Free pumpkin pickup for HSU students

From Nov 1 through the 12 Full Cycle Compost and WRRAP are teaming up to offer a pumpkin pickup to Arcata residents for free. You do not have to be a customer of Full Cycle Compost to reap the benefits of their service. As long as you sign up on their website to notify them where to pick it up, they will take the pumpkin off your hands.

Full Cycle Compost is a recently established co-op where five individuals bike around the city to pick up people’s food and plant scraps to turn into compost. Once they pick up the scraps, they turn it into compost at the Jacoby Creek Land Trust farm and the Jardin Santuario.

Their mission is to keep local food waste out of the landfill and to feed the local food web with healthy and nutritious soil and vegetables. Tobin McKee is a worker-owner there and helped establish the business with Morgan King from WRRAP. McKee is a Humboldt native who starts up new co-op’s but fell in love with the business so much he decided to become an owner.

McKee stated that 30% of landfill mass is made up of material that could have been composted. More waste means more unnecessary trips to the landfill for the trucks picking them up, which is not beneficial to the environment.

“When you take out your garbage, ecology picks it up, then takes it to a processing facility, and then they put it on a big truck that drives to Medford and all the food waste can’t compost in the landfill,” McKee said. “It rots and decomposes which releases a lot more methane than composting.”

The offer originally ran till Nov 5 but has since been extended. Now you are able to enjoy an extra week with your festive creations.

Starting in January a new law will be enacted that requires all multifamily dwellings and businesses to compost their food waste. Unfortunately Arcata does not have a composting facility due to the high cost so Full Cycle Compost is doing what they can to support the community.

“It’s gonna be a lot more hauling than we’re used to, but we’re going to do as many trips as it takes to pick up people’s pumpkins.”