By Bridget Huber for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

In January 2019, students at Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, took a hard look at how much food they were throwing away. It was Taco Day, and as lunch period wrapped up, teacher Gerin Hennebaul and a group of students sorted the milk, fruit, vegetables, and other foods left on the cafeteria trays into buckets. “It really left an impact on the kids,” Hennebaul says. “They were shocked.”

The students weighed the waste and found that that day’s lunch, served to 721 kids, generated nearly 600 pounds of food waste. About 75 pounds of it was fruits and vegetables, and 120 pounds was still edible: unopened milk cartons, bags of baby carrots and sliced apples.

With more than 95,000 schools across the country serving lunch each day, that waste adds up. About 530,000 tons of food and 45 million gallons of milk is wasted in U.S. school cafeterias each year, the World Wildlife Fund estimates, which translates into about $1.7 billion worth of uneaten food. 

Dumping food in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. And wasting food indirectly drives extinction; agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss around the world — converting wild lands to cropland, diverting or polluting rivers and lakes, and pesticide use destroys habitats that wildlife need to survive. To tackle the environmental toll of landfilling all that food, environmental groups, like the World Wildlife Fund, have been working for about a decade with nearly 250 schools nationwide, including Lovin Elementary, to reduce waste but also to educate kids about the broader connection between the food they eat and issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. 

As Pete Pearson, the WWF’s senior director of food loss and waste, explains, making the cafeteria a classroom helps reduce waste now, and hopefully will produce a generation that’s more environmentally responsible than their parents. “When you get a school that is saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at our cafeteria, let’s understand the connection of food to the environment,’ then students start asking questions,” he says. 

Efforts to address food waste at the federal level have been less aggressive — but there are signs that’s starting to change. The U.S. has committed to halving the nation’s food waste by 2030. In December, the Biden administration proposed a national strategy to meet that goal, and tackling food waste at schools is part of the plan. But the USDA, which is responsible for feeding students, has not yet made cutting food waste a core part of school nutrition programs. Rather than wait for help from Washington, a handful of states, including Vermont and California, have passed or are considering laws making it illegal to throw away food scraps, which puts pressure on school districts to find ways to keep food waste out of landfills.

After Lovin Elementary’s first food audit, students started delivering PSAs during the morning announcements; one of their big messages was that taking milk at lunch isn’t mandatory, a common misconception that creates a lot of waste. They began feeding leftovers from the teachers’ salad bar to the school’s chickens. And Hennebaul set up a share table, where kids deposit unpeeled fruits and unopened packaged food, like granola bars. There’s a fridge for milk and baby carrots. Throughout the day, kids take and leave things from the table. Every morning it starts off empty, fills up, and then ends up empty again, Hennebaul says.

In March 2019, the school did another audit and found that waste had dropped from 589 to 435 pounds. The amount of discarded veggies fell to 47 pounds, and 108 pounds of edible food was sent to the share table instead of to the landfill. 

Since then — pandemic disruptions aside — Lovin has gradually ramped up composting; this year it has composted around 5,000 pounds of food. Most of the scraps go to the school’s garden, and some are shared with a local organization that trains adults with developmental disabilities to garden and compost. 

The food-waste program has led to many learning opportunities, Hennebaul says. Third graders teach kindergarteners how to compost and sort garbage, for instance, and measuring waste yields lessons on volume and decimals and how microorganisms break down food. The hope is that the big lesson — that food is not garbage — sticks too.

As schools like Lovin have tackled food waste piecemeal, some best practices have emerged. Audits are key; “unless you see it, it’s not real,” Pearson says. Share tables are a reliable way to cut waste and get food to kids who need it. Letting kids choose the foods they want at lunch, instead of serving everyone the same thing — a model called “offer vs. serve” — is another strategy that works. So is addressing milk waste. In addition to making sure students know they don’t have to take milk, some schools have replaced milk cartons with dispensers that let kids take as much or little as they want.

Advocates and researchers are trying to go beyond the school-by-school approach and collect data that can inform a comprehensive strategy for reducing food waste in schools on the state and national level. The EPA recently awarded the World Wildlife Fund $1.1 million to work with schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, Memphis, and Nashville to promote food waste reduction starting next fall. 

And in Maine, four public elementary schools of varying sizes took part in a pilot program last year, led by University of Maine researchers, that began with a waste audit and included sharing baskets for uneaten food and educational components. Kids watched a slideshow, for instance, that explained what they did and did not have to take in the cafeteria line, and that made explicit the links between food and the environment. One slide, titled “What happens when food goes in the trash?”, showed a photo of a polar bear clinging to a fragment of ice and a truck dumping garbage into a landfill. 

Over the nine-week course of the pilot, the schools cut waste by about 14 percent, saving a quarter-ton of food. Based on these results, the researchers estimated that putting a similar program in place statewide could reduce food waste by up to 325 tons, saving 4,263 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — about as much as taking 1,000 cars off the road.

Next year, with funding from the World Wildlife Fund, the researchers plan to expand the study. Finding ways to reduce waste in Maine schools is made even more urgent by the fact that it’s one of a small but growing number of states that now serve meals free to all students, regardless of family income, which has led to an uptick in the number of kids eating at those schools—and thus to the prospect of more waste.

While she supports efforts to make school food free to all students, Susanne Lee, a faculty fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, who led the Maine study, says expanding school food programs makes it even more imperative to develop policies at the state and federal level to address waste. “Who wouldn’t want to feed kids?” she said. “But if the kids are already throwing away forty percent of the food that we’re giving them, how is it helping?”

On a recent day at Sebago Elementary School, which took part in the Maine pilot, students filed into the lunch room, starting at a salad bar, where red peppers, cucumbers, and other vegetables were cut into large chunks. Kids waste less produce when they can choose what they take, and when it’s cut into kid-friendly forms, explains Morgan Therriault, the school’s food service director. Until recently, the school donated its food scraps to a local pig farmer, but the farmer retired and until they find another, the scraps are going in the trash.

At Sebago Elementary, lunchtime was unhurried and surprisingly calm. Kids have 30 minutes to eat. Experts say giving kids enough time to eat helps reduce wasted food, too, though schools that have to move many students through a small cafeteria often only give kids 15 to 20 minutes. Some schools, like Lovin Elementary, have experimented with playing music during some of the lunch period and asking kids to focus on eating—rather than socializing—while the music is on. Others feed kids lunch after recess, hoping they’ll work up an appetite and get most of their chattering done before sitting down to eat. 

Therriault says her school’s small size — just over 100 students — has advantages and disadvantages when it comes to addressing food waste. She and another staff member prepare and serve all of the food, so they see what kids like (tacos) and what they throw out (fish sticks). And the amount of waste generated is manageable enough that Therriault was able to bring the buckets to the pig farmer herself. The downside is staffing. The school’s food-waste work was started by a teacher with a passion for it, but he retired, leaving Therriault to continue the work on her own. Balancing cutting waste with making sure that everyone is fed and that kids with allergies are safe is a lot to manage, she says, and it’s hard to imagine growing the program without more support. 

Making sure that food waste reduction programs are sustainable and long-lasting is a real challenge. WWF has been pushing the federal government to make food waste reduction a key part of the USDA’s school meals programs, and Pearson says there’s political resistance to putting more money into nutrition programs. Legislation like the School Food Recovery Act, a bipartisan House bill that would give grants to help schools cut food waste, hasn’t passed. But gathering more data on what works could help make the case, and Pearson says he’s optimistic that waste reduction programs have bipartisan support.

“I think the problem always comes back to having to invest some money into it,” he says. 

But if schools can get a program in place, it takes on a life of its own, says Lee, the Maine researcher. “If you start those kids in elementary school, they will then be asking when they get to the middle school, ‘Where are our separate waste bins at lunch? Food shouldn’t go in the trash.’” 

At Lovin Elementary that’s exactly what’s happening. Other elementary schools in the district have begun composting, as has the high school. “You’re just watching it become part of our culture at school,” Hennebaul says, “and just part of who we are and what we do.”


Bridget Huber wrote this article for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.


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Kane County officials plan to launch four composting programs at large-scale facilities to reduce food waste, as part of meeting the county's climate goal to reduce greenhouse gases.

A $500,000 federal grant will pay for waste management programs at the Northern Illinois Food Bank and other large facilities that struggle with food waste.

Clair Ryan, recycling program coordinator for Kane County, said the partnerships came about serendipitously, beginning with the food bank. It receives sizable perishable and canned food donations, some of which are already spoiled, and asked if the county had resources to help them address food waste.

"And I said, 'Well no, we don't at the moment, but there's this grant opportunity...'" Ryan recounted. "It kind of got me thinking, 'OK, so if we can make this happen for the food bank, where else can we do it?'"

Northern Illinois Food Bank is one of the largest in the state. Through the composting program, it will implement a process to unpackage fruits and vegetables for anaerobic digestion.

Other program partners include the Kane County Adult Corrections Facility, the Kane County Cougars stadium, and Sherman Hospital in Elgin. Due to a new state law requiring large event facilities to provide recycling and composting bins, Ryan emphasized the partnership with the Cougars stadium seemed like a natural fit.

"The upshot of all of it is that we're going to be able to, over the course of the two-year project, divert about a million pounds of food waste," Ryan pointed out. "Keep it out of landfills, stop it from degrading straight into methane that contributes to climate change."

The program will also provide funds to purchase compost for distribution to small farms and community gardens throughout the county. In the long term, Ryan hopes to establish a dedicated food scrap drop-off point at Kane County's recycling center to encourage more community participation in the composting efforts.


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By Shi En Kim for Sierra.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Plastics are a problem that knows no boundaries. These intractable incarnations of fossil fuels have found their way into the atmosphere, our kitchen produce, and even the deepest part of the ocean. They choke wildlife to death and sully the world’s natural landscapes. In microscopic form, plastics are arguably even more pernicious—micro- and nanoplastics have infiltrated into reproductive organs, lodged themselves in the brain, wreaked havoc on cardiovascular health, and contaminated mammary glands. 

In early December, representatives from around the world gathered to devise the first-ever global treaty to slow the tide of plastics pollution. But they blew it. After two years of recurring talks, an agreement failed to materialize between members of the United Nations. Many of the representatives wanted to phase out or curtail the production of plastic, but they were stymied by a small group of leaders from oil-producing countries. “The outcome of those treaty talks is disappointing,” Melissa Valliant, the communications director of the advocacy network Beyond Plastics told Sierra.

An ambitious antiplastic coalition, mainly small island nations and those from the Global South, said regulations on plastics after they become waste didn’t go far enough. Plastics had to be regulated before they hit the shelves.

Historically, recycling has never made a significant dent in waste. Only 9 percent of the world’s plastic is recycled to date. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the 2018 national recycling rate was a paltry 8.7 percent (most of it goes into landfills). But even this figure is a lowball, experts say. Recycling numbers only account for plastic collected for recycling, not the fraction that’s actually recycled. In some places, such as Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, Utah, plastic waste that’s collected for recycling is burned. Now, recycling rates are set to decrease in the coming years as plastic production ratchets up and recycler countries like China, which once was the dumping ground of the United States’ plastic waste, close their ports to American trash exports.

The other trouble with recycling is that plastics simply aren’t cut out for it. Polymer products contain a variety of additives, up to 16,000 different chemicals, and they complicate the sorting process for each category to be recycled effectively. A content labeling mandate on plastic products or simplifying the formula would help, but the chemical makeup for plastics is often proprietary.

Processing waste is also riddled with social injustices. Landfills, recycling centers, and incineration facilities, not to mention petrochemical plants, are often located in minority or low-income neighborhoods. A 2016 report found that people of color are twice as likely as white residents to live within a mile of industrial facilities in the Houston area. Residents in these polluted areas face about a 25 percent higher respiratory hazard and cancer risk than the rest of Houston’s households. This pattern of fenceline communities disproportionately paying the price repeats across the US and the rest of the world.

While waste regulation is indispensable, it won’t address the other upstream environmental impacts of plastics incurred long before these products enter our bins. Production is an energy-intensive and leaky process, and it accounts for 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a footprint that’s three times as large as that of aviation's. That may sound puny, but the plastics industry is actually the fastest-growing source of emissions—it’s poised to reach 19 percent of the world’s entire carbon budget by 2040.

“We're on course for an exponential increase of plastic production because the petrochemical sector is scaling up massively,” Sirine Rached, the global plastics policy coordinator at the advocacy group GAIA, said. As the world increasingly electrifies transportation and power generation, petrochemical companies are making up for lost sales by doubling down on plastics.

Environmentalists say that plastics regulation needs to kick in at the production level to nip the problem in the bud. This includes product bans, reducing plastics production, or setting caps. Without these measures, our plastic traffic is set to balloon by 70 percent in 2040 compared with 2020 levels.

“The only way to reduce waste disposal is to reduce material production because every single pound or ton of material that we bring into the world will become waste eventually,” Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said. “There’s no way around it.”

What cap level is appropriate? Anything helps, given the soaring trend of plastic production. A recent study in Sciencecalculated that curbing annual virgin plastic synthesis at 2020 levels alone can reduce waste by 40 percent and emissions by 18 percent. Another report suggested that freezing at projected 2025 levels eliminates 5.1 billion tons of waste, shrinking the world’s trash heaps by a third. These are still generous allowances, and even these limits can wrench the plastic growth curve downward if not flatten it.

Even though the UN negotiations ended without a treaty, the fight for a global treaty isn’t over—further talks will be held sometime next year to continue working toward a global agreement. However, experts have expressed doubt about whether the outcome will be any different. Unfortunately, for-profit companies can’t be counted on either. Earlier this year, Coca-Cola, named the world’s top plastic producer for six years in a row, walked back on its commitment to make all of its packaging 50 percent recycled plastic by 2030, whittling that goal to at most 40 percent by 2035.

Instead of relying on companies and international treaties, local government policy is needed to make a substantial difference, Valliant said. For starters, bans or fees on single-use plastics can bring material change. After the District of Columbia mandated food businesses charge customers five cents per disposable bag in 2009, plastic bag use dropped 75 percent in six months, and the number of wayward bags contaminating local waterways fell by 72 percent. Another study found that banning single-use plastic bags eliminates nearly 300 bags per person from entering circulation per year. As of January 2024, 12 American states have instituted such a ban.

In the US, anti-plastics legislation takes effect in a patchwork across states and cities. Elsewhere, other countries have enacted tighter stances. The UK and the European Union have levied a plastic tax on non-recycled waste. Another shining beacon is Rwanda, which has prohibited all businesses from dealing with plastic bags and bottles since 2008. Since 2019, the African nation has imposed a complete ban on all single-use plastics.

The US has scant federal laws concerning plastics. Just last September, a bipartisan recycling bill came into fruition, and it aims to standardize the 9,000 or so recycling jurisdictions across the US. It also mandates a 30 percent minimum of recycled content in packaging. A few more proposed bills are also plodding through Congress. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2021, perhaps the US’s most ambitious framework yet, proposes phasing out a variety of single-use products and making businesses responsible for managing the waste that arises from their products. Most of these bills, however, don’t address the plastics problem at the source, only at the post-consumer stage.

“This is not rocket science. We know the solutions,” Valiant said. “It's all about the government putting in the necessary effort to prioritize people and the planet over industry profits so that society can move toward a world with less unnecessary plastic.”


Shi En Kim wrote this article for Sierra.


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By Doug Bierend for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On an unseasonably sunny day in March, at a community garden in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and hosed down shoulder-high windrows of compost. Tucked underneath elevated train tracks, Know Waste Lands is the home base of the compost-hauling nonprofit BK Rot.

Its quarter-acre lot houses custom-built tool sheds and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized sifter designed by Gross. As the pair worked, a steady trickle of locals stopped at the entrance to drop off kitchen scraps—not trash, but the makings of “black gold.” Thanks to careful management, even on this balmy day the steaming heaps of rotting vegetables didn’t give off an offensive odor. “I actually like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.

BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of community compost organizations throughout New York City. For decades, with crucial support via the city’s NYC Compost Project, community composters have taken a small but significant part of the roughly 4,000 tons of organic waste generated by New Yorkers every day and converted it into a valuable resource.

Food scraps and landscaping debris, rather than going “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are transformed into material that sustains local gardens, fortifies the city’s heat-mitigating tree population, and remediates contaminated soils. Meanwhile, local residents are educated and empowered to manage their own waste, less pollution goes into transporting and processing food scraps, and community bonds are deepened.

Community composting is a cherished part of many neighborhoods throughout New York. But its future is unclear. In November of last year, under Mayor Eric Adams and his sanitation department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the NYC Compost Project was cut entirely from the city budget. So was a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food-scrap drop-off locations throughout the city, processing millions of pounds of scraps each year.

The cuts decimated community compost operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing down numerous processing locations, and curtailing educational programming. All to save around $7 million, a mere 0.006 percent of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally in front of New York City Hall.

After an immense pressure campaign by activists, members of the city council, and other elected representatives, funding was restored at the end of June. With the vote, the budget for community compost was placed under the New York City council instead of the city’s sanitation department.

“I’m hoping that this will be less up for negotiation each budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of NYC’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There’s so much more that we could do, and it ends up by necessity concentrating our efforts onto preserving what’s in existence, versus imagining a more expansive alternative future.”

Saved From the Trash

The NYC Department of Sanitation began supporting community composting in the early 1990s. It launched the NYC Compost Project, establishing and supporting compost operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, along with satellite facilities at various parks and community gardens. The project also supported the beloved, now discontinued Master Composter program, to which many community composters in New York trace their roots.

As community composting evolved, the city also advanced its own curbside collection programs, which rely on contractors for transport and off-site processing. The city generates its own compost at a massive, recently expanded facility in Staten Island, though community composters note that the inconsistent separation of waste going in results in lower quality compost. In 2016, the city’s anaerobic biogas digester in Newtown Creek began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company, the giant “digester eggs” receive a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.

Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.

Biogas and centralized organic waste collection are the other side of the community compost coin. They represent what Guy Schaffer, author of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, calls “neoliberal waste management.”

“There’s this pattern that happens in a lot of places, where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a board member of BK Rot. In his analysis, such market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequities. “We can see the setting of a price on waste so that people have to pay for it, but that often creates a situation where waste winds up getting recuperated by the most marginalized people.”

BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants, including as part of a crop of new additions to the restored NYC Compost Project, it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.

The upshot of BK Rot’s work is that, along with creating a valuable resource and reducing landfill—they claim to have diverted 1.5 million pounds of organic waste to date—it provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps fill trash bags on the street corner to attract rats, or fill up trucks and landfills that typically operate near marginalized neighborhoods.

“Bushwick is such a fascinating focal point for thinking about waste inequity and intersectional inequities as they relate to environmental justice,” Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot, said. “[BK Rot] really is an answer to say, ‘Well, what if we can dream up a different system? What if we can address all of these problems at once, or at least a great number of them?’ . . . We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”

Grab a Pitchfork

Each instance of community compost takes a slightly different approach, responding to local conditions and needs. They are what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, alternatives to the status quo established in its midst. To address the income inequities of the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot takes a labor-centric view, making its priority one of engaging and employing local youth. Other composters may rely more on volunteer labor and try to leverage the value of the material itself, using markets to foster different relationships between communities and waste.

“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”

Despite the struggles for funding, community composters remain supportive of the city’s various efforts to divert organic waste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among its promises were an expansion of tree canopies, curbside rain gardens, and green jobs, along with a reduction in emissions. All these aims are helped by community compost, which makes the recent struggles over funding and access to land particularly vexing to community composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has ample funds for projects like a quarter-billion-dollar police training facility.

The Struggle Continues

The city’s restoration of the NYC Compost Project in June means that community compost can continue developing, though the form that will take is undetermined. A number of small operations will receive restored funding. “GrowNYC is no longer operating the food-scrap drop-off sites in the green market,” Sacks said. “As a result, there was money that we could reallocate to other groups. Something we as a coalition have wanted to see for a long time is not just the established community composting groups being funded by the city, but new ones that are doing great work also being funded.”

But the cuts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January as result of rezoning. Since 2011, it had operated a state-of-the-art composting facility underneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting over 3 million pounds of Parks Department leaves and wood chips. Just last year, it generated 700 cubic yards of compost that went to 154 different parks, schools, community gardens, and various greening projects. The cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce its staff, and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s Parks Department claimed it needed the site for a parking lot, despite owning an empty lot next door.

All of this underscores the crucial role of land, and of a positive relationship with the city, in enabling community composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite immense public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters, and public testimony at various hearings, press conferences and rallies. “It’s literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect community composting. Other community composting operations have been disrupted at least in part, including the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and all four botanical gardens.

Still, many of the city’s leaders do see the value of community compost. Twenty-nine out of 51 city council members, and four of the five borough presidents, signed letters to the mayor and New York Department of Sanitation supporting this summer’s restoration of funding to community composters. More than 49,000 New Yorkers also signed a petition demanding the same, in an effort organized by the SaveOurCompost coalition.

In parallel with the city’s expanding curbside program, community composters will again have the means to develop experimental infrastructures, while also filling the gaps within the city’s waste operations. With proper support, the diverse network of community compost operations can offer a meaningful alternative and complement to centralized, carbon-intensive systems, which in New York currently capture only about 5 percent of organics in the waste stream. The hope among community composters is that the value of what they do is now clear to the city and the public alike, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as trash but an opportunity to improve life in the city.

“I hope that all this drama results in a broader public understanding of what composting is and what is required as a land-based movement,” said Gil Lopez, an activist for community compost and a member of the Queen Solid Waste Advisory Board Board. “Invisibilization of waste is what I believe the mayor and [the department of sanitation] want to make happen. This allows [and] demands the public not think about it once it leaves their home. Community composting humanizes ‘waste’ and transforms it into a local resource and tool for raising ecological literacy, civic engagement, physical activity, and local responsibility for reducing our own impact in environmental injustice.”


Doug Bierend wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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