If it didn't grow in your yard, it doesn't belong in your Brown Cart! Join the Brown Cart brigade - help us make better GOLD GROW compost!

Overview

The City of St. Peters provides our residents with a handy, dandy Brown Cart that you can wheel around the yard and pick up leaves, grass clippings, weeds, garden waste, and small limbs.

It's important to remember that this Brown Cart connects you with something special: The amazing GOLD GROW compost product made at St. Peters' Earth Centre. How is that? Your Brown Cart's job is to bring your yard waste to Earth Centre so that it can be processed with biosolids from our wastewater treatment center for some of the best fertilizers your lawn and garden will ever enjoy: We call this compost GOLD GROW!

Now, here's where you fit in, and this is an extremely important part of the GOLD GROW process. It relies on you to place only yard waste - never trash- in your Brown Cart. When you do that, you're part of the "Brown Cart Brigade" that's making amazing GOLD GROW compost that's recycled right back into yards and gardens throughout our community. So, to be part of the Brown Cart Brigade and make a better GOLD GROW product, all you need to remember is this:

If it didn't grow in your yard, it doesn't belong in your Brown Cart!

Otherwise, you're contributing to a huge mess at Earth Centre. What do we mean by that? Well, the unpleasant truth is that as of Spring 2021, we have 5,000 tons of unrecyclable waste material that has piled up due to people placing trash in their Brown Cart. That amount of unusable material could fill a football field as high as five feet across.

Yard Waste Only

The Brown Cart is for yard waste only. It's this simple: If it didn't grow in your yard, it doesn't belong in your Brown Cart!

We can't say "only yard waste goes in your Brown Cart" enough, because each year we have a problem where thousands of tons of material keep piling up and slowing the organic materials recycling process. Our staff at Earth Centre works hard using special screening equipment to get as much trash out of our yard waste as possible, but there's so much trash that there's a massive pile of material we just can't ever get rid of. As we screen a bit of trash out of this pile of waste a little bit at a time, more trash comes into Earth Centre and undoes all the progress our staff makes.

It's a vicious cycle that only you can end!

Inevitably, small pieces of this trash can make it into our GOLD GROW compost, reducing its quality. The trash placed in Brown Carts is bad for GOLD GROW, bad for the environment, and bad for our pocketbooks because of the cost it takes in extra resources and time to screen out this trash so that we can produce high-quality GOLD GROW compost.

So, to turn things around and end the vicious cycle of trash piling up at Earth Centre, please remember: If it didn't grow in your yard, it doesn't belong in your Brown Cart!

Acceptable Items for the Brown Cart

Remember: Here are the only things you ever want to place in your Brown Cart:

• Leaves
• Grass clippings
• Garden waste
• Weeds
• Small branches up to 3 feet long