By Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
INWOOD — Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat joined the Urban Park Rangers and GrowNYC on Sunday for a celebration of Inwood Hill Park’s newest addition: a communal composting center where the neighborhood's food scraps and compostable garbage will be turned into fertile soil.
The event marked the creation of one of the first batches of soil produced by the new three-bin wooden compost built last June by volunteers from the Rangers, GrowNYC and the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
“I am happy to be here to celebrate the new compost system with you,” Espaillat said, adding that as the park's neighbor, he recognized the importance of the work done at the Inwood Hill Nature Center, which runs educational programs in Inwood Hill Park.
The compost soil created will be available for public use and will help grown vegetables and flowers in the Nature Center. A list of compostable materials can be found on the Uptown Compost blog.
Luisa Bautista, a Washington Heights resident who is planning to move to Inwood with her three-year-old daughter Mary-Ann, said she brought her daughter to the event in order to teach her about caring for the Earth.
“I want her to learn about everything, about plants and bees,” she said, “because we need to care about the environment and nature.”
Residents interested in contributing compost can do so from Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the nature center, which is located on West 218th Street along the northernmost portion of the park.
