and with this crisis also comes an
opportunity.  The nation's landfills do not have a lot of life in them.  They are getting too full too quickly  and we are beginning to see the errors that come from putting garbage in one spot, building on top of that plot of land.  Thus the issue becomes how to better manage the MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) of a growing population with all of the landfills filling.

A lot of the same objections of the small scale that we noted above became a factor in the large scale.  Managing smell, pests, and more began to make people think.  Add to that an increased price to manage, the decision of who would manage it and this made for a stressful transition.

The people of Moncks Corner were not to happy to have Genearth building a new facility when they did not believe the previous one was managed well and that they would have to foot the bill at least in part, to bring that facility about. A website even sprung up that was not too kind to Genearth.

This strikes at the very core of the issue that we are seeing.  People are not paying attention to their garbage.  Local government made very little effort to inform the people how their money is being spent.  Genearth made very little effort to explain what they were planning on doing, and a lot of the people in the town did not want to know where their waste was going.

The Lowcountry area of South Carolina is growing but the main thing that people are not thinking about that they should is where their waste is going.  For a lot of civilizations, that should be the first thought.  Not only where it is going but how long that method will be viable.  Will it last 10 years?  100 years?

This is where our primary focus is going to take us.  How do you convince people who have not had to take this stuff seriously for a generation or three to start thinking about new ways and to believe in the mission of doing so such that it doesn't leave future generations in a lurch and a state or even a town behind the times in comparison to the rest of the country or even the world?

Moncks Corner is only one of many towns, large and small, in South Carolina.  Education is the key and the first ton is the hardest.