Community composting

Graham Ellis

Founder of Community Compost Solutions

In 2021, my wife and I moved to Rye and joined the Rye Community Garden where I got stuck into helping to revive the compost. Six plastic bins, full of dried out sticks and leaves, were not composting at all, so I replaced them with nine pallet bins, and it's grown from there.

Over the next year, I started to pick up coffee grounds twice a week from 12 businesses across Rye, including the Lime Kiln Café at the Rye Harbour Discovery Centre. Since then, we've managed to divert over 40 tonnes of organic matter that would have ended up travelling many carbon-polluting miles to distant sites. Instead, it's been turned into large quantities of top-class live compost, which has remained in the community, benefiting Rye Community Garden, Tilling Green Community Garden, three Rye Community Fruit Orchards and several gardeners. This is just one of the ‘solutions’ that our local company offers, to help reduce waste and carbon emissions and lower the impacts of climate change - by reducing waste and nourishing soil, we can create a healthier and more sustainable environment for ourselves and future generations.

Composting is a natural process, but conditions have to be just right to create the right mix of materials and aeration. That's why the same materials will not compost when dumped in landfill, instead expelling harmful gases and toxic waste by-products. Our own little composting enterprise saves over 600kg of CO2e emissions per tonne - that's huge.

In 2023, I looked to expand our venture, by securing a base yard behind Tilling Green Community Centre, where we set up many more compost bins and registered ourselves as a Community Interest Company (CIC). We now have three directors and several regular volunteers involved who help me out.

So what does the future hold? Our mission is to continue to inspire and support residents and small businesses to reduce their organic waste, while addressing the climate crisis and improving health and wellbeing through composting. We run workshops and offer programs to promote the installation of appropriate micro-scale composting in small businesses, community organisations, schools and residences in East Sussex. We have an alternative brown bin service, collecting organic waste to turn it into a nutrient-rich resource for local community gardens to use. We are also developing a local grass-roots model, promoting sustainable practise, which we are hoping we can share with other communities to easily replicate. After all, community composting supports a community’s social, economic and environmental well-being - so it touches everything!

If you'd like to find out more, or get involved, please head to our Facebook page,  www.communitycompost.uk or give me a call on 07733 433004.