An ode to compost
Individuals, communities, and governments have the ability to turn food trash into farm treasure.
Growing up, “taking out the compost” was my least favorite chore. It meant carrying a beige plastic pitcher filled with my family’s food scraps through the yard to the compost bin my parents had built next to the giant vegetable garden.
The decaying pile of peels and stems smelled and looked like rot, and I’d stand as far away as possible and stretch my arm out to deposit the latest haul, shaking it gently while silently praying no “juices” would leak onto my hand. A mouse or a rat would often scurry away, disturbed, and I’d run screaming back to the house.
My mother laughed at my antics with smug awareness. She knew the rituals and values she was embedding into my psyche would lead to a future in which I would avoid throwing a half-eaten sandwich into a garbage can as if my life depended on it. Just look at me now.
According to new data from ReFED, in 2019, 35 percent of the food produced in the US was not eaten. Whether it went unharvested, was damaged in transit, or rotted in a refrigerator, all of the resources that went into producing it—like fresh water and fossil fuels—were wasted. And the majority ended up in a landfill, where, without the right conditions to degrade naturally, it released methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
This happens year after year, and the best solution to food waste is to stop wasting food.
But it’s nearly impossible to achieve that 100 percent of the time within our current system, and there will always be inedible bits like egg shells and kale stems. So, one of the best solutions is to turn our food trash into soil-building treasure that can help us produce more healthy food without utilizing additional natural resources (to make synthetic fertilizers).
Over the past decade, efforts to encourage and mandate composting have been growing in cities and states all over the country. There are now six states with policies that ban sending food to landfills in some way, plus many cities that do so, including Seattle and San Francisco, which have curbside pick-up. And nonprofits, local governments, and small businesses all over the country are working on voluntary composting initiatives.
But there are many challenges to scaling up the gritty practice. New York City, for instance, pulled back its plans to expand residential compost collection because there weren’t enough places to send it. At the same time, community composting operations that filled the gap have been getting kicked off their land to make room for real estate.
From all of this, there are lessons to be learned. What works and what doesn’t when it comes to building infrastructure that can support composting tons and tons of food scraps from stadiums, schools, and restaurants? What, other than an insistent, frugal mother with a green thumb, can help individuals confront barriers to composting at home?
Yvette Cabrera is the director of Food Waste programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). NRDC published a report in 2012 that kick-started the organization’s long-term commitment to tackling food waste and galvanized broader action on the issue. The team decided to start working with cities, and began first studying how and why food was being wasted in different cities. “Municipalities were kind of rising to the top as a key intervention point for food waste given the fact that they control large municipal budgets, oversee municipal waste collection and processing, do large-scale food procurement, and many other things.”
Since then, the work has expanded significantly into a program called Food Matters. Cabrera and her colleagues first worked with Denver and Baltimore and recently launched programs with 15 cities in 5 regions, an approach that will allow neighboring cities to share infrastructure and resources. Food Matters initiatives have included many different strategies that vary from place to place, like using city health inspectors as food waste ambassadors who talk to restaurants and food production facilities during inspections about donating excess food or composting.
Often, local priorities set the stage for the direction an approach should take. In Baltimore, a small city with limited resources, building additional commercial composting facilities or starting curbside pick-up are pie-in-the-sky goals that would likely take eons to implement. A Harvard Law School report on food waste laws around the country points out that cities and states considering implementing major regulations or programs have to consider various factors before doing so, including infrastructure capacity, money available to set up programs, and political will.
One issue that Baltimore residents had been building political will around for many years is shutting down the city’s incinerator, which burns city garbage and in the process spews pollution into neighborhoods primarily inhabited by people of color. “When they did an analysis of what was actually going into the incinerator, they found that a huge portion...is organic material,” Cabrera explained. In fact, in 2018, the Baltimore Office of Sustainability reported that about half of the city’s trash consisted of food and other materials that could be rescued for donation or composted. One way to push toward shutting down the incinerator, then, would be to find new ways to dispose of that material, ideally in ways that helped people and the planet rather than harming them.
NRDC worked with city agencies and local community groups on various initiatives, starting with supporting groups like Baltimore Compost Collective that were already making on-the-ground progress. Another project involved creating food scrap collection points at farmers markets staffed by volunteers who could offer advice on home composting and weigh scraps residents brought with them to show them how much waste they were diverting from the landfill. They also got farms that were selling at the same market to haul the scraps back to their farms, either for use in their composting operations or to feed pigs. “We've seen a lot of success with these full food-system solutions where we’re not just talking about taking waste out of the waste stream, we’re also talking about engaging the community, and supporting our local food systems,” she said.
While bigger citywide solutions might look better because of their potential scale, they require more time and resources and significant buy-in from businesses and individuals. “If you don't have that participation, it's going to be really hard to sustain your program,” Cabrera said.
Laurie Beyranevand, the director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School has seen examples of that challenge in her state. While most states with food waste bans only require businesses producing a certain amount of food waste to either donate or compost their waste, Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law is the first in the country to fully ban food scraps from landfills, essentially making composting mandatory for everyone. Its requirements were rolled out gradually since 2012 and went fully into effect last July.
Since 2012, a representative from Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation told a local news station the state gained nine new food scrap haulers, and 12 facilities began offering or expanded their composting drop-off operations. Individual compost facilities have also reported massive increases in food scrap collections as the 2020 deadline approached.
Having a stereotype of Vermont firmly affixed in my mind, I assumed the state would be wildly successful in implementing the law because all of the farmers and hippies who live there are obviously already skilled composters who also happen to make their own soap and granola.
But Beyranevand said that while the mostly rural state certainly allows for more at-home composting compared to more urban areas, in some ways, the state’s infrastructure has made the law’s requirements more complicated than they would be elsewhere. Of the four towns she’s lived in, for example, only one had residential garbage pick-up. In the three others, residents had to drop their trash off at the town dump and pay by the bag. Before it was the law, Beyranevand started composting because she knew it was an environmentally friendly practice but also simply to save money at the dump. “If you're paying for trash, that's an economic issue...and I think a lot of people don't even necessarily use their compost. They just have a compost pile to keep it out of the waste stream,” she said.
Beyranevand is one of those people. She has no use for compost but makes her own at home because she needs a way to dispose of her food scraps. This scenario made me laugh and was also eye-opening. In urban places like Brooklyn, having a fire escape feels like meaningful outdoor space. When I lived there, I’d keep my food scraps in the refrigerator in between dumping them at a local drop-off point, but my refrigerator was half-size to fit in my mini-kitchen, so often I’d have to calculate: If I put this compost in there, will the milk fit? In Vermont, meanwhile, it’s unlikely your town has free drop-off points for food scraps, but you could just build a compost pile in the yard—whether you need it or not.
In other words, efforts to divert food waste from landfills and to encourage composting likely won’t work unless they’re place-based and take into account how locals eat, live, and take out the trash. “In Vermont, nothing is consistent in the way that it is in other places...and that inconsistency across the state makes it really, really hard to think about: What does it look like to have a consistent state system in place that is making sure that the law is actually being implemented in some way?” Beyranevand said. “I think, in theory, it's nice to have the state setting the goal. To say: we have a commitment to this. But I think if the states are going to do that, then they need to be doing a ton of outreach to the municipalities.”
Similarly, it makes sense that when I ask Cabrera what she thinks the best strategy is to get more people to compost at home—either by dropping off scraps or making their own compost—it’s hard for her to pinpoint a single idea or tip. The best approach is always going to be the one that fits into your individual—or community—life. But after years of this work, she’s even more convinced of the power of the simple action of separating out food scraps in each kitchen around the country. “That banana peel or whatever that thing is that looks so minuscule actually does have a really big impact when you think about the collective amount of food waste that we're generating. Maybe it doesn't look like a lot for your individual household because you're throwing it in the trash little by little, but it is,” she said. “And when you start to put your food scraps to the side, it educates you on the amount you’re generating in your house.” That insight might even help you cut waste from the get-go, she said.
It’s been decades since I held my nose while unwillingly participating in family backyard composting in my rural hometown. Since then, I’ve never lived in a place where the actual act of composting was possible. But in New York City, I found ways to jam bags and plastic containers of food scraps into tiny fridges and freezers and then walked or biked the scraps to drop-off points. In Baltimore, I signed up for Compost Crew, a service that provided me with a 5-gallon bucket and now comes by my house once a week to empty it. (Local services like this one now exist in cities all over the country.) Twice a year, the company brings back fresh compost that I can use to fertilize my small (but now at-least existent!) garden.
The sight of the nutrient-rich black matter ready to contribute to the production of juicy tomatoes and crisp snap peas is humbling. If microorganisms can turn my apple cores, sweet potato peels, and moldy yogurt into this, the least I can do is “take out the compost.”
Got questions about composting? Ask me in the comments below and I’ll try to answer. If I don’t know the answer, I can almost certainly refer you to a useful resource. Here are a few to get started:
EPA’s list of national resources, by region, for food scrap drop-off and composting
Rodale Institute’s video tutorials on composting
Still hungry?
Never not talking about nitrogen. Remember last week when we talked about chickens and nitrogen? For Civil Eats, I wrote another article on a different issue related to the infamous nutrient-pollutant double agent. It’s about a recent research study that identified 20 “hotspots” where nitrogen pollution in agriculture is particularly high and there may be significant opportunities to fix it.
Actually eating
I ate at a restaurant (outside!) for the first time in about a million years and it felt so weird and amazing all at once. My friend and I got dinner at a tiny Mexican restaurant in DC called Anafre. I had vegetable enchiladas with mole, and I felt like hugging the server everytime he came to the table to ask us how we were doing. It finally feels like the end of this pandemic is at least approaching…
Let’s be friends
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I wish composting was less messy. I keep a compostable bag in the freezer to collect scraps, then take the bag(s) to Mom’s Organic Market every week when I shop. Seems to be the best solution for my family, but it an be messy...