According to the EPA, every year food accounts for 20% of what Americans throw away.
This is a huge issue because food and other organic materials like paper towels, in landfills
cause 15% of methane gas emissions in the U.S. and are
Your leftover food doesn’t have to end up at a landfill.
Instead, you can give it a second life as compost a.k.a.
I wanted to find out how this works, so I decided to follow my own food scraps.
For about a month I’ve been collecting my old scraps and keeping them in my freezer
so they don’t smell.
These are the old scraps that I’ve been keeping in my freezer.
You can see, egg shells, tea bags, tops of peppers, all these things are compostable.
And today I’m going to drop them off and compost them.
If you don’t live in a city you can compost in your backyard, by getting a big composting container.
Search online to see what works best for you.
If you’re in a city, you can keep your scraps in your freezer or get a small container to
keep inside your house or apartment.
Check if you’re covered by a curbside collection program or a food scraps drop-off program.
Today, I’m taking my waste to a food-scraps drop-off site in Union Square.
New York’s Department of Sanitation and partner groups run 60 food-scrap drop-off sites
covering 3.9 million New York residents.
Most locations are open 1-3 days per week.
After adding my food to the collection barrels, I’m ready to follow my scraps to the compost
processing site.
These barrels are full we’re gonna cap them up, and we're gonna put them in the truck
and we'll head to the site.
The NYC Compost Project and the Lower East Side Ecology center have been turning
New Yorkers’ food scraps into compost on a one acre plot in lower Manhattan for over 20 years.
We accept vegetarian food waste, fruits vegetables, egg shells, coffee grounds, tea bags.
We do not accept any oily, prepared foods, meats, cheeses, none of that stuff.
And why is that?
Because the composting process that we use here is not to the scale that it can break
down the pathogens that are present in the meats and prepared foods.
Each week, they handle around 8 tons of food scraps.
And that is just a tiny fraction of the over 14,000 tons of food New York residents
throw in the trash every week.
After food scraps arrive at the site, they are transported into bins and combined with sawdust.
Composting requires two types of materials, 'browns' like the sawdust are high in carbon.
'Greens' like my food scraps are high in nitrogen.
Compost piles need a proper mix of both to properly break down.
Basically composting you're creating this ecosystem for the bacteria and fungi to do
the work that they're built to do.
And that's the decomposition process.
The bins protect the material from pests, as liquid drains off, and the decomposition
process is kick-started.
Then after two weeks, the decomposing food is moved to big, long piles called windrows.
The windrows long shape allows oxygen to better reach the decomposing material and creates
ideal conditions for the scraps to breakdown.
For the next 2-3 months, the piles are turned over every week so that oxygen can reach the
decomposing soil.
The final phase, the compost sits for 1 to 2 months in a process called ‘curing’.
This period allows the pile to cool down, and to become even more rich with fungi, bacteria,
and nutrients that plants love.
After curing, the compost is sent through a screen so that only small, fine pieces are left.
Anything that’s not compostable will remain as garbage at the end of the process.
I hate these they're our fruit stickers.
They’re everywhere in our compost process.
So if your composting take off your fruit stickers before you put it in a compost bin.
Based on the outside temperature, the full composting process takes about 4-6 months.
The NYC Compost Project gives away or sells the final compost back to residents or to the city.
We take our finished compost and we add it to tree beds across New York City to help
rebuild the health of trees. One of our strong missions is to rebuild New York City soil
and so by collecting New Yorkers food scraps we're able to produce compost to rebuild the
soil in the city.
The EPA estimates about 5% of U.S. Food gets composted.
Despite that current low rate, composting programs are on the rise across the U.S.
It’s estimated 6.7 million U.S. households have access to a compost drop-off program
like the one I used in New York City.
And Curbside collection programs have risen by 87% since 2014.
That same year, New York City launched the nation’s largest compost curbside pick-up program.
So far around 3.3 million New York residents are covered by the curbside program.
Hopefully, my neighborhood will be covered soon.
Keeping food out of landfills is an important part of the fight against climate change.
When food scraps go to landfill they don’t get any oxygen, and so they don't properly breakdown.
Instead they release methane
By composting we can decreasing the amount of greenhouses gases released into the atmosphere and
Not only that, sending food waste to the dump is costly and it's inefficient.
Waste is New York City's biggest export.
So we send a lot of organic matter heavy wet organic matter to other states, the whole
region accepts our trash as an import so that they can bury it in their own landfills.
It's not really the greatest system.
We're burying a resource on the ground and making it impossible to use it again, creating
greenhouse gases and not to mention the crazy amount of resources that are required to transport
all of that material.
And now I’m going to show you how to use this city made compost on your house plants.
What you do is take a little pinch of it, a little handful, and you give it to your plant.
Put it on the top of the soil and it acts as a natural fertilizer basically like a food for your plant.
It's full of nutrients and they just love it.
And they don't even need that much, just a little bit on the top.
And what's so cool is it's all natural, no chemicals involved.
And it used to be your food. Now it's feeding your plants.
I mean, come on.
This was One Small Step. I'm Lucy Biggers.
See you guys next time. Bye!
Do you compost at home and have any tips or tricks?
Let us know in the comments and we'll see you guys next time.