In a landfill, food and organic materials are dumped into the landfill, with more waste continually piled on top, creating compacted, oxygen-deprived areas where bacteria flourishes to break down the organic matter. The decomposition process generates methane, a greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, “municipal solid waste landfills are the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the US.” 

Put another way: The majority of things we casually toss into the trash can be composted, with big benefits for the planet. 

Composting is a pretty basic concept, although there are several ways to go about it. Essentially, composting speeds up the decomposition process by adding organic matter to an oxygen-rich environment and then letting the bugs and fungi that break down matter do their thing. There are small, backyard-scale composting setups with worms (known as vermicomposting), large, industrial-sized bins that rotate the matter consistently to ensure the right airflow and all sizes in between. Whatever method you use, eventually, the end result is compost—a nutrient-rich soil that can be used as a soil amendment. 

Roughly 15 million American households have access to a food-waste compost program, with about 400 programs spread across 25 states. That’s about 12 percent of households across the country. If composting is a big win for cities—taking waste out of landfills, producing fertilizer and engaging citizens in the recycling process—why doesn’t everyone do it? Well, like most public works initiatives, it’s not that simple. 

To learn more about which municipalities offer composting across the US and Canada—and to add your city to our list—check out our compost map here. 

The curbside pickup truck from Washington’s pilot program. Photography submitted by the City of Washington, DC.

‘One size doesn’t fit all’

So, what does it take to implement a new composting program? In 2017, Washington, DC’s Department of Public Works put together a survey to assess the feasibility of a compost program for local residents. There are a lot of considerations; in this case, it found that the main obstacle was processing capacity. For a city of about 700,000 people, where does all of that waste actually go? 

The city just did not have the space to divert waste from the landfill at that time. However, in the intervening years, industrial composting programs in DC-adjacent Prince George’s County have increased, and other cities such as Boston have started composting—a development that Rachel Manning, a program analyst within Washington’s Department of Public Works, and her team have watched with interest. Finally, in August of 2023, seven years after its initial study, Washington launched its pilot compost program. 

The city now has about 10,000 households participating in the pilot program, with regular curbside pickup of compost, along with trash and recycling. Manning says the team sends out regular surveys to participants to see how things are going throughout the program, which is scheduled to last for a year. “Something that’s interesting to us is understanding that one size doesn’t fit all,” Manning says of the issues that have popped up from resident responses. “Maybe not everyone fills up a five-gallon bin, maybe some people want more than five gallons…so there’s a little bit of thinking about what are the right sizes of these containers? What type of [truck] fleets do we need to serve all these homes? Right now, it’s not the same size as our trash packer trucks, because we’re not servicing as many people. But also, food has a lot of moisture in it, so you need a particular vehicle for that. Also, [the Department of Public Works] has a goal to electrify all of their fleet. So, we need to think about electric vehicles, and what the capacity is there.” 

So far, Manning says the program has been a success. It has about a 70-percent adoption rate among participants and has diverted more than 400 tons of waste from the landfill. The city also brings the compost back to residents (if they ask for it) to use in their gardens, so there’s even more incentive for residents to compost. This summer, when the program is scheduled to come to an end, Manning and the team will evaluate moving forward with composting on an even larger scale. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘We’re willing to pivot’

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” says Melissa Kozakiewicz, assistant city engineer in Kansas City, Missouri. “I always start with pilots, and using the word ‘pilot,’ I can pivot and be flexible when things are working and when they’re not….but we aren’t going to take it away.” 

Kozakiewicz, who has previously built up a compost program in Jersey City, New Jersey, is now spearheading the compost pilot program in Kansas City. She’s hoping to replicate some of her previous successes, particularly in how she makes the program available to residents. “You have to be really deliberate and careful with how you introduce [a compost program]. You don’t want anybody to feel like you’re jamming something down their throat, because then they’re out,” says Kozakiewicz. Instead, she works at a pace with which the community is comfortable and integrates demonstrations at big public events, such as a Fourth of July parade. That way, residents get comfortable with composting as part of their public life and might be more inclined to continue doing it at home. 

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

Kansas City also doesn’t currently offer a curbside pickup of compost. Instead, its model is a drop-off program. The city has five current drop-off locations, with 10 more to come around the city this year. Kozakiewicz says that helps prevent contamination of waste, because compost bins aren’t lying around next to trash or recycling containers. If residents make a trip to a special, designated location, it helps to reinforce what that location is for. It also helps ward against another common concern for cities: vermin and pests. “We have one of our drop-off spots inside of City Hall’s garage. It’s a publicly accessible space that anybody can use,” says Kozakiewicz, and the regular foot traffic allows for a lot of feedback if something’s amiss. “If you call me and say ‘Hey, I was at the City Hall garage, and it looks terrible,’ I can call somebody right this minute to go check it out.” (Data on adoption rates for composting are harder to find, but studies suggest that in the case of recycling programs, residents are more likely to participate when the programs offer curbside pickup.)

Both Kansas City and Washington, DC, are experimenting with programs at the municipal level and with just a portion of their residents so far. But can these programs scale up? Recent state-wide legislation is trying to answer that question. 

In Vermont, a state-wide food scrap ban went into effect in 2020. Residents separate their food scraps and either compost them in their own homes, drop them off at a designated station or sign up for curb-side pick-up. The law also prioritizes reducing food waste upstream, ensuring more food goes to food banks or is turned into animal feed. At the time of implementation, Josh Kelly, materials management section chief at the state’s department of environmental conservation, told Vermont Public that state legislators had been working on reducing waste since 2012. “We have had a state goal to have 50 percent of the waste that we produce separated and recycled, reused or composted. And that goal has never been met in all the years that it’s been in place.” In the year following the ban’s implementation, sales of backyard composters in Vermont more than doubled, and a survey last year found that 61 percent of Vermont residents felt a “moral obligation” to keep food out of landfills (although the state is still not meeting that 50-percent goal).

California is hoping to see some of that success, after it implemented state-wide legislation in January of 2022. The goal of the law, says Lance Klug, with CalRecycle’s office of public affairs, is to reduce the amount of organic waste in landfills by 75 percent and reroute 20 percent of fresh, unsold food to Californians in need, both by 2025. The law requires all cities and counties in the state to implement programs to collect organic waste and increase food recovery from sites such as grocery stores. So far, says Klug, the program is chugging along, although it’s run into issues ranging from COVID-related supply chain slowdowns to a slower adoption rate than hoped for. Roughly 75 percent of jurisdictions in California now have a composting program in place, and in 2022, about 200,000 tons of unsold food was recovered and redistributed to folks who needed it. However, as reported by the Associated Press, it’s unlikely the state will meet its 2025 goals. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘Education can’t be understated’

Not everyone has a state or even a city supporting them in the effort to compost. But for some folks, that doesn’t matter—they just do it anyway. 

For Bob Ferretti, that was no small feat. He’s the associate director of administrative services at Yale University, which at any given time has about 25,000 students, staff and faculty on the campus. That’s a lot of waste. 

About 15 years ago, Ferretti and his team began the process of figuring out how to facilitate a composting program on campus—made more difficult by the fact that, at the time, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, did not have a program in place municipally. (Currently, there’s still no residential program for would-be composters in New Haven. However, the city does mandate that if you are a large business, produce enough compost and are located within 20 miles of a compost facility, then you are required to use it.) “There’s really no composting infrastructure within the state at an industrial scale,” says Ferretti. “There were small organic operations within local farms and things like that, but nothing that could handle the volume we were producing.” 

[RELATED: He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way.]

At first, Ferretti recalls, Yale had to hire trucks to cart the compost daily from campus to a facility on the New York State border, which was a few hours round-trip. It wasn’t the best environmental solution, Ferretti says, for an effort aiming to curb greenhouse emissions. “We did meet with the city to try and come up with something even more local,” says Ferretti. “I don’t think there was a ton of real estate available for it.” Plus, says Ferretti, there were questions about who would own that kind of project. Would it be a municipally run program that only serves Yale? A private program for the university but that utilizes local government? Ultimately, Ferretti and his team found an industrial composter within the state, only about 30 minutes from campus, and partnered with it. 

There were some initial wins for the Yale project. As students who lived on campus mostly lived in residence halls and ate at large dining facilities, much of the waste was already centralized, making it less difficult to collect than in a spread-out city. But this was more than a decade ago, and Ferretti says they had needed to do a lot of education to get everyone on board. “We did a lot of waste stream audits for visual awareness, you know, where we dumped out bags of trash across campus and had people in Tyvek suits sorting through and showing people what’s in our waste stream so that they became aware of how much could be diverted,” says Ferretti. “We would have the students actively weigh plates after every meal, to see how much food was scraped into this bucket, so that they know how much was being composted.” There were still challenges with cross contamination, as silverware, latex gloves or other generic trash was easily dropped into the wrong container. “Education can’t be understated,” says Ferretti. 

There’s a lot to consider when starting up a new compost program. Even if your municipality offers curbside trash and recycling collection, adding compost to the mix isn’t as simple as buying a few more trucks and hiring some new workers. But with each new program that gets introduced, there are more examples of how to make composting work for cities, towns and even private entities of any size. 

In Kansas City, Kozakiewicz says the important thing to remember is not to wait for things to be perfect—you’ll be waiting a long time. “You’ve got to kind of push a little, using the resources that you have,” she says. “Nobody’s interested here in building a new landfill.” 

The post Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Along the way, we found some interesting data: Roughly 83 percent of folks in Vancouver compost. New York City diverts more than eight million pounds of organic waste from landfills every year. Many cities, including Boston, San Jose, and San Antonio, provide compost back to residents for use in home gardens. Most importantly, in each of these cities, there is some sort of compost program accessible to residents.

If your city doesn't offer a compost program, you may be able to change that. Here are a few ways to get started:

• Look for community compost groups. Many organizations, including community gardens or environmental clubs, hold seminars or introductory panels on how to start composting. Get up to speed on what’s offered in your area; in addition to learning the composting basics, you might be able to join a network that’s already established. You can also search for a local composter here, or use this EPA map to find opportunities to divert excess food near you. 
• Make your voice heard. If your city does not offer a compost program, let the waste management department know you want one! One of the biggest hurdles to starting a pilot program is ensuring that there are enough residents interested in composting in the first place. Make it clear that you want to participate in a program, which makes it much easier for city officials to greenlight one. There are also resources to help municipalities as they get started, including this template from the US Composting Council which helps cities look at land use ordinances and classifications. 

• Look at the zoning bylaws. Many municipal bylaws were written decades ago, and they may not be up to date with the best waste management strategies for cities. But when city officials see that there is interest from the public, they have more reason to look at updating those bylaws, or looking at new ways of waste diversion. 

For more on how to get your city to start composting, read our Q&A with a composter here.

Want to add your city to our map? Fill out the form below, and let us know what composting is like where you live.

The post Map: Who Composts? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Ben Stanger has composted his whole life, starting with a backyard bin when he was a child. But when he wanted to expand his composting efforts and start a business, he had a hard time finding a municipality that would let him. 

Eventually, he was able to work with officials in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to update their bylaws so Stanger could start composting. Now, two years later, his business Green Box has grown by 28 times, and he’s looking to see how much further he can go. 

Stanger spoke with Modern Farmer about what it takes to start composting at this scale and how to advocate to rework restrictive legislation. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

Modern Farmer: First things first: Ben, how did this interest in composting start for you?

Ben Stanger: Growing up, my family was always very involved in growing food, gardening, canning stuff, whatever. As part of that, we composted as a way of doing natural waste diversion and creating quality soil to go back into the garden. It was something I was very used to and, as a young child, always took for granted. I realized, as I was older, “Oh, everybody doesn’t do this. Why don’t they all do this?” 

I moved to Chicago after college and, in 2017, I was working at a sustainable seafood company at a farmers market. And I saw a compost collection van driving around the neighborhood. And I just realized, “oh, wow, people are doing this, this is a real thing.” I contacted them, and I started working for them. I worked there for about two years. And in those two years, during the beginning of the pandemic, we grew really quickly. And I realized, “OK, this is a real way to kind of solve this issue.”

MF: So, that’s when you decided to iterate on the Chicago business, but in your hometown of Madison, Wisconsin?

BS: Yeah. In Chicago, [the business] didn’t actually compost ourselves. We were collecting organic waste, and then somebody else collected it from us. And that worked for the situation, but I kind of felt like it didn’t give us enough oversight over what we were doing. 

After moving back to Madison, I realized there wasn’t really any infrastructure to compost food scraps, even if I wanted to outsource it and just be a collector, like in Chicago. 

MF: On the surface, it seems like a compost program would be easy to implement if a city already has a trash or recycling pick-up. When you were searching for a place to start your business, what were the issues you came up against?

BS: The big thing is a lack of infrastructure; there’s nowhere to compost that amount of food waste. Food waste is hard to compost compared to other organic waste, like yard waste. It’s really nitrogen rich, it’s really putrescible. It’s really wet and often contaminated. And so you have to be able to handle all those things. And so it kind of requires a different approach than yard waste composting, which is pretty easy to manage. And so just making the investments, there are things that communities haven’t done. 

MF: In terms of infrastructure, many cities have landfills. What do you need for a large-scale composting program?

BS: Well, there’s no one right way to do this, everything is kind of iterative.

We opted for a rotating drum composter. Our goal was to just get our foot in the door in whatever municipality we ended up working in. And to do that, we wanted to make sure our process was as clean and efficient as possible so that we would allay any fears about possible rodents or pests or bad smells. So, we spent a lot of money to make sure that we didn’t run into any perception issues. Our main goal is to kind of make the perception of composting seem cool and achievable. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: In a place like Wisconsin, roughly a third of household waste is food waste. With that much organic waste, compost seems like an issue many jurisdictions would want to tackle. How many places did you go to before you found a home for Green Box?

BS: I was in my parents’ basement for about six months, just shopping around municipalities. Pretty much every place I emailed either didn’t have a commercial composting zoning classification, or if they did, they expressly prohibited food scrap composting. And pretty much every place, all their zoning codes were written in the ‘80s, when they were more concerned about pests for local landowners and homeowners. That was a big legislative hurdle. 

The other hurdle was real estate. The market is really hot right now, there are a lot of people moving here. And a lot of it is dedicated towards either residential or multi-use development, so it’s hard to find space for this sort of operation.

Finally, just being a new business owner in a business that’s not well established, it’s hard convincing people that what you are doing is worthwhile, if people hadn’t even heard of composting.

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

MF: So, you had to contend with a bunch of bylaws written 40 or more years ago. 

BS: Yeah. And we did find a home in Sun Prairie. That’s a combination of timing, finding a good location and warehouse and the city being willing to work with us. What ended up happening was there was a zoning code to allow for commercial composting operations. Sun Prairie was very helpful and willing to work with us to update one of the classifications to compost food scraps.

MF: So, now, your coverage area extends outside of Sun Prairie, and you actually have customers throughout Madison as well. 

BS: We started off smaller and tried to be dense. We started just about two years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 2022. 

At first, we had 25 members that were composting 200 pounds a week. And because of that we had to be fairly tight, just to make sure that we weren’t losing money on pickups. But now that we have about 700 residential members, composting about seven tons a week, we can afford to go a little bit further afield. In fact, we’re planning a few expansions to even further surrounding smaller municipalities in this coming year. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: Is composting easier with more people, with larger pickups? Can you do things that backyard composters can’t? 

BS: So, in order to kill pathogens like E. coli and salmonella in compost, you need to achieve a temperature of 131 degrees [Fahrenheit] for a sustained 72 hours. That’s the baseline. Most backyard composting piles don’t hit that, so you don’t want to compost meat, bones or dairy in those smaller compost piles because of the risk of bacteria spreading. 

But for us, we can achieve those temperatures on an industrial scale, no problem. And because we are rotating and composting in a vessel indoors, we have no issues with pests. 

We need to make this easy for the average consumer to adopt. We’re happy to take diehard conservationists and environmentalists, that’s great. But we figured they were probably already composting. We need to try and cater to people who don’t have the time or the interest or just the knowledge. So, [we’re] trying to get as broad a base as possible.

[RELATED: Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It?]

MF: That’s an interesting goal, to go after the customers who might not be your immediate target audience. I know that, for many folks, efforts like composting can seem a little futile in the face of the massive changes that need to happen to help our planet. 

BS: Definitely. I’ll say it probably doesn’t matter that much if one individual composts. But if that one individual composting gets 10 more people to compost, eventually those 10 get 10 more, and then we get to the point where now there’s buy-in and capital investment in the infrastructure, so we can start working with whole municipalities…That’s a real impact. Part of this is changing perceptions, changing goals, changing understandings about how waste works. That’s the really powerful part.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

For more on what is takes for cities to start a compost program, check out our feature on municipal compost programs here. 

Ready to compost where you live? Here are some expert tips to get started. 

• Look for community compost groups. Many organizations, including community gardens or environmental clubs, hold seminars or introductory panels on how to start composting. Get up to speed on what’s offered in your area; in addition to learning the composting basics, you might be able to join a network that’s already established. You can also search for a local composter here, or use this EPA map to find opportunities to divert excess food near you. 

• Check in with your city’s waste management team. Does your city offer composting? If they do, is it easily accessible? Most city’s waste management departments are easily found on the city website. From there, they should lay out exactly what you can and can’t compost, your individual pickup times, or the drop-off locations nearest you. 

• Make your voice heard. If your city does not offer a compost program, let the waste management department know you want one! One of the biggest hurdles to starting a pilot program is ensuring that there are enough residents interested in composting in the first place. Make it clear that you want to participate in a program, which makes it much easier for city officials to greenlight one. There are also resources to help municipalities as they get started, including this template from the US Composting Council which helps cities look at land use ordinances and classifications. 
• Look at the zoning bylaws. As Ben found out, some municipal bylaws were written decades ago, and they may not be up to date with the best waste management strategies for cities. But when city officials see that there is interest from the public, they have more reason to look at updating those bylaws, or looking at new ways of waste diversion.

***

The post He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

On this particular afternoon, Cameron Rentsch is pedaling an e-bike through Missoula’s University District. Hitched to the back of the bike is a narrow trailer, holding three tall receptacles for collecting food scraps. They won’t all get filled today as this route is quick—only eight stops. Rentsch follows a map marked with the addresses and, at each house, picks up a small white bucket filled with organic waste—apple cores, coffee grounds, wilted roses—and dumps the bucket into one of the receptacles on the back of the trailer. 

Rentsch does this work for Soil Cycle, a compost-based nonprofit. Monday through Friday, Soil Cycle sends its cyclists out on the road, picking up food scraps from houses and businesses and taking them back to its facility. Not only do Soil Cycle’s staff pick up the food scraps, but a few times a year, its customers can pick up the end result: compost for their home gardens. What’s more, they do it all on bicycles, keeping the transportation sustainable. In 2023, Soil Cycle diverted more than 49,680 pounds of food scraps from the landfill. It’s a circular, closed-loop system. 

Meeting a need

When Caitlyn Lewis was in graduate school at the University of Montana, there was no municipal food waste collection system in Missoula. So, after graduation, she decided that’s where she wanted to focus her energy. As a result, she founded Soil Cycle.

“I was sick of throwing my veggies away when I was cooking, and I was adulting a little bit more and cooking with more fresh produce and thinking about my waste stream a little bit more than maybe I did when I was in high school. And there was nowhere to put it.”

Missoula is far from the only city to have a community compost program, but Soil Cycle stands out for its focus on sustainable transportation. There are a handful of other communities that also have bike-powered food scraps collection, such as BK Rot in New York City and Peels & Wheels in New Haven, Connecticut. Soil Cycle has gone through several different mission shifts since its founding, but the bicycle transport has remained one of the core values, says Lewis. 

“We figured we can meet as many issues in our city with one organization…soil health, food waste, carbon sequestration and sustainable transportation,” says Lewis. “It really is an example of how to do business in a different way.”

A few times a year, Soil Cycle is able to give the actual compost back to the customers.

“We’re creating this fertilizer that you can use on your houseplants and in your garden, and they can see firsthand how they’re making a difference,” says Elisabeth Davidson, executive director of Soil Cycle. “And I think that’s probably the biggest part in closing that loop. It’s people seeing the product that’s created by the food waste.”

Even a few years ago, the mindset around composting felt different in Missoula, says Lewis. When she started Soil Cycle, there were about 10 people who signed up right away. But others took some convincing.

“The rest were like, well, why do I need to compost? Why should I pay a service a fee to collect it? Why do you make compost?” says Lewis.

Left: Rentsch approaches the bike receptacles. Right: Aerial view of food scraps in the receptacle. (Photos by Lena Beck)

While limiting food waste is best for the environment, redirecting wasted food away from landfills is the next best option. Research from the EPA in 2023 found that 58 percent of landfill-produced methane came from wasted food. Methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Composting integrates oxygen into the equation, minimizing the methane produced when done correctly.

As more municipalities have created food scrap pick-ups and compost services, the directionality is often one-way. People let their food scraps be collected at the curb, says Davidson, and then their involvement ends. She hopes more people will start to wonder where those food scraps end up. 

“I wish folks just knew more about where their food was going after they threw it in the compost bin,” says Davidson. “It gets sent off and then [people are] like, ‘OK, I did my part.’ And that’s true, they did do their part. But looking throughout the system, you need to think down the line of OK, where’s my food waste going after this? How is it being processed? And how is it being distributed?”

Beyond Soil Cycle and Missoula, many cities have programs where you can purchase or get compost for free, making the process more full circle. In Bozeman, Montana, Happy Trash Can Compost collects food scraps and sells the finished compost back to the community. In Los Angeles, LA Compost provides several options for obtaining free compost, through farmers markets, co-ops or community hubs. Even some of the food scraps collected through the municipal program in Portland, Oregon are processed by Recology Organics, which will sell its compost products retail.

What’s next

A little before 4 pm, Rentsch finishes the route and pulls the e-bike to a stop in front of the gate surrounding Soil Cycle’s headquarters. Dropping off the food scraps and cleaning out the receptacles is the only thing left to do today.

“We can’t save every piece of fruit—organic materials are organic and they will decompose,” says Lewis. “But we should honor them and we should make the best-quality fertilizer we can.” 

Meanwhile, Lewis, who in recent years has also started a flower farm called Blue Mountain Flowers, has realized that there are some additional challenges to composting at the farm level—for example, an abundance of organic material can be hard to “turn,” a critical part of composting, if you don’t have heavy equipment. One of her goals for the coming year is to design a composting system that is easy to manage for farmers and is replicable across small farms.

“It’s a passion project of mine to create a composting system that can be replicated for small farmers,” she says. “And there’s ways to do it, without putting [in] a ton of time. You just have to be creative.”

Left: Rentsch bikes through Missoula picking up food scraps. Right: The bike parked at a customer’s house. (Photos by Lena Beck)

Since Soil Cycle is hyperlocal, there’s no competition with nearby municipalities. A company or initiative doing the same thing in the next town over is a collaborator, not a rival. 

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be bicycle-powered and identical to what we’re doing,” says Davidson. “But I’d say a lot of local communities are interested in creating some sort of composting service.”

And Soil Cycle’s connections stretch far beyond Montana, as more communities try to pick up the idea.

“I have a meeting with someone tomorrow, who I believe is from Ireland, [who says] ‘I want to do what you’re doing, here,’” says Davidson. “OK, let’s talk about it.”

The post Meet the Modern Composters on Wheels appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Many people are eager to do their part, and individual actions, taken as a whole, can make a big difference. At the same time, it’s important to remember that individual responsibility alone cannot solve the plastic crisis. Government regulation that holds manufacturers and polluters responsible is key to addressing the issue. 

So, what can you do? 

Recycle right

Recycling won’t stop the tide of new plastic being produced, but it can make a dent in how much virgin plastic goes straight into the landfill. Make sure you’re up to speed on which items are recyclable in your area, and keep in mind that your waste doesn’t disappear into thin air the moment it goes into the bin. 

“Human hands touch everything,” says Logan Harvey, senior general manager of Recology Sonoma Marin, which recently debuted a new recycling facility in Santa Rosa, CA. Despite employing a plethora of the newest technology to sort mixed recycling, human sorters manually review all the materials, sometimes dealing with non-recyclable items that range from head-scratching (an elliptical machine) to disgusting (used diapers) to downright dangerous (hypodermic needles). Recycling guidelines aren’t merely abstract recommendations; rinse and dry items and pay attention to your municipal guidelines.

Reduce, reuse and refill

You’ve heard it before, now hear it again: Reducing consumption of plastic and learning to reuse items before or instead of throwing them away are among the most important things you can do at the individual level. 

“It’s really the reuse, refill models that are most effective,” says Erica Cirino, communications manager for the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition and author of Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis. “There are more and more refill shops, which are basically markets where you can get food and other home products, from washing machine powder to dish soap and toothpaste, without all the plastic packaging, by being able to fill up your own containers and bring them home.”

Reuse and refill map created by Plastic Free Future.

Short of that, Cirino advises looking for places where you can buy food that’s simply unwrapped, such as farmers markets and grocery stores that carry products loose or wrapped in paper. “Look for better options until more of these truly zero-waste shops can emerge,” she says. 

Get inspired 

Social media zero-waste influencers can perpetuate unrealistic standards for how little waste normal people with busy lives can realistically achieve. However, there are hundreds of clever ideas online to minimize waste or give items new life through repairing, crafting, decorating, gardening and reorganizing. To find ideas, search for keywords like “zero waste” and “plastic free” on your social media platform of choice to find accounts dedicated to creative ways to reduce and reuse. 

 

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Join forces

As awareness of the plastic issue has grown, so have the ranks of nonprofit organizations dedicated to addressing the problem through education and action. Some, such as  the Surfrider Foundation, The 5 Gyres Institute and Plastic Oceans, are dedicated to ocean plastics; others, such as Break Free From Plastic and the Plastic Pollution Coalition, envision a global movement to stop plastic pollution. These types of organizations often have the most up-to-date information about campaigns and opportunities to act; they’ll also gladly accept monetary donations to support their work.

There may also be local groups and initiatives to get to know in your community, which can be the most immediate and actionable way to get involved. “Being active in your local policy-making efforts and being aware of what’s happening in your own community is the most important place to start,” says Cirino.

Support legislation

Local and state-level laws such as plastic straw and plastic bag bans have proliferated over the last decade. Such bans are largely effective, with some exceptions, but they are a piecemeal solution to a much larger problem. 

In Canada, a national ban on single-use plastics, instituted in 2021, was recently overturned, granting a win to plastics manufacturers. The federal government has since appealed the decision, and the ban remains in place while the appeal works its way through the courts this year. 

Although previous iterations haven’t had success, US lawmakers recently introduced sweeping legislation that would address the issue at the federal level. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2023 “is largely considered to be the most comprehensive attempt to address plastic pollution in US history,” says Cirino. “It’s not perfect, but it would better protect communities that are already harmed by plastic pollution, hopefully address recycling issues and also shift the burden of plastic pollution off of municipalities and taxpayers onto the actual producers of plastic pollution.”

To support the legislation, you can contact your congressperson and let them know what you think about the issue. You can also submit a form letter here.  

Educate yourself and others 

The issue of plastic waste can feel scary, complicated and overwhelming. There’s no simple solution, and no single person can solve it alone. Educating yourself, and sharing what you know with your friends and family is a great first step to raising awareness. 

There exist many books and documentaries on the issue of plastic waste. One of our staff picks is Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future (2023). Written by journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis, the book tours readers through the history of waste and recycling and explores where our waste—from plastic and paper to food waste, sewage, nuclear waste and more—really ends up and what it means for our future. 

***

We want to know: What products, tactics and strategies are you using to cut down on your plastic waste? What resources are most helpful? Tell us in the comments—we’d like to publish a story with reader recommendations!

The post What You Can Do About The Overwhelming Problem of Plastic Packaging appeared first on Modern Farmer.

These ingredients are endlessly diverse, including spent grains from beer production, ripe fruit that is too small for supermarket standards and cacao pulp from the process of making chocolate bars, but they share a similar origin story. In the past, these ingredients were lost somewhere in our food supply chain; now, pathways are being created to ensure they reach consumers. 

While other cited trends tend to center on a specific single ingredient or nutrient, the “upcycled” trend is unique in that it shifts the focus from personal to planetary health and longevity. “For the first time, the majority of the world is able to witness the real effects of climate change around them and they are looking for ways to help,” says Caroline Cotto, co-founder and chief operating officer at Renewal Mill, a California-based company that produces baking mixes with upcycled ingredients. “As more consumers look for sustainable foods in the marketplace, upcycled foods rise to meet that demand.”

“It’s this growing awareness that the take-make-waste systems that we’ve all participated in for the last 70 years are making people hungry and making the environment unlivable,” says Anna Hammond, founder and chief executive officer at Matriark Foods, a New York-based company that produces pasta sauces and vegetable broth with upcycled ingredients. “Solving for wasted food is one of the easiest things that almost everyone can participate in to mitigate climate change.” 

According to research from ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food waste, 38 percent of food in the US was wasted in 2022. That’s 235 million tons of meals that went uneaten, despite the fact that one in eight Americans is food insecure. And it’s not just the food that goes to waste; that year, uneaten food accounted for 6.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and 22 percent of all freshwater use in the US.

[RELATED: The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained]

“Food waste happens literally at every part of our global food supply chain,” says Cotto. “It happens when we leave unharvested food on fields due to cosmetic imperfections; it happens when we improperly store food during transport; it happens through byproduct production at food manufacturers; it happens when grocery stores overorder and throw out food they can’t sell or when restaurants make too much and can’t serve it all; and, in fact, the majority of the wastage still happens in our own homes.” 

Avoiding food waste in our kitchens is a crucial first step toward reducing our carbon emissions, water usage and overall impact on the environment.

“There are lots of things we can do to reduce food waste,” says Cotto. “Don’t over purchase. Make a list before you head to the grocery store. Eat leftovers or find ways to repurpose them into delicious new meals. If you’re headed out of town but still have stuff left in your fridge, find ways to gift to your neighbors and freeze everything you can for when you’re back. Compost whatever you cannot eat.” 

In addition to carefully and consciously eating all of the food that we buy, opting to purchase upcycled foods allows us to amplify our individual efforts by supporting climate-friendly producers that have an even greater environmental footprint. This is especially important for institutions, such as schools, hospitals and corporate offices, where the effect is even more powerful. 

In two reports on food waste in the United States published in December 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted upcycled foods as a key tool for addressing the climate crisis. 

Hammond came to this conclusion on her own several years prior, leading her to found Matriak Foods. There are “three questions that we always ask ourselves in everything we do,” says Hammond. “Does this mitigate food going to landfills and the negative environmental impacts of that? Is this good for small- and mid-scale farmers? Does this create greater access to healthy food for more people?” 

These questions are embodied in each of Matriark’s products, including its classic tomato basil pasta sauce. “We work with a roaster of tomatoes who [because of the way his machines work] was throwing out anywhere from 1.5 to 3 million pounds of tomatoes a year,” says Hammond. “We’ve developed a food-safe, compliant way to capture those perfectly ripe tomatoes and puree them into the base of our sauces.” Each carton of this sauce—which is packaged in Forest Stewardship Council-certified materials—diverts 0.4 pounds of food from a landfill and saves 50 gallons of water. 

Anna Hammond is founder and CEO at Matriark Foods, which upcycles ingredients for tomato sauces and broths. (Photo: Jessie YuChen/Matriark Foods)

Renewal Mill also partners with other food producers—in its case, the makers of plant-based milks, such as soy milk and oat milk. It collects the leftover pulp from this process, then dehydrates and mills it to be transformed into shelf-stable gluten-free flour. It sells this flour on its own and in vegan baking mixes for brownies, cakes and cookies. Since its founding in 2018, Renewal Mill has diverted more than 700,000 pounds of food waste and avoided more than one million pounds of carbon emissions. 

Both Matriark Foods and Renewal Mill belong to the Upcycled Food Association (UFA). “This organization’s first directive was to create a formal definition of upcycled food,” says Cotto, who serves as a board member at UFA. “The definition decided upon was: Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains and have a positive impact on the environment.” 

This definition serves as the foundation for the Upcycled Certified program, which has since certified nearly 500 products that span the spectrum from sweet to savory. In December 2023, an independent, third-party food verification company, Where Food Comes From, Inc., acquired the Upcycled Certified program, enhancing its perceived credibility and broadening its reach. 

Upcycled baking mixes from Renewal Mill. (Photo courtesy of Renewal Mill)

“You can shop for upcycled food across almost every aisle of the grocery store and for every meal,” says Cotto. “Look for the Upcycled Certified logo on packaging to help identify which products are reducing food waste.” 

Renewal Mill and Matriark Foods products can be bought online in individual packages or wholesale via their websites, where they also provide information on finding products in stores, including certain Whole Foods locations. To find more upcycled products and ingredients, shoppers can check out the UFA website’s list, which includes food and beverages, home and personal care products, and pet food options. 

Cotto points out that you can upcycle at home, too. “If you make your own beer or plant-based milks at home, don’t throw away the pulp. It can be repurposed into bread. Use fruit and vegetable pulp left over from juicing in muffins. Use the rinds of cheese to make rich and flavorful soup bases. The possibilities are endless!”

The post This is the Year to Eat More Upcycled Foods appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It happens everywhere in our food system. Tomatoes that don’t meet product specifications get left on the vine at farms. Byproducts of processed foods get tossed out on the manufacturing line. Ugly lemons get picked over at the supermarket. At home, we throw out the wilting spinach in our refrigerator that we bought when we had grand plans to cook, then ended up ordering takeout instead.

All of these things add up; food waste cost the US $428 billion in 2022. In addition to the monetary costs, wasted food could be going to those who need it—12.8 percent of American households were food insecure in 2022. Environmentally that same year, the US expended 6.1 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions on food that never gets eaten, as well as an estimated 16 percent of US cropland and 22 percent of its freshwater use.

The thing is, reducing wasted food is completely possible. A close look at where it happens in the food system, and how, reveals how interventions can make a difference in achieving our food waste goals.

Big goals for 2030

In 2015, the United Nations created a Sustainable Development Goal, or SDG, to halve food waste at the consumer and retail levels by 2030. The US joined in pursuit of this goal, thereby taking on the biggest food waste challenge in the world.

Now, in 2024, we have passed the halfway point to that deadline, but food waste is still a monumental problem in the US.

However, there have been some interesting fluctuations in this trend. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown exposed weaknesses in our food system, but it also dramatically changed people’s eating habits, as well as their waste habits. Research indicates that the onset of the pandemic resulted in reductions in household food waste in many countries at first … “and then kind of a return to normal levels of waste thereafter,” says Brian Roe, leader of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative.

We don’t have definitive data as to why, but Roe offers a guess: In general, people were home more, going to the grocery store less frequently and not eating out at restaurants as much. As things began to re-open, food waste levels went back to “normal.”

Another interesting part of the food waste discussion at the national level is that municipal composting programs are becoming more common. However, compost doesn’t count toward the SDG food waste reduction goals. These measures will have to be achieved through upstream interventions. So, where in the food system can this happen?

On the farm: 16.8 percent of surplus food 

When it comes to fruits and vegetables, Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, says occasional overproduction can be attributed to fluctuating markets. Because of that, growers are always playing a guessing game about how much they will be able to sell and the price they will fetch versus the basic cost of harvest.

There’s also the question of aesthetics. “You also have products that are systematically left in the field because of their specs. They’re not meeting specs, for one reason or another. It could be size, shape, color, sweetness, but it also could be that they have two weeks of shelf life left instead of three.”

Labor or budget shortages can also result in food left on the vine—perhaps farms only find it possible to pay workers to go out in the field twice instead of three times and food gets left behind. Gleaning programs can address this.

But produce isn’t the only food that can be wasted on farms. Gunders says produce gets a lot of the focus, but that there are also wasted eggs, meat, dairy and commodity grains.

Tomatoes left on the plant. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

In processing: 14.7 percent of surplus food

Manufacturing is decently efficient, says Gunders. But the byproducts of certain items can be a source of wasted food in the system. For example, if you’re making french fries, you may be tossing your potato peels, even though they are edible. 

The upcycled food movement has stepped in to try to figure out how to address some of these issues.

At grocery stores and restaurants: 20.2 percent of surplus food

A typical grocery store sells tens of thousands of different items, a fair few of which are not shelf-stable. Grocery stores must estimate how much of something they think they will sell, and they won’t always get it right. US grocery stores produce five million tons of food waste annually.

Seventy percent of the food wasted at restaurants happens in the front of the house, not in the kitchen. Often, this happens through big portions. Patrons can’t finish the food and it gets left on the plate.

A handful of states have passed legislation addressing surplus food at this level, either through organic waste bans, providing tax incentives to donate surplus food or liability protections for donated food, such as that which has passed its “best by” date. You can find more about what each state is up to using ReFED’s Policy Finder.

Uneaten food in a garbage receptacle. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

At home: 48.2 percent of surplus food

The biggest share of food waste occurs at home. This makes the environmental impact even stronger—not only is the food wasted, but so much energy was used to get it from the farm, through the food system and into your kitchen. 

“It really boils down to the fact that we’re not very good at managing our food,” says Gunders. 

Fortunately, steps for reducing your home footprint are pretty accessible. A recent pilot study out of the University of Guelph found that at-home educational interventions can help reduce food waste. You can access the manual it used at home here. And for actionable tips for what you can do at home, read our how-to here.  

“I’m a big believer that we need to chip away at the consumer level because it is the source of the most. And by the time it gets to the consumer, it has embedded increasing amounts of energy and other resources. You’ve transported it a few more times, you’ve refrigerated it for longer, you burned more energy [and] created more emissions to get it to the consumer level,” says Roe.

Prevention vs. reaction

When it comes to food waste solutions, many fall on one end of the spectrum or the other: preventing food from being wasted in the first place versus getting use out of it once it has been wasted. Both sides are valuable.

Preventive strategies help cut down on the amount of money and energy used to create food that doesn’t get eaten. 

But disposing of wasted food the right way is also important. Landfills are the third greatest producers of human-driven methane in the US. An EPA study from 2023 found that an estimated 58 percent of the methane produced by landfills was due to food waste. Food, when tossed in the landfill, generates this greenhouse gas. The way to cut down on this is by redirecting food waste away from landfills. Compost, if managed properly through the integration of oxygen, will not create such high levels of methane. Check out our tips on compost best practices here.

“Getting a system in place throughout the country to really systematically get that food out of landfills, is now taking, I would say, more prominence as a good climate strategy,” says Gunders.

Learn more. Most of the data used in this article was sourced from ReFED, a leader in understanding food waste through data. Check out its homepage, Insights Engine and Policy Finder for more information.

The post The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained appeared first on Modern Farmer.

With numbers like that, it’s clear that wasted food is a big issue, with an impact on the environment and food security. For problems this large, it’s easy to feel like individual action can’t make a difference. But in this instance, since we know that the largest share of wasted food happens at the household level, individual action being impactful isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.

“If we don’t take action as individuals, we will not be able to solve this problem,” says Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED. “All the grocery store and restaurant work and supply chain work that’s happening out there will not solve this problem without people in their homes changing their food habits as well.”

After talking to some experts in the field, we put together a list of recommendations for cutting down on your food waste at home.

Buy less

While this isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it really is the key to reducing home waste. Don’t buy more than you can consume within a given time period. The thing is, many of us become guilty of this without even realizing it. 

There are a lot of different mindsets that can contribute to food waste at home, says Brian Roe, leader of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative. Some of these can be very well-intentioned, such as the provider mindset—overprovisioning so as to always have enough on hand for everyone. “Your love language translated into a waste language,” says Roe. “People are more focused on trying to be that good provider and don’t necessarily think about the waste as much.”

When that’s the case, keep a food diary. Every time you toss something out, mark it down. Look for patterns. Are you buying too many bananas? Are you cooking in portion sizes that leave you with leftovers you aren’t eating? Roe also recommends physically collecting the waste in one place. The visual of how much it is can motivate change. Noticing these patterns is the first step in breaking the cycle.

You can also keep track of how much you spend on food and compare it to how much is wasted. Many consumers are financially motivated, and they don’t want to waste money. However, that isn’t always enough of a mindset to reduce household food waste.

“The point of waste and the point of purchase are so far apart,” says Roe. “People aren’t reconciling their books the way a retailer or processor is.”

Store it right

Have you noticed that every time you buy spinach, it wilts before you can use it? Do your raspberries go bad within days? Storing these things properly makes a difference.

Secondly, proper storage can prevent things from getting lost in your refrigerator. Using clear storage containers so you can see what’s inside or marking the contents with labels and dates is a good way to keep what you’ve got at the front of your mind.

Harvest Public Media recently ran a piece about how canning is coming back into style. Canning used to be very popular at the household level, but it has largely fallen out of practice. While many people do this to preserve their garden’s harvest into the winter, you can also draw upon tried and true preservation techniques to avoid throwing away surplus food before it goes bad. Try canning, jarring or jamming.

Lastly, use your freezer to buy yourself extra time. “Freezers are a great way to put a pause button on your food,” says Gunders.

Safely canning or jarring vegetables is a good way to avoid wasting them. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

Reevaluate ‘best by’ dates

We’ve all pulled a can of soup out of the cupboard only to see that its “best by” date has long since passed. But these dates are widely misinterpreted, says Gunders. Many actually refer to best quality, not to actual safety. 

“There is a small subset of products that can have some kind of increased risk associated with them,” says Gunders. “Deli meat is a great example. But we have no way as consumers to tell the difference at this moment because there [are] no actual legal definitions for the words they use next to the dates.”

There is now a push to create legal uniformity in the language you see on packaging so that it’s easier for you to tell what these dates actually mean. There is a voluntary language guide, which you can find here, but it is not universally adopted.

In the meantime, give things a sniff or taste, says Gunders. If it seems fine, it probably is. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everything. As a rule of thumb, Gunders says the exceptions are likely to be the foods that pregnant women are recommended to avoid.

[RELATED: The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained]

Try weekly fridge clean-outs

It’s normal to accumulate extras in your fridge. Leftovers that you couldn’t quite finish or some surplus ingredient that you didn’t use all of, such as fresh herbs or half an onion. These are the items that are most likely to be tossed out unnecessarily. But you can reduce these occurrences with a designated day to use them up. Maybe you dress up leftovers with the extra ingredients you have lying around, or perhaps you cook all the extras into a stir-fry or soup. Being intentional about this can reduce the amount of food you toss.

“[Shop] your fridge before you go back to the store to really make sure you’re using stuff up,” says Gunders.

Compost as a last resort

We love compost. But, ideally, you are composting the parts of your food that can’t be used for something else. Roe says that research has suggested that, for some people, reducing food waste upstream and composting the scraps can be complementary attributes of a conscious consumer. But there’s also evidence to suggest that, sometimes, composting wasted food mitigates the guilt that people feel about letting it go bad. To address the food waste problem, compost should be the last resort, not a way to absolve yourself from wasting food.

A lot of things that often get tossed actually have viable uses in the kitchen—think, radish tops in your pesto or zesting your organic citrus rinds. For some clever tips on how to do this (plus many more), check out FoodPrint’s ABCs of Reducing Food Waste.

This graphic shows the optimal steps for reducing and handling wasted food. (Courtesy of the EPA)

Get the app

Thinking of creative ways to plan ahead during shopping trips or reuse ragtag ingredients may not be your strong suit. For those of us who might need help imagining what half a bell pepper and some shredded cheese might turn into, there are fortunately an abundance of phone apps that might help, such as Your Food – No Waste Inventory or KITCHENPAL: Pantry Inventory.

Roe recommends Hellmann’s campaign to decrease food waste, where you download the Fridge Night app and it helps you squeeze one more meal out of the stragglers in your fridge.

“You don’t have to be perfect at provisioning, you don’t have to be perfect at storing. But if you have the ability to make up for it at the end and the motivation to find the things in the fridge and put it together, then you are going to save money, get that one more meal a week out of your fridge [and] waste less,” says Roe. “And so, it kind of helps correct for other earlier errors in the chain.”

Learn more. Most of the data used in this article was sourced from ReFED, a leader in understanding food waste through data. Check out its homepage, Insights Engine and  Policy Finder for more information.

Let us know. We picked up these tips by talking to experts, but a lot of people have developed strategies from their own experience. Let us know in the comments about a creative way you reduce food waste.

The post A Bulk of Food Waste Happens at Home. Here’s How to Cut Your Footprint. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Locals take precautions, staying off the boulders where bears can doze out of sight, carrying deterrents like bear spray or marine flares and reporting sightings on the town’s Facebook page. Every Halloween, emergency services band together to patrol the perimeter of town for bears so kids can safely go trick-or-treating.

But there’s a much more pressing threat to community health than a 1,000-pound polar bear ambling through the streets of Churchill, one that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: food insecurity. Churchill, home to 900 residents year round, is accessible only by train and air, meaning that the cost of fresh produce is often double that which people would pay in the capital city of Winnipeg, located over 600 miles south.

A mother and her yearling cubs testing the ice forming along the Hudson Bay. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

“In the dead of winter last year, the [grocery store] didn’t get their shipment in. So, there was nothing on the shelves,” says Jayden Chapman, sustainability coordinator at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC), a non-profit organization that facilitates research and education initiatives in the North.

It was a reminder of the food security crisis in 2017 when a devastating flood event washed out the train tracks and cut off the flow of food and essential goods into the community. All essential goods had to be flown in,’ and, as a result, food prices skyrocketed and quality plummeted. 

“We’d get a shipment in and it would already be black and moldy. They’d still put it on the shelf because it was our only option,” says Chapman.

In the face of crisis, staff at the CNSC decided to innovate, and through a collaboration with Growcer Modular Food Solutions, they piloted one of the first vertical, hydroponic farm projects—housed in a 40-foot shipping container built to withstand the harsh winter conditions that can dip below -40 Fahrenheit—in northern Canada. The pilot project was a success and, as a result, the Rocket Greens initiative was born.

Today, Chapman and her colleagues produce between 250 and 400 units of fresh greens, which they deliver via a weekly subscription program to residents, restaurants and businesses. 

CNSC sustainability coordinator Jayden Chapman shows off a harvest of leafy greens. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

Katherine Branson, a sustainability technician at CNSC, manages the weekly production, planting seeds and transplanting seedlings after two weeks. Most plants take five to six weeks to grow to maturity, she says. Branson plants a variety of leafy greens and herbs—40 varieties in total—often opting for leafy kale, which tends to thrive. The plants are irrigated by a 1,200-liter tank, which circulates water continuously and is topped up every three weeks.

“I try to grow to full capacity every week, no matter how many people are buying because we like to donate the surplus,” explains Branson. “This is really important to us. We can’t really address food security and sovereignty if we’re just selling to the people who can afford it. We donate it so people who don’t have the means can access it.”

Another critical issue facing the town of Churchill is organic waste management, says Chapman, particularly related to scents attracting polar bears and increasing the risk of human-bear conflict. During the summer and fall months, as bears wait for the bay to freeze, they often follow their noses into town or to the garbage dump. Increasingly warming temperatures, due to climate change, is resulting in delayed freeze-up and bears spending more days on land.

A polar bear outside the CNSC is caught on trail camera, part of Dr. Doug Clark’s research on the frequency of bear visitation to human facilities. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Douglas Clark, University of Saskatchewan)

Dr. Doug Clark, a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, uses trail cameras to study the relationship between the increasing number of days that bears spend on land and the frequency of visitation to human facilities, including the CNSC. In warmer years, like 2023, Clark is seeing a correlation between delayed sea ice and increased visitation of bears to human structures, including waste bins.

“This [research] tells us that we should focus our efforts on better managing waste and other attractants to prevent human-bear interactions,” says Clark. “And when they do occur to prevent escalation.”

This winter, Chapman and her colleagues are excited to launch a new initiative at the CNSC and pilot an in-vessel, outdoor composter to transform kitchen waste into compost. 

During the summer and fall months, when dozens of researchers and guests come to stay at the CNSC, the facility produces upwards of five gallons of organic waste a day. In the current system, the waste is stored behind the building, and although bears can’t get into it, the scent still attracts them, as documented by Clark’s research.

“This will help to reduce the smell of garbage around the Centre and the tension and risk of bumping into a polar bear,” says Chapman.

Waste management is a critical issue facing sub-arctic and arctic communities in Canada today, particularly related to attracting polar bears. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

The BIOvator, a stainless steel incinerator, breaks down organic and carbon materials, including a combination of kitchen waste and cardboard, or wood shavings, and converts the waste into nutrient-rich soil.

“We’re basically creating a product out of garbage,” says Chapman.

As part of the pilot project, the center will collect kitchen waste from the facility, staff’s kitchen waste from their own households and local restaurants in town. But Chapman hopes to expand their reach further into the community, which would, in turn, divert food waste from the landfill. The soil will be distributed to a community garden project in Churchill.

Chapman’s team’s efforts are part of a wider trend to implement improved waste management strategies in Churchill to reduce the number of bears wandering into town. For example, the town of Churchill is currently considering switching from an interior dump, which houses waste for several years before being shipped south to a landfill, to a thermal incinerator, which is a more environmentally safe method.

A yearling cub on the outskirts of town. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

With the looming threats of climate change, northern communities around the Hudson Bay will continue to face challenges with melting sea ice and the increased presence of polar bears in the community. But Churchill is leading the way as a model community in the Arctic for food security initiatives.

Other remote northern towns are following in Churchill’s footsteps. In 2018, Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, an Inuit community in northern Quebec, invested in a hydroponic farm in a shipping container. The following year, a vertical farm was established by a local grocery store in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to supply people with fresh produce. The Gitmaxmak’ay Nisga’a Society, a non-profit First Nations organization based in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, invested in a similar model in 2020, and today feeds 1,600 members on a weekly basis.

“Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time updating and troubleshooting the hydroponic farm,” says Branson. “But we’ve been producing healthy greens in Churchill for six years now.”

Jayden Chapman and Katherine Branson transfer fresh produce from the shipping container to the CNSC to organize into weekly subscription boxes. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

Since they started, the Rocket Greens initiative has sold more than 40,000 units of produce and the price of leafy greens (around $7 with government subsidies) has dropped to $4.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Branson, as she places heads of lettuce into the weekly boxes.

Before she leaves the research station, she does as locals do in Churchill: looks both ways for bears. With none in sight, Branson steps out into the frigid sub-arctic temperatures to deliver fresh greens right onto people’s front doorsteps.

The post What It Takes to Feed the Community in the Polar Bear Capital of the World appeared first on Modern Farmer.

To keep product in supply, she began asking other sheep farmers in her area if they had any fleeces they weren’t using. For sheep that are raised as meat, shearing is still a regular part of their upkeep, but the wool often isn’t used for anything. In fact, farmers across the US and Canada end up burning, burying or stockpiling their wool because processing it is expensive and seen as not worth the time and labor required. She was hoping to obtain just 15 fleeces, but Maksymiuk found that a lot of farmers were hoping to offload their wool somewhere.

“People were just like, ‘here, take it—just take all of it,’” says Maksymiuk. “And, somehow, we ended up with like 75 fleeces.” 

As she undertook the cumbersome process of cleaning the wool, Maksymiuk realized she would end up with a lot of unusable material. Much of the wool was saturated with organic matter such as manure, straw and leaves. Bags of this “waste wool” sat around for a long time, with Maksymiuk unsure what to do with it. The solution didn’t appear until some time later, when another member of the wool industry gave her an idea: Turn the wool into pellet fertilizer.

Maksymiuk is now part of a wave of people spurring on an emerging market for wool that is often discarded, routing it back into agriculture.

Left: Maksymiuk’s flock. Right: Maksymiuk holds wool from a Navajo-Churro sheep. (Photos courtesy of Leanna Maksymiuk)

Pivoting to pellets

Kimberly Hagen, a former grazing specialist at the University of Vermont, doesn’t use the term “waste wool.” It’s not really waste, she explains—just wool that needs a purpose. She is one of the people who has put years into studying what that purpose could be.

For many sheep farms, wool is not a viable income stream. There are a few related reasons for this, including the rise of synthetic fibers and the lack of processing infrastructure. The cost of doing something with wool is often higher than any income that could be made from the wool. It’s hard to estimate how much wool goes unused in the US, but it’s a lot.

“A lot of people drag it out to the far corner of their farm or stuff it in bags and leave it in the corner of the barn ‘til it gets to take up so much room, they don’t know what to do,” says Hagen. “For most people, it just doesn’t even pay to drive to one of these collection sites. It’s just not worth it.” 

Beyond yarn, wool can be a viable material for upholstery or insulation for green building. It’s also a useful mulch for gardens. One big obstacle when it comes to processing wool is the act of cleaning it, called scouring. This is expensive and sometimes requires transporting wool long distances. Hagen began researching one possible avenue for unused wool that wouldn’t require scouring: wool pellets for fertilizer.

Wool makes sense as a soil amendment. It has nitrogen, almost no phosphorus and a little bit of potassium. In pellet form, it doles out the nitrogen to the soil over time.

“What’s nice about the wool pellet is because it’s so fibrous, it’s a slow release; it really slows down that process,” says Hagen. During heavy rainfall, it doesn’t all wash away. This could possibly amount to less nutrient pollution in the waterways in comparison to synthetic fertilizers.

Through the University of Vermont, Hagen began testing the added value of wool pellets to crop soil. Initial trials indicated that the plants supplemented with wool pellets performed as well or better than the control plants.

While no longer with the university, Hagen is in the process of raising money and applying for grants to purchase pellet machinery and eventually buy wool from sheep farmers.

“I want to see sheep producers be able to have a revenue stream from the wool,” says Hagen. “So, my goal is to pay the farmers for that wool enough that it covers their costs for getting their sheep shorn and maybe a little more if I can make that happen.”

Left: One of Maksymiuk’s flock. Right: Wool pellets from Waste Not Wool. (Photos courtesy of Leanna Maksymiuk)

Getting the gear

In response to the knowledge that a lot of wool goes to waste, the national Fibershed group started a waste wool working group. A member of this group was pelletizing it for a soil amendment. This idea caught the eye of Peggy Hart, a member of the Western Mass Fibershed and wool artist, author and founder of Bedfellows Blankets, which weaves artisan blankets on antique looms. The Western Mass Fibershed decided to take on the project.

“I’m always wheeling and dealing with buying wool and helping sheep farmers get their yarn spun,” says Hart. “It’s trying to bring this particular fiber back to people’s consciousness because for so many years, people have not used wool. And yet, we continue to raise sheep.” 

Western Mass Fibershed applied for grants and, with the funding it received, will be able to buy its own machinery to pelletize wool. This past season, Hart drove 100 pounds of wool down to Indiana to be converted into pellets as a test run. This year, the group sold the pellets at farmers markets and gave some to UMass to test in its permaculture gardens. 

Hart is hoping to receive the machinery and have it up and running by the late winter or early spring, around the time the first shearing of the year occurs. She’s estimating they will be able to process 10,000 pounds of wool from the surrounding area, which she doesn’t anticipate will be hard to find. Many farmers she’s spoken to are happy to just get rid of the wool.

The other main goal for the future is to compensate farmers for their waste wool. It won’t be much to start, says Hart, but, hopefully, it would at least cover the cost of shearing. At The Big E, a fair in Massachusetts, Hart started talking to some of the farmers who were showing their sheep.

“They just sort of laughed when I asked them what they did with the wool,” says Hart. “And when I said that we actually hope to pay farmers for their waste wool, they were just ecstatic.” 

Left: Maksymiuk’s child sits over waste wool. Right: Maksymiuk sells Waste Not Wool pellets. (Photos courtesy of Leanna Maksymiuk)

Building a business

Back at Lone Sequoia Ranch, after hearing about the possibility of making wool pellets, Maksymiuk took the plunge and bought the machinery from Europe. She started pelleting in June of 2022. To date, her business Waste Not Wool has redirected 9,000 pounds of waste wool from the landfill, burn pile or general lack of use. In addition to bringing nutrients to the soil, Maksymiuk has anecdotally observed that it holds water well, too, and helps aerate the soil.

She tells people to think of it like washing a wool sweater—when it’s wet, it weighs a lot more. “It’s so heavy because it’s saturated with water,” says Maksymiuk. “That’s like these little pellets.” 

Now, she sells the pellets at in-person markets and online. In the future, she’d love to do pellet trials with farmers and custom pelleting—taking wool from farmers and giving it back to them as pellets.

“Lots of people that have sheep also have gardens,” says Maksymiuk. “So, I would really like to be able to take their wool, pellet it and have it go back to them so that they’re making their farms more circular.”

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