Transforming Twitye

SOIL's Port-au-Prince composting site at Twitye is undergoing a complete transformation. It's a makeover, SOIL style! Given SOIL's mission to transform wastes into resources, the team decided that our site at Twitye, the infamous Port-au-Prince dump, provided an ideal opportunity to take that mission one step further. The Port-au-Prince dump has been a symbol of waste, poverty, and hopelessness for over 25 years. Today, the SOIL team is working to transform the small piece of Twitye housing our compost site into a beautiful, healthy piece of land, showcasing the possibility and the power of transformation.


Here's how we're doing it!

1. We're streamlining the composting process by utilizing a classic composting technique: turning. Every month, we'll turn the compost in our bins, accelerating decomposition, increasing internal temperatures, and creating beautiful compost even faster!
2. Our site has been redesigned with a new layout for the compost bins, created specifically to optimize the turning process. The new process is designed to facilitate the movement of compost around the site: as each batch of compost ages, it is turned and moved forward, one bin at a time, eventually being transferred to a windrow (a covered pile outside of a bin) for the final few months of decomposition.
3. To improve the soil retention and beauty of our site, we're planting up a storm! Right now we've planted hundreds of banana trees in between our compost bins. Eventually, the fully grown trees will provide wind shelter for the compost bins, as well as stabilizing the soil around our site and protecting the soil from severe erosion.

Our ultimate goal is to create a plot of land that embodies SOIL's mission of transformation, and to someday leave that land behind as a valuable resource, more beautiful than the way we found it. Construction of our new bins is complete, banana trees are planted (many more plants to follow!), and the site is already looking amazing. Check it out for yourselves!

 
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