Center of @ttention: recycling and composting

There was a video on Yahoo a few days ago that was just the motivation I needed to get back to doing more...
http://news.yahoo.com/video#video=22530922

if you don't watch the video - some of the facts are that Americans throw out an average of 4.5 lbs. of trash every day. That equals a national average of 250, 000, 000 (yep, thats millions) TONS of trash a year. 12.7 % is food, 13.2% is yard clippings, and 31 % is paper.

So I already recycle paper, cardboard and plastics. But since I need compost for my garden next year, I decided it was time to stop throwing out all the compostable kitchen scraps (like those banana peels, egg shells, unused produce, etc.) and yard clippings -- we had been throwing them in the garbage because we didn't want to weeds seeds to go back on the lawn.

So I did my online research and here is an article I liked:

http://www.grist.org/article/rot-n-roll/

and here is the video I liked the best:

http://www.howdini.com/howdini-video-7560688.html

I looked into a tumbler composter, but since there are pallets just laying around here from building, and they are FREE - I went with this set up (got the idea from my "Square Foot Gardening Book")http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/Square_Foot_gardening1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.examiner.com/gardening-in-san-francisco/all-new-square-foot-gardening-by-mel-bartholomew&usg=__B-CRqBlSOT47SOE-qmZQ_HtemX0=&h=240&w=240&sz=19&hl=en&start=3&sig2=tFLRoAWt1iGK9YIGYgIjqg&zoom=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=S56TisMSNhwsGM:&tbnh=110&tbnw=110&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsquare%2Bfoot%2Bgardening%2Bbook%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4HPIA_enUS304US304%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=qejJTIyLFsnPngeNgOnWDw

(square foot gardening images - http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1T4HPIA_enUS304US304&q=square+foot+gardening&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=XejJTLnvMdKnngfGsYn5Dw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=2&ved=0CEcQsAQwAQ

That is what the boxes on the west side of the yard are going to be used for next year.

getting started...