This week we got to tour Nederland Transfer Station (NTS). We had Billy as our amazing tour guide and Meghan Wiebe as our host. Altogether we learned so much about their small but mighty mountain operations:

🤎 NTS is the proud operators of a Green Mountain Technologies, Inc. in-vessel compost container. Residents bring their 5 gallon buckets full of organic material and food scraps to the site and dump them into a larger trash cart before being added to the compost mix. 

🌲 Residents can leave with a bucket full of free, finished compost. Typical applications in the mountains include top dressing, planting and landscaping. NTS does not give away their wood chips because of the potential for invasive beetles to be spread.

💦 NTS's compost recipe is a sustainable balance of food scraps and wood chips from the neighboring lumber recovery yard. Residents drop off lumber from fire mitigation projects which get chipped and brought over. Contrary to what you might think based on Colorado dry conditions, no additional water has been added to their compost mix until just this week!

🐻 While bears are generally attracted to smells of food scraps, NTS has not had any issues with intruders. The same wood chips used in the compost mixture are used as a natural filter for any aromas emanating from the composting process. 

🏗️ The Dumptique offers residents opportunities to offload unneeded building and home materials for someone else to use in a project for free (can you say circularity?). Be sure to check out the newly built garage and the possibilities inside next time you head up to Ned!

Thank you for showing us the possibilities for sustainable diversion for smaller mountain communities, Nederland!