Clark Park Community Garden

Meeting time

Monday 6PM

Project description

At Clark Park Community Garden, one of our key functions is to provide a model for sustainable gardening and agriculture, and our onsite composting helps allow us to do that. Currently, our method is very labor-intensive, and many volunteer hours are spent distributing materials to the various bins at various stages of the process, turning them over, and monitoring their breakdown – to the detriment and neglect of our other projects. Furthermore, our need for usable, organic compost has only grown; and alternative sources (such as Tempe’s compost yard) are routinely found to have plastic or other contaminants, and retail alternative products (such as the Lomi from Pela) are either too small or aren’t really composters, only food waste reducers. The engineering team will create a composting system that works with little manual labor input to turn organic materials into healthy compost. This design will include ways to monitor the health of the included compost.

This semester, we are hoping to do research and plan a possible solution to the composting issues in Clark Park. Since this is the first semester, much of the work being done will be meeting with the community partner and discussing parameters of the solution, as well as doing research on possible solutions and the specifics of the area.