Something rotten
I have come to firmly believe that if we’re going to win fight against our own annihilation, we each have to focus on issues that we don’t just care about, but that actually make us happy. We are not going to suffer our way into a better future.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, co-founder of the All We Can Save project, created a Venn diagram for people anxious about the climate fight but unsure what their role should be. It asks us to consider three things:
What brings you joy?
What are you good at?
What is the work that needs doing?
At the center of this diagram — where your gifts, your passions, and your ethical obligations overlap — is what you should do.
I think this is a fantastic exercise not only to help us identify where we can be most effective in this movement, but also to force us to look at a smaller, more manageable section of the problem, rather than considering every existential crisis facing us and getting so overwhelmed that we have to dissociate to five straight episodes of New Girl (or whatever your comfort media of choice may be).
Anyway, all this to say, today I’d like to talk about a climate action that gives me great joy, and which I am thrilled to talk about, and which I hope you will come to be a huge nerd about as well:
Compost is cool
As you probably know, food waste is a big problem. This is a systems issue, of course — much of the wasted food in the U.S. is thrown out before it even reaches the consumer. But individuals also make a lot of trash from discarded food: The EPA estimates that around 24 percent of all municipal solid waste entering landfills comes from the food we throw out.
Inside a landfill, food waste produces methane emissions, which are among the most harmful greenhouse gases in terms of heating the planet. (“Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 [methane] is 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.”) On a compost heap, food scraps will also emit some methane (I think less, but I’ve been unable to find anything verifying that), but the key difference is that those scraps will become soil, which can actually help trap carbon from the atmosphere down the line.
Of course, compost also makes soil, which can help us grow our own food, which is integral to the utopian future I imagine where everyone has thriving little home gardens rather than yards, and nobody goes hungry.
This is the future that liberals want.
That sounds dope. Sign me up.
Good news and bad news: There are tons of resources available to help you compost — through your city or county, through a company, in your yard — but they’re not ubiquitous. I’ve been composting almost all of my food waste for about three years now. One of those years was in Edinburgh, where the city provides food waste collection to residents for free, alongside trash and recycling. All I had to do was take my little biodegradable bag of vegetable scraps down the street, toss it in the bin, and the city took care of the rest.
While I lived in Arlington, compost services weren’t so easy to come by. The county just recently launched a curbside collection program, and it’s only available to single family households. Arlington residents who live in apartments (which is most Arlingtonians) are out of luck. To avoid putting all my food scraps in a landfill, I’d bag them up and take them to a nearby bougie organic market, which contracted with a local private company and which was kind enough to accept leavings from lowly renters like me.
In Denver, where I live now, curbside compost pickup is available for an annual fee ($103), and I’m lucky to live in a house where I’m able to participate in the program. (I also have a yard now, which my landlord decrees that I must mow; all the grass clippings go into compost instead of landfill, which is great news for my blood pressure).
So there are options. I want to walk you through the steps I take to assess those options and to find a compost solution that works for me. But since those steps were honestly kind of easy in my last move, we’ll do this as an exercise with a real-life application: A friend of mine has described herself as “compost-curious,” so let’s set her up with with some rot.
Step 1: Learn what your options are
My friend lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. So first I’ll just google “compost Raleigh” and see what the city or county offers. (If you’re doing this at home, try “food waste” or “food scraps” as well — some municipalities differentiate between compost and food waste.)
In Raleigh, it looks like the only government services are food waste dropoff points and $50 backyard compost bins for Wake County residents. (This is similar to what Arlington had when I lived there, and I’d bet many counties in the U.S. have the same basic options.)
But my friend doesn’t currently have a garden, so she wouldn’t get much use out of backyard compost, and I’m guessing she does not want to drive a big bin of food scraps across town every week. So what else can she do?
Next, I’ll check for places closer to home where she can drop off food scraps — farmers markets, businesses, neighbors with big gardens, etc. Litterless.com is a good resource for this! Unfortunately, the no-cost options I can find on Google are not looking promising, so we’re onto what I would consider a last resort: Find a paid service.
Privately owned compost services seem to be growing in popularity, which makes sense: More and more people want to responsibly discard their food waste, and local governments aren’t moving quickly enough to fill that demand. In Raleigh, residents can sign up for CompostNow, which offers weekly curbside pickup for paying subscribers. It’s convenient, but it’s expensive: $29 per month, which comes out to just under $350 a year. Immediately, that price point excludes a lot of people from being able to participate.
Step 2: Pick the best option for you
The Wake County food waste dropoff is free, but inconvenient. I would give that a try, but to reduce the frequency of trips I would freeze my food scraps. Lots of urban residents use this option if they don’t have space for a caddy, or don’t want to deal with odors. It works great with a paper grocery bag: Simply chuck discarded food in there, close the freezer, and keep it out of sight until you’re ready to take it to the dropoff.
I would also reach out to my community, through Facebook groups or Nextdoor or the bulletin board at a charming coffee shop, to see if there’s anyone who wants my food scraps for their compost pile or farm animals. Maybe my friend lives near a bunch of urban farmers; maybe there is a local composting operation with really bad SEO. It's always a good idea to see what already exists in your community.
If none of the above has worked, I would then reach out to next-door neighbors and ask if they want to go in on a CompostNow subscription. Splitting costs may make the service more accessible (and more appealing) to more people.
Fun tip! Alongside any of these options, I would also save select scraps in my freezer to make stock. This is an excellent hack that another friend of mine introduced to me. You want to save hefty leavings, like onion heels or celery/carrots that went a little limp because you forgot about them. When your scraps bag is full, you just stick all your bits in a pot, fill it with water, and boil it for many hours until you have a delicious stock for all your sipping or soup-making needs.
Step 3: Ask for better options
I am not totally satisfied with the compost solutions I’ve been able to find for my friend, and I bet you aren’t, either. Remember, waste management is a systems issue, not a you-and-me issue. We can carefully recycle all we want, for example, but if our cities send most of that recycling to a landfill anyway, we're shit out of luck.
And to be honest, your household's food scraps being diverted from a landfill are not going to make much of a difference in the long run. But if you help make compost available to your whole city? And several thousand people are now sending their food scraps to a compost pile rather than a landfill? Now that's something.
So talk to people who run those systems. Write to your city council, to your representative in the state assembly, to the people running your local farmers market, and ask them what it would take to bring compost to your community. You might have to get a petition going, or organize some friends to write letters-to-the-editor for your local paper.
It can be frustrating to talk to people with the power to change things and hear that they have no desire to try — that happened when I reached out to the Arlington Farmers Market (more than once) and suggested a food waste dropoff. And it can be scary to knock on doors in your community to collect signatures for a petition. But again, I truly believe that this kind of work is worth the social anxiety and the time we spend on it, if our goals are closely tied to a strong sense of joy.
Think back to that Venn diagram: What brings you joy? What are you good at? What is the work that needs doing? If that ends up being compost for you, then great! I am glad rotting food floats your boat, and I hope this newsletter has given you some helpful ideas.
And if it’s something else, then maybe you’ll see me write about it in another issue.
Note: In this issue, I’ve talked only about the kind of compost that someone picks up for you, which is common in urban areas. I know that many people make their own compost on their own properties, but I simply don’t know anything about that! So I’ve reached out to some friends who do have experience with DIY compost, and hopefully I’ll be able to share their insights with you in a future letter.
As another note, please help me: Is it farmers market? Farmers' market? Farmer's market (for the One True Farmer)??? Nothing looks right.