Composting for Community: Recent Episodes
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
How does the return on investment for community-based composting compare to that of centralized composting? What unique co-benefits do community composters bring to the table, beyond waste diversion? In this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, we are joined by Kourtnii Brown, founder and director of Common Compost (Oakland, California) and CEO of the California Alliance for Community Composting. We discuss the immense potential of community composting to scale up and meet diversion goals and improve community resilience based on the findings of the Community Composting for Green Spaces (CCGS) 2021/22 pilot program.
Kourtnii Brown
CCGS aims to strengthen, protect, and develop small and medium composting projects across California while supporting and empowering the communities they serve. In 2020, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) awarded the California Alliance of Community Composters (CACC), in collaboration with People, Food and Land Foundation (PFL), $1.54 million to launch the CCGS pilot program, supporting 125 community composting projects and establish 65 part-time employment opportunities. The pilot also observed a number of co-benefits: meaningful jobs in marginalized communities, increased organizational capacity, effective community education, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and increased use of green spaces.
In this episode, Kourtnii Brown reflects on the impact participating initiatives had in their communities, the potential of community composters to help reach California’s ambitious waste diversion goal of 75% by 2025, and inspiration for other communities to launch similar initiatives.
By investing just a million dollars of any county or any city’s budget today to support launching a decentralized network, about a hundred community-based projects in public green space, low cost diversion capacity can be accomplished in under two years and it can be sustained for many more. In some rural counties it could provide the solution that would meet total capacity needed to reach zero waste goals.
If you look at the outcomes of this pilot program, [if] all 109 of those sites were able to maintain their current diversion levels and we were to just continue to invest $1 million annually into the sites themselves, we estimate that we could collectively continue to divert about 7 million pounds a year, produce 2,750 cubic yards of compost a year, reduce emissions by 550 metric tons of CO2 equivalent – so almost 200 cars off the road a year – we would achieve another million metric tons from applying that yummy compost to local gardens and farms and also 35 full-time equivalent jobs.
Related ResourcesCalifornia Alliance of Community Composters Website
CalRecycle Community Composting For Green Spaces Page
ILSR Webinar ft. Kourtnii Brown: Census of Community Composters – Key Findings, Challenges & Future Outlook
Why Community Composting Is Critical To California’s Infrastructure — BioCycle, February 20, 2023
Transcript
| Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Across the country, the community composting movement is growing. Small-scale composting provides communities immediate opportunities for reducing waste, improving local soil, creating jobs, and fighting climate change. You’re listening to the Composting for Community Podcast where we’ll bring you stories from the people doing this work on the ground and in the soil. | | Welcome back to the Composting for Community Podcast. I’m Linda Bilsens Brolis of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Composting for Community Initiative. In this episode, I talk to Kourtni Brown, founder and director of Common Compost, a community focused food scrap recycling and composting service provider in Oakland, California. | | Kourtni is also a founding member, acting president and CEO of the California Alliance for Community Composting. The CACC is a coalition of community composters that form to strengthen, protect, and develop small and medium-scale composting projects across California while supporting and empowering the communities they serve. | | In 2020, the CACC secured a major win for community composting in the state. They, in collaboration with the People, Food and Land Foundation were awarded a one and a half million dollar grant from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery to pilot the Community Composting for Green Spaces Program. | | This episode offers a deep dive into the impact assessment of the program’s two-year pilot, which measured not only the organics diversion potential of community composting, but also a number of unique co-benefits that frequently go unaccounted for in conventional waste diversion initiatives. Kourtni lays out how this impressive program demonstrates that community composting is a wise, cross-cutting investment for California that can also serve as a model for communities around the country. Let’s dive in. | | Hello, folks. I’m joined now by Kourtni Brown. Welcome, Kourtni. | | Kourtnii Brown: | Thank you. Thanks for having me. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | So great to have you here. I want to talk to you about the California Alliance for Community Composting, but before we do that, I wanted to talk to you about your personal relationship with composting. How did you get started? What got you hooked? That kind of thing. | | Kourtnii Brown: | Yeah, sure. Well, it was the worms. I come from a background in environmental policy and I was on a work trip in Sri Lanka and actually saw municipal composting being done on a large scale with worms. And I immediately came home and asked my roommate if she would be interested in starting a worm bin on her back stairwell for composting our own food material at home, and she was totally in. And when I saw how easy it was, I was like, “We need to be sharing this idea with more people.” | | It started by actually doing the composting itself and trying to take it outside of my own home and do it more in my community, then we realized very quickly we needed a much bigger worm bin in order to handle that volume. Then I became more into manufacturing, building flow-through worm bin systems and started my own enterprise called Common Compost and worked on just building bins and trying to get them out into areas of our community where they would be best utilized. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | What a cool way to get started. Seeing composting abroad also got me hooked. I feel like in so many other parts of the world, localized composting is just so normal and the simple utility of it just seems so much clearer. And you come back to the US and our waste management systems seem so much bigger and more convoluted. So how did you grow Common Compost into what it is now? | | Kourtnii Brown: | I was working for a international development organization and I quit my position in the fall of 2014 to really take the leap and pursue, develop Common Compost. So I entered a hackathon, it was called Living the New Economy. It was coming up with sustainable business ideas that really could start to begin solving real issues in our communities on a whole wide scale of things that made them more economically resilient. | | So I took waste management as the topic that was most inspiring to me, and in that, food waste as part of an issue that is really compounding climate change and trying to look at how our own community was really managing that stream of material. So I won the hackathon part of it. It actually included a scholarship to Optima Business Bootcamp, which was a social entrepreneurship bootcamp for building out business ideas in this way. | | I really took Common Compost through the year of 2015, just to learn how to have organizational development behind an idea and to see where it could go, if it was profit driving. I think in this all, I made a lot of friends who were also community composters. | | So that process in the year of 2015 and into 2016 of trying to launch this business, we started running into some political barriers. And so I went back to those friends and asked them, “Did you deal with this during your organizational development as well?” | | And then found out we actually had a lot of the same political barriers in common. So formed just an unincorporated alliance to go to our local city councils, to go to state agencies, and just ask for a little bit more protections in the work that community-based organizations are doing to recover this material as a local resource. This is about between the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2017. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | What a journey for Common Compost. And in addition to running your own business, you’re also serving as the CEO of the California Alliance for Community Composting. How did that come about? | | Kourtnii Brown: | In the spring of 2017, the US Composting Council held their annual conference in Los Angeles and I applied for a scholarship through the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to attend that conference. And that’s actually where I met most of these folks in person for the first time, including Michael Martinez of LA Compost. We had a informal gathering to discuss how we could better work together in the State of California for our common goals, and that little evening soiree was the beginning of the California Alliance for Community Composting. | | For the next two years, we started showing up as individuals and as a cohort to workshops and working groups on SB 1383, the California State legislation that works to reduce short-term climate pollutants, methane being one of those. So that’s how it’s tied into food waste and food waste diversion. | | Really understanding how best to educate our policymakers to really understand that the solution is solvable at all scales, and this is an area where we’re working and this is what we’re doing and these are our benefits and impacts. And that as they considered roll-outs and general regulations that they considered in that, protections for small-scale and community-based operations. | | But understanding that we really couldn’t come together as an unincorporated alliance and advocate for common goals when a lot of us are farmers and gardeners and composters. We’re not policy makers, we’re certainly not lawyers. So just having the language once we got a seat at the table to effectively discuss what makes good policy for composters. It was really training our own folks to be able to have those dialogues as well as to have the dialogues themselves. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Yes, it’s so important, learning how to take a seat at the table and then also knowing what to do with it. It seems like your collective efforts have really carved out support for community composting within the state. It’s so impressive. | | On that note, let’s turn to an interesting and inspiring project that the CACC has been undertaking, the Community Composting for Green Spaces Program. Please tell us about it. | | Kourtnii Brown: | It’s the first ever of its kind pilot program that was funded by the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. This is the state agency primarily tasked with drafting the regulations and administering the implementation of Senate Bill 1383. | | So as we sat at these tables and we negotiated for these protections, we also asked for financial investments in small-scale activities primarily because we’re so good at community education and outreach. So it turns out basically that our policy advocacy was quite effective and CalRecycle did dedicate some investment in small-scale solutions. So they ran a pilot program that was released in December of 2019. | | So at this point in time, none of the individual organizations and enterprises that were part of CACC could actually access this grant opportunity. You had to be 501(c)(3) nonprofit or you had to actually be a registered business entity, and I think a lot of us were still operating under the radar. | | So we decided to get a fiscal sponsor that was willing to accept, if we were to get the grant award, to accept the funding and allow us to actually administer the grant program as a conglomerate of organizations. Those original organizations were LA Compost with Michael Martinez, the Integrative Development Initiative with Elinor Cescenzi, we have Soilify with Lynn Fang, and myself as Common Compost. | | So we all got together and we wrote the winning proposal for the first pilot round of Community Composting for Green Spaces, where we really got to design how a state agency would be able to effectively, financially, and technically support community-based organizations to take on doing some of this diversion to reach the state’s targets. | | Community Composting for Green Spaces launched in October of 2020, and we all worked collaboratively with a expert advisory group of 12 additional individuals to create programming which was not only responsive to the needs of these communities, but was able to strengthen, empower, and protect the project works. And to learn something too about the best models, about best practices, about our impacts at this level, and be able to tell that story for the first time on a coordinated statewide level. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow, it’s super impressive. Could you talk to us about the impact of the programs to date? | | Kourtnii Brown: | With the Community Composting for Green Spaces, we took about six months to do community outreach to identify the groups that were going to work with us, to train them, and to work on their project site designs, installation, and launching them. | | So when everybody finally got up and running, it was September of 2021. For the next 18 months, we tracked key performance metrics at each site. We gathered and analyzed data on diversion, trees planted, jobs, tasks, and hours worked, and also the compost produced. | | Operators were using simple Google forms at first to do this data, but we also worked with the leadership team at Epic Renewal to begin the development of software and hardware that will be open sourced application for handheld devices that aims at making this data tracking on those core key metrics we need for every site, not only in our program, but it really helps with key development indicators in any compost hub. | | And then at 10 of the select sites we also worked with, WeRadiate to do remote sensing technology to start measuring key metrics on compost quality itself, so temperature, moisture, oxygen levels. And Lynn Fang also conducted a pre and post soil quality analysis at a dozen of the select locations to help measure the effectiveness of compost application on soil health. And Elinor Cescenzi and a team of contractors also conducted community compost hub health assessments. | | And this was basically to begin looking at all the other co-benefits that happen here outside of just diversion. So economic resilience, food systems, organizational capacity, community education, and also overcoming barriers to use of green spaces, genuinely looking at compost hubs as a way to overcome unhealthy and unjust systems and inspire places where people can come and to gather and to learn and to benefit, and also to walk away with good, healthy and nutritious fresh produce. | | We supported 12.5 full-time jobs through the course of the program. That boiled down to about 9 full-time jobs every quarter. These were folks who were from disadvantaged and low-income communities working at projects that were stewarded within those communities, owned, operated, and supported by those communities as well. The jobs were shown to be fun and fulfilling and engaging and really helped bring in over thousands of volunteers to put hands-on work into these projects. | | And so when those happen, I think the biggest benefit of what is going on in the community composting world is they go home to their house and they do a much better job with source separation and with diverting that material in whatever the municipal solid waste service system that is happening back at home. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | That’s a great point. And overall, you outlined a lot of co-benefits of community composting that I think are frequently overlooked. | | We’ll be right back after a really short break. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please consider supporting our work with a donation by going to ilsr.org/donate. Your donations make this show and all the work we do here at ILSR possible. Visit ilsr.org/donate to make your contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And if you’re looking for other ways to support us, consider rating or leaving a review of this show wherever you listen to your podcast. These reviews help us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening. And now back to the show. | | So you just touched on some co-benefits of community composting that you observed through the green spaces pilot, those that relate to job creation and chronically underserved communities, meaningful community engagement and education and access to green spaces. Could you speak a bit more on what you observed as to the cost-effectiveness of community composting as it relates to waste diversion? | | Kourtnii Brown: | Oh, yes. Thank you for this question. I am really excited to dive into these numbers in a little bit more detail. For the 18 months when sites were actively composting, we supported 117 projects and we spent about $930,000 on 109 of those project sites that actually reported diversion. They reported 10.5 million pounds between food material and green material diverted from landfills in California. That boils down to 5,233 tons. That is equivalent to taking 200 cars off the road for one year. | | So we’re really proud of the greenhouse gas emission reductions that we were able to accomplish through this program. But I think there is another layer of the onion that we need to peel back here with the cost investments at a decentralized and small-scale level. And that’s if you look at the work that was being done at these 109 project sites and the amount of material that was diverted through them, it cost us $178 per ton of material in operations, equipment, and providing all of the other community co-benefits like farming, volunteer engagement, and education to manage that amount of material. | | And I think this is a very cost-effective and competitive price point for diverting organics from landfill. Because if you look at California right now and what the state has projected that it will cost to meet their very ambitious diversion target, which is 75% reduction by 2025, that’s next year, and we are nowhere close to meeting this goal. | | California has projected that it will cost them $17.4 billion to build about 85 centralized facilities in order to divert 26.8 million pounds annually from landfills. But if we were to take just 1% of that projected $17.4 billion and we invested it in decentralized-scale solutions in combination still with the larger-scale solutions. So for 1% that is equivalent to $174 million. | | Now taking the data that came out of this pilot project, let’s round up to spending $1 million on 100 projects per year and we’ll round down with our total diversion to 5,000 tons per year. So for $1 million, you get 100 projects and you get 5,000 tons. These are very good even numbers to use. | | So with that math, if we had 5,000 tons for every $1 million invested and we were to take 1% of the 17.4 billion, so that’s 174 million, we would be able to divert 870,000 tons of material for just 1% investment. But if you look at 870,000 tons as a percentage of the 26.8 million in total that needs to get diverted annually, that turns out to be 3.25% of California’s annual capacity needed to do this work. So for 1% investment, you get a 3% capacity return. | | Now if we take even the next layer of the onion and we look at what it costs to divert that amount of pounds, the average for commercial operators in California today is $374 per ton of material, to move it and to take it to centralized facilities. But for ours, it cost us $178 per ton of organics to move that material. Included in that cost is the equipment itself, is also labor, and is also these co-benefits. | | So we’re looking at a capacity return of 1% of investment to 3.25% of the capacity, but we’re also looking at a price point return of 1/3 the cost of a commercial operator to provide the same services for a jurisdiction. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow, that all is super compelling. Can you help us understand how all that translates to greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential of community composting? | | Kourtnii Brown: | Yes, absolutely. So we are a two for one deal in this aspect because we divert the material. And so, we get a metric ton of CO2 equivalent in greenhouse gas emission reduction just from diversion, but we also create compost and we apply it right there at the sites where we are diverting the material. So we get an additional greenhouse gas benefit from putting organic matter on the ground, making that soil healthier so that it can actually hold more carbon and draw more carbon out of the atmosphere. | | So with this program at 109 of those sites, they were able to produce 4,420 cubic yards of compost and apply it on site or distribute it in their very local network of community gardens and parks. We also planted 488 trees in these compost hubs to green spaces. Most of them were fruit bearing trees, so also to feed people. And that afforded us an additional 3 million metric tons of CO2e over a 40-year period too. | | So if you really look at what our price per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent for diverting material at a community compost hub where you’re also greening the spaces and growing food, we drop down to $353 per metric ton of CO2e. That’s diversion, trees, and compost application. | | I think it’s also relevant to note that these impact stats haven’t yet taken into consideration the additional GHG emissions avoided from composting locally in terms of the foregone vehicle miles traveled in order to divert the same material at far away compost facilities that are usually located outside of this 200 mile sustainability radius. | | So when we’re looking at the cost to human health for cleaner air and by decreasing truck congestion on the roads and the maintenance for those roads, these externality costs would actually make us even more cost-effective. The cost of these externalities actually make our programs that much more beneficial for local investments. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow. That’s really why I was so excited to talk to you because you have data to back up the benefits that we often tout as being associated with community composting, such as their being more cost-effective and being quicker to bring online and getting all these co-benefits that go with that you might overlook if you’re just focusing on bigger, more centralized infrastructure. It’s just really exciting that you have this great data to back that up. | | So now, if another community in another part of the country was looking to replicate something like the Community Composting for Green Spaces Program, what would you recommend? | | Kourtnii Brown: | Great question. If you look at the outcomes of this pilot program and all 109 of those sites were able to maintain their current diversion levels and we were to just continue to invest $1 million annually into the sites themselves, we estimate that we could collectively continue to divert about 7 million pounds a year, produce 2,750 cubic yards of compost a year, reduce emissions by 550 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, so almost 200 cars off the road a year. And we would achieve another million metric tons from applying that yummy compost to local gardens and farms and also 35 full-time equivalent jobs. | | So this means it is more cost-effective for every dollar that you invest in waste diversion to be directed towards developing community-scale solutions across all states and all municipalities, because community composting provides three times more throughput capacity for every dollar spent. And because our costs also include jobs for at least two years, local compost hubs, access to education, access to green space, healthy compost, healthy soil, and healthy food. | | So I think how that boils down at a local level is by investing just $1 million of any county or any city’s budget today to support launching a decentralized network, about 100 community-based projects in public green spaces, low cost diversion capacity can be accomplished in under two years, and it can be sustained for many more. And in some rural counties, it could provide the solution that would meet total capacity needed to reach zero waste goals. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Awesome. That seems like it should be attainable for many communities around the country, especially with support from the EPA and the USDA. | | At this point, what are some of your goals for the coming year, whether it’s for you personally or for CACC? | | Kourtnii Brown: | So we were the successful award recipients for the second round of this program, CCGS-2. It will run July 2023 through April 2025. CalRecycle invested an additional $5 million in the program. They are allocating a specific $510,000 for tribal entities to do this program as their tribal nations, and then the other 4.5 million for community-based groups. So CACC the successful award recipient in seven of the eight regions. So even though we will be coordinating it statewide, it is very much now broken down into a regional program. | | My focus is, the next 20 months, to really take what we started during the first round of Community Composting for Green Spaces and apply it with that nuanced regional level where the sites that are launched, the technical support that we offer, and the regional coordinators who are shepherding these participants through the program really get very localized, but still having the access and the benefits to statewide knowledge networks and statewide training opportunities. | | We’re really moving this program from state level down into the regional level. And then we can expand there and then hopefully focus that even further down into the city and to the local level. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Well, that’s super exciting. I’m looking forward to following that trajectory, and it sounds like you all continue to create a model that can hopefully be exported elsewhere. | | At this point, any other thoughts or words of wisdom specifically for composters and advocates looking to secure funding for the community composting efforts? | | Kourtnii Brown: | Yes. There are several state and federal funding opportunities for compost programs that are related to more than just food material diversion to qualify for these activities such as climate mitigation grants, healthy soils initiative, sustainable cities networks, city urban greening programs, habitat conservation, and food rescue grants. So a lot of way, all of these are very related to food treated as a resource that needs to be recovered to create more food. | | So it’s really important to begin educating your policymakers or engaging with those agencies that are offering these funding opportunities as early as possible, letting them know what you do for your work, how that is related to these programs and whatnot. And then secondarily, applying for those grants and those opportunities. The more the community composters are able to be eligible and also show up for contracting, bidding, and RFA processes with large-scale agencies, the more that we can start funneling these resources into growing this network and strengthening this network. | | A lot of that is maybe first starting with yourself, educating yourself on just how to have a grant language, policy language, how to go to state agencies, how to make introductions. But then once you’re there, to really talk from your heart about the work that you do so that you can create a space for you to be able to work in those areas and those opportunities. | | All too often, I think that they are designed and geared towards having large-scale, one-size-fits-all models, for-profit models, and that can make it really hard and create a lot of barriers just to get access to these opportunities. Before they’re even designed, it’s really important to be part of that process. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | That’s fabulous and very much resonates with our experience. And I think once policymakers who might not be familiar with the composting space, get to see what community composters bring to the table, when they really understand the roles that community composters and other community-based enterprises play. That changes the understanding of what you really are getting as part of that package. | | It might seem easier to go with one big project that you have to keep track of, but you’re missing out on this opportunity for all these other co-benefits. And I think that the data that you all have calculated from your project really can help other community composters make these points or policy makers in their own communities. | | So to close, I wanted to ask if you have any advice or lessons learned for composters that are just getting started in this space or something that’s inspired you along your path? | | Kourtnii Brown: | Well, I would say compost is very forgiving when you’re learning. The decomposition process by nature is a very slow process, so sometimes it can make that learning very slow, and sometimes mistakes can be made and corrections to those mistakes do take some time. | | It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of because after you really meet your own best practices, you can take it to this next level of craft compost and this level of quality where we can control every input and every part of the output when we do it in such small batches that it really becomes like a family member, an extension of yourself. You get very sentimental about your compost piles. | | So just to remember that the compost pile itself is a really loving, forgiving, accepting, and nurturing, and also giving part of your life. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | That’s a beautiful way of thinking about a compost pile. I love that. Kourtni, thank you so much for taking time from your very busy schedule to tell us about your work and the Community Composting for Green Spaces Program. And just I’m super excited to see what you guys do next. | | Kourtnii Brown: | Yes. Thank you so much, Linda, for having me. Thank you for the support from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. They’ve not only been a mentor and an inspiration to a lot of what we’re trying to create as well. So very grateful for this partnership and wonderful to talk to you again. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Drew Birschbach and ILSR’s composting team. Our theme music is I Don’t Know from Grapes. Be sure to check out the rest of the ILSR podcast family, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and Community Broadband Bits at ilsr.org. |
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSListen to this episode, then check out more episodes of the Composting for Community Podcast.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. For monthly updates on our work, sign up for our ILSR general newsletter.
If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at info@ilsr.org.
Audio Credit: I Dunno by Grapes. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Image: Desert Compost Volunteers, SURF Farm Smart Stack Build Demonstration, University of Redlands
Image Credit: Inez Gonzalez
What do we lose when we no longer have control over what happens to the waste we produce? In this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, we speak to Melissa Corichi of Let It Rot, a community composting business in Palm Beach County in South Florida. Melissa has been operating her business since 2015 with the aim of diverting waste in her local community, growing food, and protecting the environment. Her business, however, has been put in jeopardy due to the two incinerators in her county run by the local Solid Waste Authority (SWA). Because of local laws, the SWA claims complete jurisdiction over all waste generated in the county, effectively disallowing the recycling of organic materials beyond the backyard scale. The result: Let It Rot is closing its doors.
We talk about:
- How the need to feed the local incinerators is preventing meaningful waste diversion efforts in Palm Beach County.
- How local rules eliminate the freedom of its residents to choose how the waste they generate is managed.
- Melissa’s call for support and the needs community composters face when advocating for policy changes that challenge monopoly power over waste.
- The power of community composting to empower a diverse array of community-based initiatives while building social capital.
We also provide a brief primer on incineration in the US, including an overview of the impacts of incineration on communities where they are built. We close with a list of actions that we all can take: some to help Melissa in her current battle, some to prevent this from happening in other communities.
“Your only choice is to have the SWA take all your trash and the SWA burns all of the organic trash – so unfortunately all of these people are forced to support a system that they don’t believe in.”
“I work with a lot of different kinds of people from a lot of different kinds of backgrounds, and they all have different political beliefs and spiritual beliefs and jobs and careers and lifestyles. And one thing that they’ve all been able to bond over and agree upon is that composting is very important, not only for the sake of keeping trash out of the landfill or not feeding our incinerator, but also for the purposes of organic gardening, organic food, and soil building.”
– Melissa Corichi
Related ResourcesLet it Rot Website
Let it Rot Petition
Let it Rot GoFundMe
“Tell Me About: Waste Incineration in Florida,” Florida Museum (2022)
“Turning garbage to electricity: An early look at a monster incinerator,” Palm Beach Post (2016)
“Florida solidifies its status as the nation’s waste-to-energy capital with supportive new law,” Waste Dive (2022)
Renewable Energy Facility 1, Palm Beach County Solid Waste Authority (accessed Sept 2023)
“Burned: Why Waste Incineration Is Harmful,” NDRC (2021)
“Florida Recycling Statutes and Rules,” Florida Department of Environmental Protection (accessed Sept 2023)
“Report: Waste Incineration: A Dirty Secret in How States Define Renewable Energy,” ILSR (2018)
“Waste incinerators undermine clean energy goals,” Neil Tangri (2023)
“Revealed: 1.6m Americans live near the most polluting incinerators in the US,” The Guardian (2019)
“Energy Recovery from the Combustion of Municipal Solid Waste,” EPA (accessed Sept 2023)
“Anti-Garbage Incineration Around the Globe, A Review,” ILSR (2018)
“The fight against Detroit’s controversial waste incinerator hits home for Ahmina Maxey,” University of Michigan, Detroit (2019)
Detroit Organics Recycling, Detroit City Council Green Taskforce (accessed Sept 2023)
“Local composting business, ‘Let it Rot’ shut down by Solid Waste Authority,” ABC 25 WPBF News, September 29, 2023.
Transcript
| Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Across the country, the community composting movement is growing. Small scale composting provides communities immediate opportunities for reducing waste, improving local soil, creating jobs, and fighting climate change. You’re listening to the Composting for Community Podcast, where we’ll bring you stories from the people doing this work on the ground and in the soil. | | Welcome back to the Composting for Community Podcast. I’m Linda Bilsens Brolis of the Institute for Local Self Alliances Composting for Community Initiative, and in this episode I talked to Melissa Corichi of Let It Rot, a community composting business in Palm Beach County in south Florida. Melissa started Let it Rot in 2015 to accomplish food scraps from her community and support local efforts to divert waste, grow food, and protect the environment, but the county is also home to two separate waste incinerators. Last year, Let it Rot and its partner organizations began receiving threats of steep daily fines, supposedly stealing material from the county’s solid waste authority and Florida Power and Light, an electric utility that uses the power generated from the trash burned in the incinerators. | | Because of state and local laws, the solid waste authority claims complete jurisdiction over all waste generated in the county. Effectively, this allowing the recycling of organic materials beyond the backyard scale. The result, Let it Rot is closing its doors. This is a story of how incinerator are directly at odds with meaningful waste reduction efforts, eliminating our freedom to choose how the waste we generate is managed. I just want to add a gentle warning here, that while the episode is a little heavier than our others, we close with positive actions that anyone can take, so stay tuned. | | Hello folks. I’m here with Melissa Corichi, owner of Let it Rot, worm farm and community compost in South Florida. Thanks for joining us, Melissa. | | Melissa Corichi: | Thank you for having me. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | We’re going to get into the details of the challenges you’re facing as a community composter, but first tell us about Let It Rot and about your community in Palm Beach County. | | Melissa Corichi: | I got started with Let It Rot back in 2015. It was actually a project for a class I was taking in college called Social Entrepreneurship, and we were challenged to come up with some sort of business that would compliment our nonprofit partner, and our nonprofit partner that semester was the Palm Beach County Food Bank, which is this massive warehouse for food recovery, sorting and distribution to the food pantry network that we have here in Palm Beach County. When we went there, what I noticed right away was there was tons and tons of produce donations that were all over ripe or already too rotten to be redistributed and they were just getting thrown away. In fact, they said that they were throwing away over 20,000 pounds of organics a year, just part of the sorting process that they were going through and what kind of food they were allowed to redistribute. | | I had this bright idea to compost the produce, make some soil, and then trade that with the farmers who were donating the produce for more food donations. I applied for a grant and I ended up getting offered about $25,000 to start the program, so I did. I built a worm bin in one of the sheds of the food bank and started diverting some of the rotten produce to the worm bin that I had in the shed of the food bank. I ended up, I think diverting about 7,000 pounds of produce scraps the first year that I worked. I was not good at worm farming and I didn’t make hardly any soil. It wasn’t really a successful venture. The food bank did not want to keep working with me, but I kind of fell in love with the composting process and the idea of recovering these resources. | | I heard about the community composting movement and decided to launch my own little pilot pickup route and I offered free pickups to a couple of people in the community I was living in on a weekly basis. From that pilot program, I started accepting real customers. I started collecting customers at about $10 a month and eventually my prices increased all the way up to $16 a month, which is what my residents pay right now, but I went from having 10 free customers to having over 100 subscribers to my community compost pickup program. I tried to work with my community as much as possible and found this incredible urban farm in downtown West Palm Beach called Urban Growers at the Henrietta Bridge Farm, and I built my first little public compost station there and I got to start working with some people in the community. It was a low income community food desert, which is why that space got funded to grow food. | | I met a lot of young people who had no experience with farming or nature growing food, and they started helping me run my community compost. I taught them how to do the compost. I got them washing all those buckets for me right away. Unfortunately, when COVID happened, the community garden was temporarily shut down and it ended up getting defunded and closed down. That brought me to a place where I had no land and was hauling a thousand pounds of food scraps a week with nowhere to compost it, so I launched a compost program where I met a lot of homesteaders and gardeners in my community and I taught them all how to compost. Instead of bringing the compost to a central location and composting it every day, I would go to a new person’s house and help them do the compost that afternoon and inspire them to build their soil and do better and grow organically. | | From there, eventually I bought my own place and I started composting on my own piece of property, which is where I’m at now. The business has kind of iterated through the community a couple different ways. I have a bunch of zero wasters and people who are on their own personal mission of sustainability that I’ve met through great community resources that I’ve worked with or worked for in the past. We have a package free grocery store that I met a lot of these people at. I work with this awesome community center for the immigrant community to find them jobs and place them in legal jobs, and I’ve done some work with them. They have a community garden as well. I have the urban farm in downtown West Palm Beach, and I’ve gotten to meet so many different people who I call the green community and bring them together with this shared love of the environment and sustainability. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | That’s such a great overview of the many evolutions that you’ve made as a business and how you’ve adapted as you’ve gotten to know your community in a more intimate way. That’s so cool that you’ve been engaging such a diverse array of community members, which is I think pretty typical of the community composting movement, so thanks for laying that out for us. Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room, the Palm Beach County Solid Waste Authority, which now has two incinerators in the county. The newest one which opened in 2015, I believe, it was the first incinerator to be built in the US in almost 20 years, and the biggest capital project ever in Palm Beach County at over $600 million. Wow. | | Melissa Corichi: | Just call it the Billion Dollar Waste to Energy Plant because so much funding went into this facility because in Palm Beach County’s eyes, the first facility that they built the same year that I started the business was a huge success to them. Between the two facilities, I think they can power about 80,000 homes in our community. I first got in trouble with the solid waste authority because I’m taking organics out of the waste stream, and they burn organics for energy here. I was served my first cease and desist letter in April of 2022. I was basically told that I’m not a registered entity with the solid waste authority and I need to be a registered subcontractor in order to work in the waste hauling and processing industry. | | When I explained what a small business I was and what kind of numbers I was doing and that according to the state law I didn’t need to register with them just yet because I wasn’t in a position where I needed to be regulated with the amount of waste I was processing, they told me flat out that organics recycling isn’t allowed in Palm Beach County due to something called the Flow Code. The Flow Code is the direction that they send different waste streams to the different facilities in Palm Beach County, and all of the organics are sent to our waste to energy plants. Between the two, they can burn almost 2 million pounds of trash annually. I process under 100,000 pounds of waste annually. I think the biggest numbers I’ve done so far was about 80,000 pounds last year, which was a huge feat for me because the year before I only did like 50,000 pounds, and I do all of my composting backyard composting style. No equipment, with a pitchfork in a pile. | | Right now we’re doing a lot of trench composting so I don’t have to turn my piles, but the Solid Waste Authority, when they were initially funded with this project to build these waste to energy plants, they were also given the privilege of writing all the laws about trash and how it’s handled here in Palm Beach County. The Solid Waste Authority decided to very blatantly claim that all trash here in Palm Beach County is property of theirs, so the cease and desist that I was getting essentially was telling me that I’m stealing from the Solid Waste Authority from Palm Beach County and from FPL, and that’s where they’ve been coming at me continuously to shut down my operation. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow. ILSR has a long history of helping to fight proposed incinerators. Back in the 80s, I guess in early 90s when that was still sort of a trend, I’d always heard that once an incinerator gets built, that community is basically locked into feeding that incinerator because it’s such a big investment. I know in the case of the newest one in Palm Beach County, it’s like a 20-year loan that has to be paid back, and that’s paid back by the rate payers. Basically it’s locking in the county and the residents of the county into using that incinerator. I just think this is such a poignant example of what happens in terms of the control of that material and the lack of choice. Where has this put you and your business at this point? | | Melissa Corichi: | It’s put me in a really uncomfortable position where I’ve had to make some really difficult choices about what I’m going to do and the future for myself and the future of Let it Rot. I have tried to advocate for myself. I’ve been to many county commissioner board meetings. I worked with one of our state legislators, Rick Roth, to try to talk with the county about the difficulties that they were placing on me and my business, and I was not really able to get any sort of permission or right to work. I wasn’t able to get any sort of exemption from the laws here. | | I have talked to a lot of other businesses that operate the same way I do that are in different counties of Florida, and I know up in Orlando, O-Town Compost was able to get an exemption from the laws there that were preventing them from being able to keep working. I tried to take that route and didn’t get anywhere. I talked to Renewable down in Broward County who is also facing some potential dangers with a waste to energy plant that’s being put into Broward County. Maybe it’s just proposed. It hasn’t been voted on or funded just yet, and they’re looking at adopting all of the same laws in Palm Beach County in Broward County, which would essentially put their businesses out of business as well. I purchased property with the intention of running Let it Rot off of the property that I purchased and live off of, and now I’m in the uncomfortable situation where I can’t update my business address and my personal address because I have the county looking for me to shut down my operations. | | When I first started getting the cease and desist letters from Palm Beach County, they actually sent regulators out to all of the businesses that I had listed on my website as partners that I work with and told these businesses that they were operating illegal transfer stations and they would be subjected to fines of $500 a day for every day they continue to keep working with me. A lot of these businesses are small businesses like my own and decided that it wasn’t worth that kind of risk to continue working for me, so I had to watch these sustainability initiatives disappear and these people who really wanted to do better for the environment and for their community lose that opportunity to do so because there is no countywide composting alternative that’s offered here. Your only choice is to have SWA haul your trash, and the SSA burns all of the organic trash here. Unfortunately, all of these people are forced to support a system that they don’t believe in. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please consider supporting our work with a donation by going to ilsr.org/donate. Your donations make this show and all the work we do here at ILSR possible. Visit ilsr.org/donate to make your contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. If you’re looking for other ways to support us, consider rating or leaving a review of the show wherever you listen to your podcast. These reviews help us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and now back to the show. | | It’s an example of once an incinerator is built, it disincentivizes or crushes in this instance any significant efforts towards diversion, but that’s on top of the other environmental and public health impacts that an incinerator has, which we won’t cover here, but we can add some information on that for those that need it in the show notes below. What do you think is being lost when a community composters such as yourself is no longer able to operate the benefits that you provided, the diverse communities that you were working with? Can you tell us your thoughts about that? | | Melissa Corichi: | Well, I work with a lot of different kinds of people from a lot of different kinds of backgrounds and they all have different political beliefs and spiritual beliefs and jobs and careers and lifestyles. One thing that they’ve all been able to bond over and agree upon is that composting is very important not only for the sake of keeping trash out of the landfill or not feeding our incinerator in this case, but also for the purposes of organic gardening, organic food, soil building. Most of the customers who find me believe in clean eating and a clean environment and not using pesticides and herbicides and things like that that poison our local environment. | | Palm Beach County is an area of Florida that’s incredibly beautiful. We have a lot of natural landscapes. The ocean is right here. One thing that’s really important to everybody here that’s a continual crisis on almost an annual basis is the blue-green algae blooms that we have as a result of the fertilizers that are used in agriculture here. For those of you who aren’t very familiar with Palm Beach County and how our agriculture industry works, we grow a ton of food here in Florida. Corn and sugar are some of the biggest things that we grow and we use a ton of fertilizer every year in order to grow that stuff. | | That fertilizer rinses into our groundwater and eventually drains into this big lake in the center of the state called Lake Okeechobee. Lake Okeechobee has been designed by the Army Corp engineers to have floodgates on either side of it. Annually as the rains come in and the water in Lake Okeechobee starts to really rise, they have to drain Lake Okeechobee a little bit and release the water from Lake Okeechobee out either direction into either the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. Something that happens as a result of doing that is the nitrification of our waterways, our intracoastals and our oceans. We have hundreds of thousands of animals, fish seabirds and other stuff that depend on that ecosystem that die every year because of these releases that we do. | | Something that’s very important to everybody here in Palm Beach County is figuring out a way to end that and composting and creating living soils and practicing more regenerative methods of growing and farming are high priorities to the community here, especially the green community, which is the people I’ve brought together with my business. In shutting me down and preventing me on such a small scale to make soils locally that are healthier and can be used in a more sustainable way to grow food is just squashing that whole industry from potentially popping up and helping solve a huge problem that we have with no immediate solution. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Yeah. It’s devastating. At a time when we really need to be rallying to make those kinds of changes and we need to be composting more, not less, and we need less pollution, not more. | | Melissa Corichi: | In Florida, at least around here, we don’t have real good dirt. We have something called sugar sand, and sugar sand is what it sounds like. It’s just sand. You go to dig a hole and it’s like digging a hole at the beach. It just continues to fill itself back in. There’s no organic matter to our soil to help hold moisture and nutrients, so the landscape is becoming more and more desolate as these inorganic growing practices are being applied. One thing that I can teach people right away with doing all the composting I’ve been doing is how important organic matter is to the soil, and it’s so easy to see the difference with the quality of soil that we have here to begin with that it has been pretty easy to convince people to start composting with me or learn how to compost with my compost program because of the results that I’ve gotten in my own garden and the gardens that I’ve worked with for other people. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | You’re also empowering people to take an active role in their immediate lives in an immediate environment instead of having to wait for bigger efforts to take root. It’s a way to empower folks that’s being squashed at this point, so very sorry to hear that. At this point, what would you say your plans for the future look like? | | Melissa Corichi: | I’ve made the very difficult choice to shut down all my operations. These next two weeks are the last two weeks that I’ll be doing pickups for all my residential subscribers. I have to move on with beginning my life in my new home, and I haven’t been able to do that because I’ve had to hide what I’m doing here from the county to avoid getting these fines and repercussions of the work that I’ve been doing. I made the choice to go into a completely different industry. I studied this year and I got licensed to sell insurance. I essentially asked myself what is an industry I could go into where I could still help people and where I could make a much better living than what I’ve been able to do working in the compost industry, and I had an opportunity to learn insurance and start working in that field. | | I would be lying if I said that some of the intention to have a bigger income wasn’t to be able to afford the legal help that I need in order to go up against the county and try to fight for the right to compost here. As far as Let it Rot goes, it’s always been a very grassroots operation. I’ve made a living off of it, but I have never had the resources to really reinvest and grow the business and scale it up into something bigger. The trouble I got in with the county kind of prevented me from wanting to take out a loan or go into debt to grow the business or fight for the business to stay open and potentially devastate myself in the home that I’m living in. I wish that I would have gone the nonprofit route when I got started because that would open me up to more funding opportunities and better resources where maybe I could have fought the government a little bit better and had a little bit more support in doing so. | | The only reason I never did is because I lost my partnership with the Community Garden who was a functioning nonprofit that allowed me to work under their nonprofit tax identification, and I lost all of the staff and help and support along with having that space. I went from having a ton of volunteers and a ton of people that I was paying to help me too to not being in that community anymore and not having any of those human resources that I used to have. All of the day-to-day of running Let it Rot fell on me. I am driving all of my pickup routes. I am doing all of the compost every week. I’m washing all of the buckets every weekend and getting myself together to go haul another thousand pounds of compostable waste the following week. | | It just became too much to keep up with while trying to advocate for myself and fight for my right to keep operating. While continuing to run the day-to-day, I made the difficult decision to start studying in a different industry and make my graceful exit from community composting into something where I might potentially have some better resources and opportunities if Let it Rot is something I do want to turn around and continue to pursue when I do have those resources and I’m in a better place. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow. It’s just amazing to hear what you have accomplished to this point as a one woman show, and you’re facing a huge barrier that would’ve been difficult to foresee. Hindsight is 2020 to a point, but you also have no idea how things would’ve played out if you had done things differently, if you had gone the nonprofit route, for example. What at this point would you want to share with those listening who might be community composters or might be policymakers that are in communities that could be facing a similar scenario as what you’ve been dealing with? | | Melissa Corichi: | Don’t underestimate the value of a tight-knit community and some really good intentions. I feel like my entire journey with Let It Rot, I never really knew what I was signing myself up for or getting myself into, and a lot of these opportunities sort of just fell into my lap and I jumped on them. I’ve gotten to work with so many incredible business entities, NGOs, nonprofit organizations. I’ve gotten to go behind the scenes for commercial productions. I’ve gotten to work events and empower people to feel better about how much waste they’re generating at their wedding or their birthday party or their business networking meeting, and I did a lot of that on my own with just the idea that I could help these people be as sustainable as possible. Had I never been put in a situation where I had to fight the local government in order to keep working, I definitely would have never stopped composting or shut down Let it Rot. | | The feeling that I get when I inspire somebody else that they can do good in the world and they can do a little bit better by just being conscious of their impact has been one of the most rewarding things that I’ve experienced on a regular basis. I have customers that are so grateful to work with me and for all the work that I do. Customer service is never a stressful or difficult thing to go through in this industry. People are just so happy to be a part of what you’re offering and that you can help them. I would tell people not to give up and to keep working and to keep fighting and really follow their passion. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | It sounds like that’s exactly what you did and that’s a beautiful legacy that you’re leaving. If even being interrupted right now, maybe in the grand scheme of things this will be a blip, but is there any way that folks can get involved in your efforts at this point? | | Melissa Corichi: | Ideally, I can do something to change the laws around here and make Palm Beach County a little bit friendlier to initiatives like Let it Rot and community composting. I’m not going to be able to do that while running my own community composting business, but I am very interested in continuing to get to know my county officials and trying to influence them for potentially another community compost business to pop up here and offer what I was able to offer Palm Beach County. I don’t know where and how to get started doing that. Any kind of help from somebody who has maybe been through this sort of situation and has navigated themselves out of it to enable composting to happen, I would love to hear from. | | I really did try to fight and advocate for composting in Palm Beach County and unfortunately I just didn’t have enough support and resources to be heard as loud as I was shouting. I still have my website up, letitrot.org, and I am open to any conversation that anybody might have with me about how to navigate the laws here and potentially change them for a more sustainable future here. I don’t really know anything specific to ask for because I just got to a place where everything that I was doing wasn’t getting me anywhere and it was just burning me out and exhausting me, but there’s definitely a desire to change the laws here in Palm Beach County and allow community composting to be something that happens. Anybody who’s willing to help me advocate for some open laws and initiatives to change, I would love to hear from. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking time to share your story with us, to share the joys and successes that you did experience with Let It Rot and the unfortunate reality that you’re facing right now that hopefully is just the end of a chapter, but that is not the end of your Let It Rot chapter. | | Melissa Corichi: | Thank you so much for talking to me. I love to share my story and I would love to hear from anybody who has anything to say about it. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | To close out this episode, we wanted to provide a little more context for Melissa’s battle. You can also find links to more resources in the notes for this episode. Waste incineration refers to the burning of municipal solid waste which is problematic for many reasons. While today’s waste incineration technology is more sophisticated than that of the 50s, it’s highly expensive and does not adequately control toxic emissions from today’s chemically complex waste. Even new municipal waste incinerators emit toxic metals, dioxins, acid gases, and climate pollutants. And they don’t eliminate the need for a landfill, since they produce an ash residue that is toxic and must be disposed of. | | Because newer incinerators recover heat to produce steam and electricity, they are sometimes misleadingly referred to as “waste-to-energy” facilities. In reality, they are “wasted energy” plants. Burning waste is incredibly energy intensive – especially for wet organic materials like food scraps – and actually represents a net loss of energy when you account for the energy embodied in the materials being burned. It should not be considered a source of renewable energy. Despite this, many states unfortunately legally classify incineration as “renewable” in their state rules, including Florida. | | Research by ILSR and other groups shows that there are other direct impacts to communities from incineration. As we heard here, incinerators severely curtail or even eliminate meaningful recycling and composting efforts. They exacerbate environmental injustice by adding pollution to already overburdened communities. They represent huge capital investments that require cities and counties to make debt payments for decades, costs that are often footed by taxpayers. At the same time, incinerators create far fewer jobs per ton as compared to recycling and composting. | | For these reasons, resistance to the construction of new incinerators has grown over time. An estimated 300 proposed incinerators were defeated by citizen and small business coalitions in the US from the 70s to mid 90s. ILSR was directly involved in many of these battles. There has been only one new garbage incinerator built in the US since 1995… and it’s the one that’s shutting down Let It Rot. | | So what’s at stake? You heard from Melissa about the diverse set of community members and initiatives she was engaging with and empowering. And yet, The Palm Beach County SWA shut down Let It Rot for processing at most, 80,000 lbs of organics in a year out of the roughly 1.8 million TONS of waste it sends to its incinerators – that’s less than .002%. With this, they are saying that her customers don’t have the freedom to choose how the resources embedded in their waste are reinvested. | | So what can we do? If you’re considering starting any sort of waste diversion initiative or business, know what state and local laws exist before you begin, and know who your competitors are. Get involved where you can and help others get seats at decision-making tables where waste infrastructure is being planned. These rules are decided locally. They should not be written behind closed doors, especially by corporate interests. | | Prevent incinerators from being built and fight them where they exist. The recent closure of Detroit’s incinerator that resulted from a decade-long community-led campaign, shows that this is possible. Now, the city is prioritizing the development of distributed composting options. And finally, Melissa currently has a petition to get Palm Beach County’s policymakers to change local laws to allow composting, as well as a gofundme campaign to raise funds to help cover her legal costs. So, let’s get to it! | | Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Drew Birschbach and ILSR’s composting team. Our theme music is I Don’t Know from Grapes. Be Sure to check out the rest of the ILSR podcast family, including building local power, local energy rules, and community broadband bits at ilsr.org. |
*Correction: During the interview, Melissa mentions the amount of waste the Palm Beach County SWA sends to incinerators. This amount is 1.8 million tons, not pounds.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSListen to this episode, then check out more episodes of the Composting for Community Podcast.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. For monthly updates on our work, sign up for our ILSR general newsletter.
If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at info@ilsr.org.
Audio Credit: I Dunno by Grapes. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Image Credit: Melissa Corichi of Let It Rot Worm Farm & Community Compost
What role does composting play in subverting barriers to local food sovereignty? In this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, we are joined by Khari Diop, an environmental educator, food security activist, and fifth-generation food grower from Atlanta. Khari is the founder and CEO of ThinkGreen Inc. and the Community CompostLearning Lab Manager at the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture. Khari shares wisdom gleaned from years serving his community by designing, building, and supporting gardens and composting systems at dozens of sites around Atlanta.
We talk about:
- How intentionally designed composting sites can aid communities in overcoming barriers to food sovereignty by engaging people in the food system and regenerating soil for food production.
- The importance of access to healthy, nutritious and culturally-relevant foods to a community’s self-determination.
- How key investments in equipment, infrastructure, and community relationships can maximize the efficiency and impact of a community or on-farm composting site.
- How impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food system highlighted the need for localized systems of support.
“I think we have to be hypervigilant in ensuring that we are providing the best nutrition for ourselves, and for our children, and for our families and each other. I think if we can get to the point where we can do that on scale, then a huge pressure will be lifted off of the shoulders, and the backs, and the minds of folks. Freeing them up to figure out the next step in our evolution as a nation within a nation.”
“One of the things my grandfather used to say was…’they aren’t making any more land’…. But we do have the ability, I think, to participate in that creation process of making new land….through composting”
– Khari Diop
Related ResourcesKhari Diop on LinkedIn
Khari Diop on Instagram
ILSR’s 7th Annual Cultivating Community Composting Forum & Field Day recap (ILSR web post)
“Community Composters Grow Into a Movement” (BioCylce article)
Food Well Alliance
“ILSR’s NSR Program Replicated in Atlanta” (ILSR web post)
O2 Compost featured in Equipment for Small Compost Sites (ILSR webinar)
Urban Farm Plans Compost Knox system
Community-scale Composting Systems by James McSweeney
La Via Campesina
Transcript
| Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Across the country, the community composting movement is growing. Small scale composting provides communities immediate opportunities for reducing waste, improving local soil, creating jobs, and fighting climate change. You’re listening to the Composting for Community Podcast, where we’ll bring you stories from the people doing this work on the ground and in the soil. | | Welcome back to the Composting for Community Podcast. I’m Linda Bilsens Brolis of ILSR’s composting initiative, and in this episode, I talk to Khari Diop, a fifth generation grower from Atlanta, who’s the founder and CEO of Think Green Incorporated, a community benefit organization that connects people to the planet by redefining green space with purposeful, creative restoration and design. He’s had a hand in cultivating dozens of gardens and green spaces around Atlanta. He’s also the Community Compost Learning Lab manager at the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture, which is a longstanding Atlanta institution that trains farmers and grows fresh produce for the community. | | We talk about his evolution from a school garden educator to a farm scale, composting system designer and operator, and how composting bolsters the local food system and contributes to his mission to advance food sovereignty in his community. Let’s tune in. Hello, folks. I’m joined now by Khari Diop in Atlanta. Say hello, Khari. | | Khari Diop: | Hello, Khari. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Or, say hello to our listeners. | | Khari Diop: | What’s up everybody? How y’all doing? | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Let’s begin with you telling us about yourself, your work, and your community in Atlanta. | | Khari Diop: | Okay. My name’s Khari Diop. I’m 46. Father of three, with one on the way. I’m a Georgia native. Grew up in Southwest Atlanta, where I still primarily work in a community that I was raised in. I’m a fifth-generation grower. I’m an environmental educator, a community garden evangelist, a food security activist, and I’m the CEO of Think Green Inc. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow. What a great introduction for yourself. Congratulations, I didn’t know that. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah, thank you. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Fourth one on the way. How does composting fit into your work? | | Khari Diop: | I guess I can start from the beginning. Much of my early work was in community and school garden, like support, and gardener education. Later, kind of got into garden design and build. For the last few years, I’ve been focusing heavy on small scale, kind of farm scale, community composting activities. A huge kind of, I guess, impetus of that was introducing the compost knox system to Atlanta. Probably 2016, 2017, through the Food Well Alliance, who has now built dozens in community gardens all throughout the city. Then in 2021, I heard about a certification course in a compost facility operations management that was being offered through the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. It was led by James McSweeney of Compost Technical Services. This was kind of followed up after attending the Community Composting Conference, so when I heard about it, I jumped in the course, completed it. Once I was done with it, I volunteered to take over our community composting lab at Truly Living Well. Been doing that since 2021. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Awesome. Thanks for that rundown. That reminds me, I remember the first time that I heard your name was back in 2016. We partnered with Terra Nova Compost, with the support of the Food Well Alliance, to do a replication of our neighborhood soil builders composter training program. It was the first time I’d ever been to Atlanta. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. That was a dope organization I formed with Corrine Coe, a brother named Eugene Alala, another farmer named Chris, and Terra Nova. I think it’s still in existence. Corrine is doing her thing. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | The Atlanta community gave us a very warm welcome, so it was super cool to see that happen. | | Khari Diop: | Yep. It was amazing. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | I know you’re going to be presenting at the Cultivating Community Composting Forum in January, which is happening in conjunction with the US Composting Councils Conference and Trade Show. I know you’re going to be talking about some of the composting systems that you’ve managed there, but I was hoping you could give us a brief overview of the system that’s in play at Truly Living Well. | | Khari Diop: | Sure. We run a three bay ASP system, and then we process between three and four tons of green material per week. Primarily, it’s Georgia-grown collards coals from our local commercial farmer’s market mixed with wood chips, and those are brought in by local arborists and tree trimmers. Last year, we processed about 200 tons, and this year, we’re probably on track to do about 220. Most of what we produce goes to the farm at Truly Living Well, and a lot of it also goes to support local growers. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Well, congratulations. That’s a lot of material y’all are processing. | | Khari Diop: | It’s definitely not a light lift, and I’m a part-time person. Up until recently, it’s been 10 hours a week for me, so lot to do with a little bit of time. Recently, through the support of the Food Well Alliance, we’ve been able to hire an assistant. A brother named Walter has been super amazing help. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | That’s great to hear. Congratulations on that. I’ve been seeing, on your Instagram, a hex spin design that you’ve been working on. Can you talk about that? | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. The hex spin was inspired by Peter Moon and the O2Compost team. I learned about them, and saw one on one of the ILSR webinars and was immediately won over. It’s a two-bed ASP system. It’s replacing a compost knox that had kind of gone in disuse and disappeared at a local food forest, so I had the pleasure of being able to build that original system with a group of young folks who were going through a urban agriculture and forestry training program. Then full circle, to be asked to come back and rebuild a system was an honor. Hopefully, this one should be a little bit more easy to operate for the folks who community garden in the space. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Right, yeah. We’ll definitely include links to the Compost Knox design. It’s put out by Urban Farm Plans. Then I’ll definitely link to pictures of the hex spin system that you’re working on, just in case there’s anybody listening that doesn’t know what an ASP system is. | | Khari Diop: | Aerated static pile, meaning we use mechanical systems, machines. In our case, blowers. Bouncy house blowers to force air through the system. We have four-inch PVC pipes that are… With the hex bin, they are underneath the bins, so to speak, and with the base system at the Community Composting Lab, they’re actually running the length of the pile. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Very cool. Just basically, it keeps air flowing to help keep the compost cooking. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah, yeah. I mean what it does, it’s kind of a labor saving force multiplier. It removes the necessity of physically turning a pile by forcing air through the system, feeding all of those beneficial organisms. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Beneficial for volunteer-run projects or where projects just don’t have enough labor, so very cool. I look forward to following that. As I think you know, ILSR promotes composting for the many social, economic, and environmental benefits it provides to communities. Have you seen any of these benefits in your work? | | Khari Diop: | Really, all of them. The building of community around composting is a major one. Here in Atlanta, we have a hugely successful business called Compost Now that employs a lot of folks. One of the businesses that also drops compostables at the Community Composting Lab is [inaudible 00:08:00]. They’re a food reclamation organizations doing amazing work here in Atlanta as well. I’m on the environmental side. The diversion that we are doing is major, and Compost Now is probably doing 10 times what our numbers are. A lot of their amendment that is produced is going towards local growers and farms. A majority of what we produce in the lab is going directly into the beds at TLW, and being used to produce amazing organic veggies that are going directly to the surrounding community. All of those pieces are bolstered and enhanced by community composting. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Very cool. That leads me into my next question. You’re featured in this great video series called The Seeds of Resilience that the Food Well Alliance put out a couple years ago. It’s great. You talk about the ability to grow food as being a key, if not the key, to freedom. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. | | Khari Diop: | Well, one of the markers of maturity of an individual is the ability to provide for oneself, provide our basic needs. I think that the mark of maturity for a community and for people is that same ability. Specifically, my community. African Americans, black folks. We need that, and have needed that since time immemorial, especially since our time on this side of the water. I think we have to be hypervigilant in ensuring that we are providing the best nutrition for ourselves, and for our children, and for our families and each other. I think if we can get to the point where we can do that on scale, then a huge pressure will be lifted off of the shoulders, and the backs, and the minds of folks. Freeing them up to figure out the next step in our evolution as a nation within a nation. Yeah, I’m all about that. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | My definition of community self-reliance, definitely being able to grow your own food features very prominently. That’s actually what brought me to composting as well. I’ve heard of food sovereignty being defined as the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems. It sounds very similar to what you’re talking about. That was a definition from La Via Campesina, which is the International Peasants Movement that started in the nineties. From your perspective, and in your experience, what are the biggest barriers to food sovereignty in your community? | | Khari Diop: | I think the biggest barrier for us is the lack of imagination. I think part of that is the failure of our educational system to really empower folks for radical independent thinking and being. I think secondly is lack of access to land. A big part of that is due to systematic divestment of our people through crooked and unscrupulous dealings by those in power, and sometimes, through straight-up violence and theft. I think thirdly is the lack of access to capital through intentional disinvestment, and sometimes even through misappropriation of funds. Organizations that are supposedly put in place to increase food security that end up with bloated office staff and misdirected bandaid solutions for their funding priorities. I think those are a few in bullet form, but we could go deeper into it, of course. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Yeah. Those are some structural issues that definitely need addressing. I think that what excites me about composting is its something that can be done by anyone, pretty much under any circumstances, to help kind of chip away at some of those issues. The community composting movement, especially really going out and addressing of the communities that these projects are serving, and getting that information, that knowledge out there. That composting is something that you can start doing now. You don’t need a lot of money, you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get started. | | Khari Diop: | Reconnecting people with the food system just in general. I think we’re all super aware of it when our forks hit the plate, but on that back end, what are we doing with what doesn’t make it into our stomachs? I think that reconnecting people with that responsibility to figure out what we’re going to do with what it is that we don’t use, and then redirecting that to spaces that are producing what it is that we need. It goes hand in hand with the whole recycling movement and greater consciousness about our responsibilities as humans on the planet. | | I think composting is the perfect vehicle for making those connections with people to the planet. One of the things my grandfather used to say was, “They aren’t making any more land. They ain’t making no new land.” But we do have the ability, I think, to participate in that creation process of making new land and new earth. That’s where we got the term Terra Nova from, through composting. I love to see it, and more and more of it. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Yeah. We have to steward what we have, because it is not an infinite resource. It is very much finite. | | We’ll be right back after a really short break. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please consider supporting our work with a donation by going to ilsr.org/donate. Your donations make this show and all the work we do here at ILSR possible. Visit ilsr.org/donate to make your contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. If you’re looking for other ways to support us, consider rating or leaving a review of the show wherever you listen to your podcast. These reviews help us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and now back to the show. | | I resonate with the mission of Think Green Incorporated. Your mission as I read it. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. We actually started off as a technology. I had a technology focus. I wanted to be able to really get a handle on the data that was flowing through community garden spaces, but we found that there was a niche that was unfilled in support for these spaces. The impetus and genesis of Think Green was really as a technology data company, so we’re hoping to get back more towards that in 2023. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Cool. That leads into my next question, but before I get to that, do you know how many green spaces, or community gardens, or community spaces you’ve been involved in stewarding? | | Khari Diop: | I would say that I probably had a hand in a couple of dozen, probably 30 or 40. Back in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, the Food Well Alliance asked me to serve as a community garden support person. Because they couldn’t take large groups of volunteers in, they would send me in with a BCS tiller to make sure that the spaces were taken care of and were able to produce food, so that allowed me to touch so many growing spaces I lost count. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Wow, that’s quite an accomplishment. What a great community service at the height of the pandemic. I mean, the food system pretty much broke down. Thank you for helping. | | Khari Diop: | It was great to be a part of it. Every day, I would wake up and feel like I was really contributing. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Very cool and very necessary. What a wake-up call to see the weaknesses in the system. A huge system that… Again, out of sight, out of mind. You can take for granted when it’s working more or less the way it’s intended to, but then you get a big stressor like the pandemic and it just shines a bright light on some of those weaknesses. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah, it was a huge shock. I mean, I think we all saw how fragile it is. I think many of us have kind of accepted the realization that if these trucks stop running, or if the price of fuel gets exorbitantly high, then things are going to be majorly disrupted, but I think we saw that firsthand thanks to COVID-19. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | It really just exacerbated weaknesses, right? The food system works well for certain people, but the whole mission to support food sovereignty gets at the point that it doesn’t work for everybody, even when it’s working as intended. | | Khari Diop: | Exactly, which is why ILSR’s work is so important in building up that local self-reliance. That’s what I’m all about, so I completely align with you all’s mission. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Well, thank you. You are the one that’s out there in the field doing it, so it’s such an honor and a pleasure to get to work with people like you. But back to the question that you perfectly were leading into earlier, what are some of your goals for the coming year? | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. Like I said, a greater emphasis on data collection and analysis. We want to be able to measure and increase our efficiency. We want to be able to grow the scientific capacity of the lab to provide in-depth analysis of our product, and also to be able to provide that service to local growers and gardens. We’re also going to be piloting some restaurant and residential waste diversion programs that we received some funding for. I’ll probably be building a few more hex spins, so we’ll see how this first one works out. I got a training for the gardeners, folks who visit the food forest, coming up this Friday. So yeah, we’ll see how that goes. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Very cool, so you’re going to get really good at building that system. | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Yeah. You’re going to have to, I think, give a presentation on it at some point in the Community Composter Coalition peer-learning community. | | Khari Diop: | Most definitely. I tried to figure out how to do it in the most economical way possible. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | I can’t wait to follow that thread. I guess kind of as a closing question, do you have any advice or lessons learned that you would like to share with composters that are just getting started, or any other resources that you might recommend that have inspired you on your path? | | Khari Diop: | I would say, work with what you got. When I first came on as the manager of the Community Composting Lab, we were completely volunteer driven. From accepting all of the inputs to building the piles. Then we were lucky enough to get a little mini Bobcat skid steer, which, oh, my God, I thought we were cooking with grease, cooking with gas. Once we got that thing, it was great. Then I quickly saw that taking two hours to move a pile even with that was too long, so we were able to purchase a Kubota tractor, which allowed us to grow by leaps and strides. To getting things done and becoming more efficient. | | But I would say work with what you got, and keep it manageable, and build relationships with folks in the community who can provide resources. At one point, one of the most difficult things for us was getting enough brown material, enough carbon inputs, so we had to kind of reestablish our relationship with the local arborists and tree trimmers. Once we did that, you know what I mean? Some of y’all will know that, at a certain point, you got to tell them to stop, which is a good thing. Try to build those local relationships. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Are there any additional resources that have inspired you along your path in this work? | | Khari Diop: | Yeah. James McSweeney, most definitely. He, I think, played a pivotal part in designing the Community Composting Lab. Like I said, Peter Moon with O2Compost. When I saw their hexagonal design for a bin, and then started working through the math, I was like, “Why isn’t everybody doing this? Just because of the space-saving and efficiency aspect.” Yeah. I would say they’ve definitely been great resources. James got that great book. Also, one of my early mentors in composting Rashid Nuri, who’s the founder of Truly Living Well. He kind of helped me get in touch with the spiritual nature and aspect of compost and organic recycling. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Great. I know James McSweeney’s community scale composting systems. We’ll definitely link to that. I know Erik Martig with Conscious Compost. I believe he designed at least one iteration of the Truly Living Well system, but I know James was really helpful in thinking through the throughput of the system and all that. | | Khari Diop: | You know some of the history, you know it. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | I do a little bit. I’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating with Truly Living Well, and Food Well Alliance, and other Atlanta folks. I consider it a pleasure and an honor. I just think, like to summarize the lessons you shared, that knowing what your limitations are, scaling up slowly, and relationships and communication. It takes an ecosystem, for sure, to make these things happen. | | Khari Diop: | You said it so well. Thank you. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Thanks. Well, I was following you, so you made it easy for me. All right. Well, Khari, it was a great pleasure to chat with you just now. Thank you so much for joining us. | | Khari Diop: | It was my pleasure as well. I hope this helps. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | It definitely did, so I look forward to sharing this with our listeners. | | Khari Diop: | Most definitely. If people have any questions, feel free to give out my information. People can email me, call me. I love to talk about this stuff. | | Linda Bilsens Brolis: | Thank you for being so generous with yourself, and your knowledge and experience. Take care, and we will see you. | | Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Drew Birschbach and ILSR’S composting team. Our theme music is I Don’t Know from Grapes. Be sure to check out the rest of the ILSR podcast family, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and Community Broadband Bits at ilsr.org. |
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSListen to this episode, then check out more episodes of the Composting for Community Podcast.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. For monthly updates on our work, sign up for our ILSR general newsletter.
If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at info@ilsr.org.
Audio Credit: I Dunno by Grapes. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Image Credit: Khari Diop and Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture
How can a community reeling from multiple economic shocks use composting as a tool to build a more resilient food system? ILSR’s Linda Bilsens Brolis talks to Renee V. Wallace of Detroit about composting as a tool for building equity and solving big challenges. … Read More
ILSR’s Jess Del Fiacco and Brenda Platt talk to three community composters in California who have been impacted by solid waste franchise districts. … Read More
Sophia Hosain is joined by Composting for Community’s intern Alondra Sierra and Elinor Crescenzi, an activist, organizer, and a founding member of the Food Cycle Collective in Pomona, California. … Read More
In this episode of the Composting for Community podcast, Nando Rodriguez, environmental facilitator at The Brotherhood Sister Sol, shares with us the various ways he engages youth in composting activities. He also dives into the role that environmental practices for Black and Latinx youth play in helping preserve and honor their cultural roots. … Read More
On this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, ILSR's Linda Bilsens Brolis and Sophia Hosain speak with Emma Jagoz, owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland. … Read More
On this episode, ILSR’s Brenda Platt dialogues with Michael Bradlee, President of Earth Appliance Organics in Providence, Rhode Island, to discuss how one community composter is continuing to collect and compost food scraps with new safety protocols in place.… Read More
On this episode, guest host Brenda Platt talks with Elsa Higby and Aleks Jagiello of the New York Compost Project Hosted by Queens Botanical Garden. This is Part 2 of ILSR’s discussion with them; to catch the first part, head over to our Building Local Power Podcast.… Read More
On this episode, host Linda Bilsens Brolis is joined by Benny Erez of ECO City Farms, her composting mentor. Benny talks about the role ECO City Farms plays in providing affordable fresh produce in two food insecure neighborhoods near Washington, D.C. We discuss his compost training work locally in the D.C. Metro Area and abroad in Zambia, Ghana, and Palestine.… Read More
On this episode, host Linda Bilsens Brolis is joined by Jeffrey Neal of Loop Closing. They discuss his vision for how small-scale, hyper-local composting can handle all of the food waste produced in Washington, DC, and the support needed to realize it.… Read More
On this episode, host Linda Bilsens Brolis is joined by Marvin Hayes of the Baltimore Compost Collective. Marvin and Linda talk about how the Baltimore Compost Collective is empowering and employing local youth while also creating a model that can be replicated throughout the City of Baltimore to create a distributed composting infrastructure. … Read More
On this episode, Domingo Morales and Kenneth Young of Red Hook Community Farm talk about the power of being exposed to urban agriculture and composting at a young age and the importance of getting the community involved in your composting project.… Read More
On this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, we talk with Michael Robinson of Rust Belt Riders about how they are closing the local food system loop in Cleveland.… Read More
On this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast, we talk with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli of Common Ground Compost about how they are helping NYC businesses comply with local composting & recycling regulations and embrace Zero Waste.… Read More
On this episode, Linda and Michael talk about how LA Compost is building a diverse ecosystem of composting hubs that are facilitating community involvement in and ownership of their local food systems.… Read More
ILSR’s BLP podcast host, Christopher Mitchell, and Composting for Community initiative Project Manager, Linda Bilsens, sit down with Sophia Hosain and Guy Schaffer to discuss how their composting projects are both engaging and serving their communities. … Read More
We talk with Tiffany Bess, Founder of Apple Rabbit Compost in Jacksonville, FL. Apple Rabbit Compost is a one-woman show that is changing the narrative around food waste to help nourish a more vibrant community from the ground up. … Read More
We talk with Kat Nigro, General Manager of Durham, NC-based Tilthy Rich Compost. Tilthy Rich, a bike-powered food scrap hauler, aims to make composting a common practice accessible to everyone in their hometown of Durham. … Read More
We talk with Corinne Coe-Law, Co-Founder and Director of the Atlanta-based Terra Nova Compost Cooperative. Terra Nova Compost aims to teach underserved communities the value and importance of soil building as it relates to urban agriculture, food justice and climate change. … Read More