Compost & Waste Management

Running a large event with 700+ attendees is not easy, and often times, large events and gatherings unfortunately leave an equally large ecological footprint. As we grow and evolve as an event, so do our efforts to become more sustainable as we work to lessen our waste production every year. This is easier said than done, but with collective help, innovative ideas, and ancient practices we can do what we can to make Spirit Weavers a waste conscious, sustainable event.

We are proud to share some of our sustainability efforts that we prioritize as an event.

In addition to requiring all attendees to bring their own plates, cups, bowls, and maintaining a “pack in, pack out” system to encourage less waste, another exciting practice we commit to as a gathering is always composting 100% of our food scraps.

As you can imagine, this is no small task, and we’re grateful to have an amazing team of compost lovers and soil advocates to help.

 

Composting the food waste from 700 people, 3 meals a day, for 10 days straight  is a huge task, and the practice of returning these food scraps back to the land is only possible with our incredible compost team and with both innovative and ancient ways of managing food waste.

Before Cedar Bloom, the gathering was held on rented space, and we worked with a local farm, bringing them all our food waste to be composted. This felt exciting and important, and we were happy to send these nutrients back to the land in this way.

Now that we have our home at Cedar Bloom, we have a compost system right here at home where we process all of the organic waste, so all the energy and nutrients from the gathering are cycled right back to the land each year!   Every year this system gets refined and upgraded by our incredible compost leads, utilizing new techniques and working with the incredible compost team to bring the new ideas to life. For the first few years at Cedar Bloom, we created contained pallet compost bins, located on the outskirts of the property. These worked alright, but weren’t the easiest to use, and with such a large amount of food waste, this wasn’t the most efficient method.

 

In 2022, Sibyl Buck and her team tried something brand new – creating a giant Compost Snake in the woods, and it became a real time demonstration of the magic of large scale composting! The compost snake was a huge success, reaching temperatures of 150* while all our food scraps were being decomposed!  Year after year, attendees can now visit this compost area and get to  actually see, smell, touch and feel the magic of composting, witnessing in real time how we feed the soil and in turn, how the soil feeds us.

With this amazing system, we celebrate the cycles of life and give thanks to the soil, nutrients, and food that sustains us.

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When humans gather, food scraps are not the only type of “waste” that is produced.

 

We’re eager to create more efficient systems in waste management to lessen our impact as an event, and another way we do this is through responsible management of human waste.

 

We are proud to have 8 EcoZoic composting toilet facilities at Cedar Bloom, which turn all of our human waste into nutrients that get returned right back to the soil here on the land! Every year we empty the tanks, their contents going straight to feed the fruit trees and soil around the land. In this way, our event is actually giving back and nourishing the land on which we gather, as opposed to harming it.

 

We are grateful to these innovative systems, and to have knowledgeable and inspired folks on our team that help us implement these new systems of sustainability into our community and homes.

OUR COMPOST & WASTE TEAM

Sibyl Buck

I am a lover of the Earth.

I practice as many ways of nourishing her and going easy on her as I have been able to find balance with in my life. At home on an acre in Topanga Canyon, occupied territory of the Chumash and Tongve people in Los Angeles county, l installed 5 grey water lines to reuse all the water (except one flushing toilet) to water fruit trees and flowers for pollinators. We have two compost toilets, as well as 3 worm bins, and a brush compost pile.  I compost because I love capturing the value in food waste to feed it to plants I have relationships with in order to grow more food, flowers and habitat. l also compost because I know that by returning all her plant babies back to her in a form she finds easy to digest, I help our planet balance herself. When compost is applied to the soil, its nitrogen richness pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, helping to heal petro-poisoning of the planet. Topsoil is called humus and it is the basis for all civilizations. I find compost to be the most amazing analogy for claiming the value from what we may be avoiding or find repugnant and using it to grow what we want to see flourish in our lives. Humans are meant to help create it by the processing of our food. For me composting is a cultural and spiritual practice that every human has an ancestral claim to.

It’s my joy to support Spiritweavers being the most compost-savvy and regenerative gathering there ever was!