How to Start a Community Compost Program (Based on Our Real NYC Experience)
Every year, Americans send over 30 million tons of food waste to landfills. There, it decomposes without oxygen and releases methane, a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than CO2. According to the EPA landfilled food waste in the U.S. causes emissions equivalent to more than 50 million cars.
But food doesn’t have to be waste. In fact, it shouldn’t be waste.
Composting turns it into nutrient-rich soil with nothing but time and microorganisms. It’s low-tech, low-cost, and one of the most powerful climate actions a person, or a neighborhood, can take.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through how we started a community compost program in our local New York City community garden and how you can start one in your neighborhood, too.
Step 1: Find The Right Place to Compost
Start by identifying a space. Community gardens are perfect because they often have:
- Dedicated outdoor space
- A network of volunteers, and a great place to meet those interested in composting
- Shared goals around sustainability
If you don’t have a community garden nearby, try:
- Schools with garden programs
- Churches or mosques with outdoor space
- Apartment buildings with green roofs or backyards
- Local farms or farmers’ markets
You don’t need to own a backyard or private land. The idea is to have access to a shared space. . You just need access and a few like-minded people.
New York has hundreds of community gardens. I’ve written about some of the history and power of these places in this article on the benefits of community gardens.
Other Ideas For Where You Can Compost
If you live in a city, you may be surprised how close you are to a community garden. If not, here are a few other options. For some of these, you may have to do more to organize your neighbors.
Local Farms or Farmers’ Markets
Farms often buy soil for their crops. I’m sure they’d love high-quality soil for free.
Reach out to farms in your area to see if they have a compost program or are open to starting one.
In cities, farmers’ markets often have compost drop-offs.
From there, the farmers will take care of it. In this situation, you won’t have to do the composting. You may prefer this or not. Personally, I like being a part of the process, but most people would rather just drop off their scraps and move on.
Schools
Some schools have garden programs or environmental clubs that would welcome food scraps for composting. This doubles as an educational opportunity for students to learn about sustainability and composting.
Churches or Other Community Organizations
Churches and other community organizations often have unused outdoor space that could be perfect for a compost bin. Plus, these institutions may have a network of volunteers and neighbors.
Apartment Complexes or Housing Associations
If you live in a multifamily building, pitch the idea to your housing association or management.
“Green roofs” are a sexy urban climate solution these days, as I talk about in my article on examples of green infrastructure. The roof is a great place for a compost bin. it gets lots of sunlight and provides a convenient drop-off location for everyone in the building.
Step 2: Find The Right Compost Bin
Now that you have the place where you’re going to compost, the next step is to procure a bin.
There are a million and one ways to set up a compost pile. It can even just be a pile.
In more dense spaces like cities, you’ll want a bin to keep out smells and critters. For example in New York, we made a point to “rat-proof” our bin.
Before you buy a bin, see if your city will give you one.
The two other neighbors who started our program with me had already reached out to a community compost program run by the Bronx Botanical Garden.
Part of their work is to provide resources to gardens like us to do our own composting.
Within a week, Pam Alvarez from BBG arrived with a heavy-duty Jewel compost bin. The four of us assembled it together in a few minutes. She also gave us 10 kitchen bins to use and give away in our community. Thank you Pam and the Bronx Botanical Garden!
Local governments often have resources for composting.
After all, it’s in their interest to keep food waste out of landfills, which costs society a lot to process and send out.
Research local giveaways for community composting. You could end up with a big bin and kitchen bins for neighbors.
Step 3: Start Small
We had our nearby garden, a big bin, and kitchen bins to use in our homes.
Now it was time to start composting. I was tempted to shout from the garden hill to everyone about it. But Pam encouraged us to start small, and we did.
We started with just three of us bringing our food scraps to the garden each week. This allowed us to work out the kinks.
We could make sure that our rat-proofing would hold up. It was less compost overall to chop up and turn.
Then we added a few trusted neighbors. Our coalition built up to five and then ten. At this point, several of us have learned more of the art of processing the compost too.
Extra Credit: Weigh Your Food Scraps
Starting small allowed us to seek an ideal from the bottom up. We went as far as to weigh all of our compost so we could quantify our impact.
(This is easier than it sounds. We have a hand luggage scale, and we know the bins we use weigh 1.1 pounds. The scale lives in the garden so we can all use it. We have a notepad to write down our weights. Within a few months, we hit 100 lbs of compost.)
We solidified a process that worked. This way, when we encouraged more neighbors later, we knew what to expect.
Step 4: Education, Enthusiasm, and Adoption
My composting motto involves these two words: education and enthusiasm.
Composting poses a few challenges, the biggest of which is the resistance to changing our routines. This is called the status quo bias. Coined by researchers in 1988, status quo bias put to words something most of us feel intuitively: people don’t like change. Whether we’re happy with our lives or not, there’s a comfort to it. Creating a new habit like composting requires overcoming status quo bias. It’s on us to educate on how to compost and overcome the challenges (like potential flies).
I start with the question: How I can lead and encourage the whole neighborhood to compost? It’s an ideal we won’t hit, but the question has led to lots of ideas.
Here are a few simple strategies I’ve implemented to help grow the community compost program.
- I turn the compost when people are at the garden so people see the act of composting. There’s a great study that shared how the biggest predictor of whether someone got solar panels was whether or not their neighbor had solar panels. We follow other people’s examples. If we see our neighbor’s composting, we’re more likely to. By dropping off my compost at a time when others will be there, I expose people to the act of composting. Curious neighbors then ask me about it.
- When I get asked, I talk about it. There’s a fine line between not shutting up which pushes people away, and providing information for them to learn more. If people ask me about composting, I talk. I’ve found myself at house parties promising to give away a bin to somebody. This has spread to more opportunities. The leaders of my building’s tenants’ association have invited me to give a presentation on composting.
- Stay patient Re: the status quo bias, people change slowly. In marketing, there’s a trope that it takes someone about ten “touch points” before they buy. I think the same applies here. Somebody likely needs to hear about composting a dozen times before they do it. They probably need to see a neighbor or two do it.
Over time, just doing my thing in the garden, we’ve gotten our composting crew up to seven people. We have diverted over 200 lbs of food waste from the landfills. In the spring, we’ll have fresh soil.
Step 5: Branch Out and Scale
This is the step I’m working on right now. (And I’ll update it once I have more success.) The first step to to this requires increasing your capacity.
Ideas to Increase Your Compost Capacity
Community composting the way we do it at the garden has an obvious limit: it is just one bin. This one bin is within a five-minute walk of thousands of people. We can not handle the entire neighborhood’s food waste. It’d be full tomorrow. That’s a problem I’d love to have, but it’s a problem.
I’ve seen community gardens that simply add more bins, like the Friends of Brook Park Garden, which has a row of five bins the way gyms have a row of treadmills.
Maria Sola, where I compost, isn’t as big as Brook Park, so we’re realistically capped at the one big bin. Even a second one would be the exponential growth in capacity I’d be looking for.
With seven regular composters, I think our bin could double what we give it. But if we want to expand beyond those who already pop in the garden, we’ll need more capacity.
That’s where community composting efforts can gain support from other groups or local government compost programs.
For example, in New York City, Big Reuse, a wider-scale community compost program has offered to come pick up our excess compost if we can produce at least 75 pounds a month. (I’ve yet to take them up on it, but I hope to one day.) This would make high-quality soil they’d give back to us.
New York City also has curbside composting available. In this case, we’d turn our community composting towards compost advocacy in general. I’m not keen on this because of the drawbacks. First, it still requires trucks and industrial facilities. Second, I’ve discussed the drawbacks of their form of composting, called anaerobic digestion.
However, it’s much better than the landfill.
My favorite solution to this problem would be to multiply the amount of community gardens. Cities need more gardens and green space. We need it for our air quality, excessive heat caused by concrete, food sovereignty, and mental health. It also means more places to compost. Ideally, everyone lives a few blocks from a community garden. We need more gardens.
Encouraging Adoption: Find Community Groups
I started in my building where we have a tenant’s association. I’m working with our elected leaders to talk about composting at a tenant’s association meeting. Our building has over 100 people, so the potential to expand the compost efforts for out due my efforts alone. Likely, a handful come away excited to compost, and dozens more have more awareness of it.
Think Exponentially
Rather than just taking the equivalent of a few cars off the road while producing soil for our garden, I can take hundreds of cars off the road if I think about scale.
If more of my neighbors compost, does that create a shift where composting becomes the norm for this area? How could that expand to the whole city? And if something’s the norm in New York City, we know the world often takes it and runs with it. What if I wrote an article about how to start a community compost program, to encourage others in more communities (wink wink)?
I know it all starts with my own scraps, but I refuse to tie down what my thoughts and actions are capable of. Individual actions can and do make a difference.
With your community composting program, don’t be afraid to think big.
It Takes a Whole Team: It’s Called “Community” Composting After All
From start to finish, if you want to start a community compost program, I’ve learned you’re better off teaming up. Organize. Create coalitions.
No, this isn’t the sexiest form of political and environmental activism, but it’s powerful.
I want to thank my neighbors who started this first and foremost, Francine and Grant. They were indispensable in getting the ball rolling. I want to think Pam from the Bronx Green-Up program run by the Bronx Botanical Garden.
Thanks to those who drop off their food scraps, Shierlyn, Floriana, Jazzmarie, Alexa, and Wil.
Let’s keep it going!
More on Composting
I’ve been at this compost advocacy for a bit now.
10 Comments