Update: NYC Mayor Adams has recently announced citywide budget cuts and as part of the Department of Sanitation's 5% cuts, they have proposed cutting 100% of funding for community composting projects and compost outreach at the 10 partner organisations. These cuts will have a devastating effect on community composting in NYC which collectively:
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What a perfect introduction to community composting in New York City – a Compost Bike Tour organised by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Transportation Alternatives and The Brotherhood Sister Sol to celebrate Earth Day! Riding as a group of about 20 compost enthusiasts through the streets of New York we explored some amazing initiatives which combine building a sense of place, community and agency while beautifying the neighbourhood, growing food, improving the soil and tackling social and environmental issues in real and practical ways.
The tour started on the west side of Central Park and took us first to the West Side Community Garden, with their stunning (multiple award-winning) show of tulips and their volunteer-run community compost program which processes scraps from the community gardeners and local residents. To amass the carbon material they hand chop waste wood and prunings into small pieces and shred cardboard and paper and collect leaves. As they are located in one of the areas of NYC that has a ‘brown bin’ (kerb side food waste collection) this provides a “safety valve” for the volunteers if they cannot handle the amount of material being dropped off by local residents. The City also drops off the occasional load of finished compost for their use in the garden.
The next stop was Pleasant Village Community Garden, located in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in East Harlem. It has a food scrap collection point located outside the garden gates which the public can access 24/7. Again, they only compost the amount of material they can handle by removing food waste from the collection bins and the rest is hauled away by the LES Ecology Center crew for composting. This example of a partnership between small organisations and local volunteers is an effective way of supporting local communities to form connections with each other, get outside in the fresh air, exercise, manage their own waste and improve local soils.
Harlem Grown’s 134th Street Farm was holding an Earth Day festival and was humming with locals enjoying the sunshine, the flowers and each other’s company. This is one of 11 sites managed by Harlem Grown, started by Tony Hillary whose vision is to combine youth development with urban farming, and has blossomed into a thriving not-for-profit organisation. The organisation has mentored and trained many youths over the years, inspiring them to lead healthy and ambitious lives and many of them have grown up into adults who now train and mentor other kids. They use a simple hot composting system of wire mesh held together by bungee cords – easy to adjust its size and also easy to assemble and disassemble.
The final stop was at the Frank White Memorial Garden. This garden is looked after by staff and volunteers at the neighbouring headquarters of The Brotherhood Sister Sol and operates as an environmental learning centre, particularly to engage local youth of colour, and includes vegetable and fruit cultivation, aquaponics and a social gathering place. Environmental Program Coordinator, Nando Rodriguez, showed us his ingenious ‘hot box’ composting system which creates a passive aeration system with the compost bins so that compost can be produced without the need for turning. This makes it easier for the volunteers to manage without the back-breaking task of forking over the compost and also allows the microbes and fungi to develop undisturbed. Nando designed this system himself as a high school student and now encourages the youth he works with to experiment with different composting techniques. Nando has a vision to build on the work already happening at many of the community compost sites to create jobs and skills for marginalised youth to process food and yard waste more intensively rather than sending it to commercial composters. His plan for 1,000 local food waste processing sites for each borough of NYC is ambitious, yet if the City of New York would fund such a project it would go a long way to providing employment, opportunity, nutrition and community for many New Yorkers.
This beautiful day spent in just a small part of New York in Spring really illustrated how community composting is so much more than simply reducing waste to landfill. Education, community building, local employment and capacity building are just some of the outcomes of these programs. Composting is often considered a “gateway behaviour” which leads to other sustainable behaviours such as food waste reduction, care of the natural environment, action on climate change and so on. In addition, reclaiming (often derelict) urban space to create something beautiful for the neighbourhood, grow food, work together with neighbours and partake in meaningful physical activity in the outdoors can help to create a real sense of “place” – of being a contributing and useful part of the local environment, connecting with the soil, the plants and the human and non-human animals that call it home.
Visiting New York City was part of my research for a Churchill Fellowship exploring education methods and partnership models to support community composting. For more details visit my Churchill Fellows Portal where the full report can also be downloaded.