As it rots, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that for the first 20 years of its life in the atmosphere has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. What’s worse is that while all that edible food percolates in the dump, one in eight American adults is experiencing food insecurity.

But like many modern-day problems, there’s an app for that. 

These apps connect farmers, restaurants, and grocery stores that have extra food that might otherwise go to waste, with folks who bring it back into circulation. “If some of these apps can change how we think about food and can include educational components and resources, this may help their customers spread the word about the importance of reducing food waste,” says Dr. Tammara Soma, director of research for Simon Fraser University’s Food Systems Lab.

Too Good to Go

Too Good to Go’s app is a location-based service free for download in every Canadian province and in 30 cities across the US from New York to Phoenix. “What users in one community will see differs from what someone 40 miles away in another city will see,” says Sarah Soteroff, senior public relations manager for Too Good to Go Canada and the United States.

The app user finds restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and donut shops within their own neighborhoods that, at the end of the day, find themselves with a surplus. The retailer may not want to store the food overnight, and, sometimes, food regulations prevent the reheating of day-old restaurant meals that makes those three leftover slices of pizza unsaleable. 

“It’s based on the surplus of that day and what the store has. It’s unpredictable, so we make it a surprise bag,” says Soteroff. It could, for example, be three dozen donuts divided into four to a bag. Too Good to Go makes $1.99 from the purchase of each bag, and it recommends bags sell for between $3.99 and $9.99. The products in the bag are usually, according to Soteroff, discounted by a third of the original price. 

The app keeps track of how much money the user has saved by buying food destined for the landfill as compared to what it would cost at full price. “Apps like these,” says Soma, “may help restaurants reduce the amount of food that is wasted at the end of the day, especially when people are motivated by cheaper prices.”

The app launched in Denmark in 2016, and it now has 90 million users globally. It has saved American consumers an estimated $127 million on food they otherwise would have bought at full price, and it has earned $41 million for businesses that otherwise would have tossed food away. 

Every time a surprise bag is sold, 2.5 kilograms of Co2 equivalent (Co2e) is diverted from the landfill and atmosphere, with approximately 35 million kg of Co2e diverted in the US. The app personalizes this for the user, by providing a running tally of the CO2e they’ve kept out of the landfill through the purchase of surprise bags and, subsequently, the difference they’ve individually made to global warming. 

Food Rescue US

In 2011, one in seven Connecticut households was experiencing food insecurity, while more than 36 million tons of food was being tossed out across the US. This didn’t make sense to Jeff Schacher, a software developer, and Kevin Mullins, a local pastor, from Fairfax County, Connecticut. They founded Community Plates (now Food Rescue US) and created a model of food rescue that depicts the true meaning of the adage “waste not, want not.”

“We were born out of a problem and a solution,” says James Hart, development director for Food Rescue US.

Businesses agree to donate food, and not-for-profit social service organizations such as shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries agree to take it. The app’s secret to success is the volunteers who sign up to rescue food and deliver it to the organizations in need. The app gives detailed instructions on where to pick up the food and where to take it. Anyone can sign into the app and claim a food recovery in their area.

For Jenna von Elling, a parent volunteer at Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church Virginia, Food Rescue US has made a huge difference to her school community. “At the start of the pandemic, we wondered how we were going to keep the school pantry stocked for families,” she says. After a quick Google search, she discovered Food Rescue US and the pantry has not been without food since.

Twice a week, von Elling and her fellow food rescuers fill two SUVs full of food they claim and recover from the local Target grocery store. What they bring back to the school pantry includes produce that is nearing the end of its grocery store shelf life but is still edible. There are also chicken breasts and other meat nearing best-before dates to boxes of diapers that are damaged. 

Since its founding, the organization has expanded to 23 states, provided 152 million meals to those in need, kept 183 million pounds of excess food out of landfills, and boasts 20,000 volunteer food rescues.

Misfits Market

Misfits tackles food loss at the beginning of its life cycle, including, what Rose Hartley, head of sustainability for Misfits, calls “cosmetically challenged” produce. 

“What we have been hearing from farmers,” she says, “is that they need an outlet to be able to sell this produce.” 

Misfits buys the twisted zucchini, the sunburnt cauliflower, and the pepper that’s grown into a cylinder instead of a bell, and makes the produce available via the app in the form of a food box delivered directly to the user’s doorstep. Subscribers can expect a 30-percent savings compared to food bought at the grocery store.

Sign into the app, anywhere in the contiguous US, and subscribe to a weekly or bi-weekly box, or choose a flex plan to shop as needed. Boxes also contain rejected shelf products—maybe the packaging is crinkled, or the printing of the label is slightly off-center, and, therefore, rejected by the store.

“We are trying to fill that gap that buyers back out of,” says Hartley. “The hope and the dream is that we create a different conception of what good food looks like.”

She admits though that change of this scale could take decades. In the meantime, Misfits continues to recover unwanted food. In 2023, it prevented 26, 444,000 pounds of food from going to waste across the US.

The post On the Ground With Apps Preventing Food Waste appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Buoys are a key component of aquaculture and fisheries—there are hundreds of thousands used in the United States alone. The buoy market, already a multi-billion-dollar industry, continues to expand by 5.5 percent each year thanks to increased interest in aquaculture farming. These buoyant orbs come in all shapes and sizes and help to moor lines, mark objects, and signal navigation. In the long history of ocean farming and exploration, we’ve used wooden buoys, cork ones, and iron ones. But today, the majority of buoys on the ocean are made from styrofoam or other polystyrene and polyethylene plastic compounds. There are thousands of buoys in use for weather and navigation alone, and every lobsterman and oyster farmer uses several dozen at a minimum.

Lost plastic buoys float on the currents and join the tonnes of plastics that now cover as much as 40 percent of the world’s seas. Bits and pieces of plastic buoys break off or disintegrate in the ocean sun, joining billions of pieces of microplastics that end up in our seafood.

You cannot have aquaculture without buoys—but you can have buoys without plastic. Sue Van Hook had a lifetime of expertise in fungi when she joined Ecovative Design as the mycologist in 2007. Ecovative Design is a technology company focused on using mycelium—the fine white vegetative filaments of fungus—to solve human needs. After discovering early on in her research that mycelium would float, Van Hook quickly realized the potential for creating buoys.

“My grandfather turned his lobster buoys on a lathe in the ‘50s and ‘60s on North Haven Island,” says Van Hook say, remembering her very first introduction to aquaculture’s wooden floatation devices. “I watched him do all that, all those years ago, and we helped paint the colors on and all of that stuff. And then I watched the whole ocean turn to Styrofoam, which at the time seemed fine, right? It was cheaper. They didn’t have to go through all of that labor of crafting this beautiful thing individually, and they lasted a long time.”

As an adult, Van Hook had become a professor of environmental studies and focused on mycology, which she taught at Skidmore College for 18 years. Now observing the buoyancy of mycelium, it didn’t take her long to remember her grandfather’s lobster buoys and their shift to Styrofoam—and to realize the environmental impact of an ocean full of Styrofoam buoys. She set to work designing and growing mycelium buoys.

Now the founder and CEO of her own company, Mycobuoys™, Van Hook has pioneered the fungus alternative to plastic buoys. To make her buoys, Van Hook will take a rope of pasteurized hemp and inoculate it with a low percentage of mycelium wood rot fungus. The fungus will then grow, spread and take up whatever space it is given to fill. Originally, she used empty soda bottles, and today, she has prototypes up to the size of mooring buoys more than two feet in diameter.

Van Hook has run into challenges finding the perfect fungus for the job, and she continues to work on the durability of the buoys. “We use wood rot fungus,” she says, explaining that the type of mycelium that creates sturdier, more perennial mushrooms like reishi is more suited to the job than the lawn fungus that grows many culinary mushrooms. She has tested dozens of strains of fungus, and she continues to work through varieties in buoy trials.

Currently, Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™ are being tested at 11 oyster farms, shellfish hatcheries, and ocean schools throughout New England and New York. Her goal is to be able to guarantee the buoys for a full season before offering them for retail sale.

Abigail Barrows was one of the first oyster farmers to trial Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™. Barrows has a background in marine biology and studies ocean microplastics. In 2015, she bought the lease on Deer Isle Oyster Company with a goal of turning it into a plastic-free oyster farm.

“We were blown away by the process,” Barrows says of her early experiences with mycelium buoys. “It was really exciting to grow something and then have this product which is so functional. And we were pretty excited about the potential application as we started our sea trials.”

The greatest challenge for Mycobuoys™ and those trialing the buoys is their durability. In addition to their hard plastic bodies, many of today’s buoys have thick toxic paint shells. To create a durable shell for a Mycobuoy™, both Van Hook and Barrows have experimented with natural paints that will protect the buoys from the sun, curious birds, and the hard use inherent in ocean farming.

“We are still looking for a more rugged coating,” explains Barrows, who has used pine tar and linseed coatings and linseed based paints on the buoys. “That would give them more robustness, because boats are going to bang into them, so we need to protect them for more than a season.”

“We are trying to find that beautifully environmentally friendly coating to prolong the life of the buoys,” says Van Hook. Today’s plastic lobster buoys do not last forever—at least not as functional aquaculture tools. Most lobstermen and oyster farmers will use a buoy for 20 or 25 years. Van Hook’s goal for Mycobuoy™ durability is a little bit shorter.

“My ideal business plan is that we grow the buoys every year,” she says. “You buy your buoys at a reasonable price, you have it out there floating your cages for a year, and at the end, we buy it back from you and dry it, grind it ourselves for fertilizer or you could compost them in your own garden.” Van Hook uses old mycelium buoy prototypes in her garden, where she never has to add fertilizer or composite thanks to the nutrition of the fungus. 

“You wouldn’t have to store [the buoys] in your driveway or your yard,” Van Hook continues, referring to the large piles of buoys that spring up on fishermen’s lawns during the off-season, “where all that UV light deteriorates the polyethylene plastic that they are currently using faster.” 

Recent legislation in South Korea will ban the use of styrofoam buoys by 2025, and Van Hook believes that other nations will soon follow. Van Hook hopes her buoys will retail around 10 percent to 20 percent above current plastic buoy prices and believes increasing restrictions on plastics will only make the mycelium option for buoys more appealing. Styrofoam and plastic buoys average between $20 and $50, depending on size, while the cost of Van Hook’s buoys will depend on the ability to scale up production and the solution to the problem of a durable coating. Those interested in helping Van Hook trial Mycobuoys™ can reach out to her via her website for 2025 buoys.

As oyster farmers such as Barrows continue to trial buoys and Van Hook expands to more shapes and sizes, the future of Mycobuoys™ is bright. On her quest to reduce ocean plastics, Van Hook may have stumbled on to an answer for more than just buoys.

“There is just so much potential here,” says Barrows. Plastics can be found in almost all fishing gear, from nets to floatation systems in boats. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is almost half what is called “ghost gear,” fishing plastics lost overboard or abandoned. In addition to Mycobuoys™, Barrows works on prototypes of wooden oyster cages, and she sells her oysters in compostable beechwood bags from a new company called Ocean Farm Supply. “We need to think outside of the box, in terms of using them for mooring balls, other kinds of floatation, other marine systems such as replacing styrofoam boat hulls and marine docks.”

The post Meet the Mycologist Stopping Ocean Plastics, One Mushroom Buoy at a Time appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In a span of less than 10 minutes, no fewer than five people open the doors of the bright yellow community fridge and pantry just outside the Medlock Park neighborhood in Decatur, Georgia. Most come here searching for fresh food and produce, or personal products such as toothpaste or diapers, donated by the community.

“I come here about three times a week,” says Anne. She depends on the food, especially fresh produce, to supplement her diet. “If it wasn’t for this fridge, I definitely wouldn’t get to eat as healthy as I do,” she says. “It’s amazing what people donate.” 

The community fridge, known as ATLFreeFridge, stands in front of North Decatur Presbyterian Church. The goal is to provide free food and help reduce food waste. It’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and anybody can take or donate food.

The ATLFreeFridge was one of six installed in 2020 as part of the volunteer initiative Free99Fridge started by former Atlantan and activist Latisha Springer. Her goal was to maintain community fridges and pantries across metro Atlanta to help combat food insecurity and waste. (Springer ran the program until she left Atlanta to pursue other opportunities.) Initially, all of the fridges were a success.

But unlike the fridge at the church, the others depended on local businesses such as coffee shops and breweries for their spaces and electricity. When Springer left the program, the fridge sponsors had to choose whether to keep their fridges or close them down. Only North Decatur Presbyterian Church chose to keep its fridge, renaming it ATLFreeFridge.

Today, volunteers install, clean and monitor the ATLFreeFridge. They donate the food, hygiene products and dry goods, and make sure no food is expired or goes bad. Most of the fresh food comes from the neighboring community, although a team of volunteers coordinate food pickups from local restaurants, farms, and grocery stores that also provide tons of fresh food.

“It was a new idea here when I first heard about it,” says Monique. “It was unusual because it was a mutual aid project instead of a non-profit. It was so smart and done with respect. There were no questions asked whether you were donating or coming for food.”

But neighbors in Medlock Park had a lot of questions early on. They expressed their concerns to the church and volunteer coordinators about things such as sanitation, people lingering at the fridge, and homeless encampments that began popping up. Most reservations, though, were about safety around the neighborhood. Those were exacerbated in 2022 after a man who appeared to be having a mental health crisis threw the contents of the fridge into the street, some at passing cars. 

That’s why, Nancy Gathany, a church member on the ATLFreeFridge executive committee, says the church doubled down to keep the fridge rather than close it. “I’m sure it was stressful for the other commercial businesses [hosting fridges] because they become magnets for unhoused people,” she says. “But it’s hard to ignore the needs of so many people coming to our fridge. It hits you in the face.” 

Co-pastor Rev. David Lewicki held a meeting in October 2022 to address community fears. They’ve since established rules for fridge shoppers, including new boundaries on the campus grounds, although there’s rarely a time without someone loitering around the fridge. The church also now enforces no overnight sleeping, but it still happens off church grounds on occasion. 

North Decatur Presbyterian now provides local resource information, including temporary housing, legal assistance, employment services, and child and pet care, to users and has designated parking spaces to address concerns about traffic.

Perhaps the biggest change is the church now has a dedicated case manager for anyone who needs assistance. He’s available once a week and sees about four clients on average, helping them get health care, housing, and employment. 

“The congregation is very supportive of the case manager,” says Gathany. “We are really trying to get the shoppers past their struggles.” Between August 2023 and March 2024, he had nearly 100 client meetings, Gathany says, and assisted several families get off the streets.

Of course, not all the shoppers at the fridge are homeless. Gathany says the fridge feeds more families who come in cars, but they have so many singles who come on foot, and are down on their luck. The 2020 poverty rate in Dekalb County for children aged 5-17 was 26.6 percent, much higher than the state average of 18.8 percent. That number improved to 18.6 percent in 2022 (the latest numbers available), but it’s still higher than the state average of 16.3 percent. And with poverty comes food insecurity, whether it’s because of lack of money, long waits for SNAP benefits, or a lack of transportation.

And, according to Feeding America, the number of food-insecure children in Dekalb County where the fridge is located hovered around 21 percent in 2022 (the latest numbers available), much higher than the county’s overall rate of 11.2 percent.

“What many don’t realize is that some of these people are coming from the neighborhood,” says Monique. “Sometimes, people are ashamed that they don’t have enough money for food. The fridge is one great place they can go for it.”

Still, some neighbors who support the fridge are still hesitant to do so. “Those who are gathering there are a deterrent to my donating,” says local Kern Thompson. “I can only assume that I’m not the only person who’s cut back donating because of their presence.” The fridge has become a hangout, of sorts, which can be both a good and bad thing when it comes to prospective donations. 

Medlock resident Monica Morgan says that’s one reason she consistently donates. “Every time I’ve been there, there’s such a need,” she explains. “There are people waiting—families—who are just down on their luck. But I’ve never felt uncomfortable dropping off food. All the people seem very grateful.”

Today, nearly four years to the day the fridge was first installed, there is still support for the ATLFreeFridge. 

But it’s not without controversy. During the writing of this piece, on July 9, the fridge was vandalized again. An unknown person cut the electrical wire, destroying the fridge and taking it out of commission for nearly a week until volunteers could find a new one. Gathany says she has no idea who did it or why, but that doesn’t change the demonstrated need.

“The fact that we even need this fridge shows us where our society is failing,” says Gathany. “Everybody is having a hard time, not just the homeless. There’s never going to be anything that 100 percent of the community supports. But the church is doing this because it’s the church’s business.” 

The post This Community Fridge is the Only One Left in Atlanta—and the Need is Growing appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That’s 17 million households experiencing food insecurity in a country that throws out more food than any other country in the world—120 billion pounds every year, equivalent to almost 40 percent of the entire US food supply. That’s 325 pounds of wasted food per person.

In other words, no one in the US should be going hungry. There is plenty of food to go around. It’s just a matter of getting it to hungry people before it gets to the dump to rot and, in the process, produces large quantities of methane that contributes an estimated eight percent to global carbon emissions. 

While we all wait (not holding our breath) for the government to creak into action, a network of community activists has emerged in small towns and huge cities alike to help get food to the people who most need it. Every community has different needs, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution, which makes this highly individualized approach more effective than many of the larger-scale, generic, government-sponsored options out there. 

Seacoast Fridge partners with local farms and food trucks

“A colleague told me about the growth of community fridges that offer free food to anyone who needs it, no questions asked,” says Whitney Blethen, recalling the early months of the pandemic, when it was becoming increasingly clear that people were getting hungrier and resources were getting leaner. “I work in a nonprofit that combats childhood hunger, and I’m married to a chef, so it felt like a natural outgrowth.”

Together with Katie Guay and Dave Vargas, Blethen founded the Seacoast Fridge in Kittery, Maine in 2021. 

“We discovered that the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects people operating free fridges, which made us feel like there was no risk and only benefits,” says Blethen. 

They reached out to the local rotary club so that they could “piggyback” on their general liability insurance, which covered a wide range of potential injuries or accidents that could occur when picking up or delivering food. Eventually, they partnered with Red’s Good Vibes, a free mobile food truck and nonprofit based in Portsmouth, N.H., which aligns with their mission and has expanded their reach.

“That has been a game changer,” says Blethen. “They already had a network of farms, and because we all have backgrounds in food safety and liability, we began labeling foods early on with ingredients and use-by dates to prevent any issues.” 

In the beginning, their one fridge would be emptied in about 72 hours. Now, they have plans for 24 fridges this year, with turnovers currently at up to four times per day per fridge. Their mission has grown along with the size of their operation, and it now includes 150 volunteers. They’ve also started food rescue programs with farms and restaurants, where “some farms allow CSA members to add $5 to their order. They use that to fund additional drop-offs for us.”

In addition to the fresh food, Seacoast offers seasonally appropriate pantry items, from sunblock and tick spray to socks and gloves. 

“We also work with our local Land Trust, and they have kids tending gardens,” says Blethen. “All of the food then gets donated to fridges or pantries. It’s great for everyone, including the kids.”

To learn more, donate or find a free fridge in Maine or New Hampshire, follow Seacoast on Instagram at @seacoastfridge. 

Sweet Tooth Community Fridge takes advantage of tax credits to pay farmers

“In Iowa, our legislature is hostile to poor people,” says Monika Owczarski. “With the city doing nothing substantial to fight poverty and our own situation, we knew we had to do something.”

Starting in 2016, Owczarski operated a pop-up food stand near her urban farm, Sweet Tooth Farm, in Des Moines. As soon as she could get authorized, she began accepting food stamps. During the pandemic, Owczarski saw a noticeable increase in need and a decrease in formal support. Then, in 2021, the city changed the rules about farming and Owczarski went from having more than an acre in production to having about three city blocks.

“We were left with one-tenth of the space, which meant we couldn’t produce enough for our restaurant clients and our weekly CSA,” says Owczarski. “Then, a soup kitchen near us got shut down.” That was the last straw for Owczarski. 

She reached out to other nonprofits, farmers and food organizations and began giving out free food to anyone who wanted it, no questions asked, with one fridge. It was the first fridge in the state. And it actually helps Owczarski pay the bills after her CSA and farming model got turned upside down.

“The [Farm to Food Donation Tax Credit] program pays farmers for the food they donate,” she explains, adding that they also get donations from restaurants, caterers and others with an excess of food that might otherwise get tossed in the landfill.

Now, the network has 16 fridges, but it is totally decentralized.

“In the last 30 days alone, we have rescued 200,000 pounds of food that would have otherwise been thrown out,” says Owczarski. “Every neighborhood’s needs are different, with some needing no pork for religious reasons and others needing more of one thing or another just because of the community they’re serving.”

The biggest challenge, says Owczarski, has been the climate. 

“We had to figure out a way to prevent the fridges from shorting out on days that are -40 degrees,” says Owczarski. “We insulate the fridges, build shelters and even have safe fireproof infrared heaters that turn on when the temperature gets below a certain threshold.”

To learn more, donate and find fridges around Des Moines, follow @sweetthoothfarmdscm on Instagram. 

Free Food Fridge looks to the nonprofit world 

Jammella Anderson founded Free Food Fridge Albany during the pandemic.

“Access to fresh foods and produce has been an issue for years in Albany and beyond because of structural racism and redlining,” says Anderson. “The pandemic made that worse for everyone, and people who were managing to get by before but were residing on an income cliff suddenly found themselves without options during the pandemic.”

If someone makes just $10 above the cutoff for receiving SNAP or other income-based benefits, they are out of luck, they explain. That means “a lot of people going hungry,” says Anderson. 

Seeing what was happening in Albany, the part-time doula and yoga instructor went into action, putting out a call to followers on Instagram and snagging a free fridge from Lowe’s and a location for their first fridge on Elm Street in Albany in the process. 

Free Food Fridge has grown considerably since 2020, and by the end of the summer, there will be 21 fridges around Albany. Donations roll in from individuals and farmers. Some contributions are regular, others are one-time only, some are in the form of food and others are in the form of money. 

“Our next phase is officially becoming a nonprofit because we are volunteer run and creating a mobile grocery that can shuttle around Albany, travel to all of our fridge locations and serve as a pop-up at farmers markets and food justice organizations,” says Anderson. 

They are also trying to change the way we discuss food access. 

“You can’t say that a hungry person looks like this or underserved communities look like that,” says Anderson. “We need to change that dialogue because, just like there isn’t one solution to hunger, there isn’t one type of hungry person or underserved community.”

To learn more, donate and find fridges in Albany, follow Free Food Fridge Albany on Instagram. 

RVA Community Fridge for Kids gathers on social media 

“I grew up with community fridges in New Orleans, but that wasn’t really done here,” says RVA Community Fridges founder Taylor Scott. “And I saw SNAP Benefits getting cut in Richmond, and all of these historically redlined areas without access to a grocery store or other resources, and I knew I had to do something.”

The project started small, as a literal overgrowth of tomatoes threatened to take over her apartment during the pandemic. She looked for a community fridge to which to donate her bounty, in the hopes that her fresh-grown produce could help provide fresh produce to underserved areas. 

But Scott couldn’t find any community fridges. She reached out to a neighborhood bakery in Church Hill and it agreed to host a fridge. It went up in January 2021. “As soon as we filled it, it would empty out,” says Scott. “Now, we have 14 fridges, and the entire community is involved. We have more than 300 volunteers helping us buy food and operate, not counting people who just drop stuff off at fridges.”

Scott communicates with the volunteers, farms, caterers and chefs who donate food that might otherwise go to the landfill through the communication platform Discord and the social media groups she has set up. Their fridges and the pantries with household goods attached sometimes empty out in as little as 30 minutes. 

“I love seeing how these fridges are bringing our community together,” says Scott. “Some neighborhoods are in absolute food deserts, and raising awareness among people in Richmond who wouldn’t otherwise realize what has been going on in these neighborhoods, while feeding people and fighting food waste, has been incredible.”

Scott says the group is in the process of applying to be an official nonprofit. To learn more, donate and find a fridge, follow RVA Community Fridges on Instagram. 

The post On the Ground With the Volunteers Running Community Fridges appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Photography by Emma Kazaryan.

In February 2020, Thadeaus Umpster opened his first community fridge—right in front of the building where he lives in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Since then, he’s helped many others find fridges and organize donations. He calls it an an anarchist network of community fridges and mutual aid. These fridges address twin problems—hunger and waste—but Thadeaus says they are more than that. They are a place where neighbors get to know each other and community bonds are formed.

The day starts like many—with an almost empty fridge.

Fridge volunteers meet in the Brooklyn Navy yards for a large pick up from the mutual aid organization One Community. Part of the donation is made up of lychees. Lots and lots of lychees.

On the loading dock, volunteers sort and load everything that will fit in their trusty red truck.

After a short drive to the fridge in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed Stuy, Andrea and her red truck take a break. New volunteers arrive and the unloading begins.

Neighbors stop to help unload and do a bit of shopping.

Fitting everything inside is a special challenge but a fully stocked fridge is a thing of beauty that supports and is supported by this community.

The fridge is stocked. Volunteers have gone home. Thadaeus coordinates the next donation.

Each day, across the country, volunteers like Thadeaus help build community and feed their neighbors through dedicated attention to community fridges. To find out how you can do the same, visit Community Fridges 101.

The post A Day in the Life of a Community Fridge appeared first on Modern Farmer.

So, you want to get involved in a community fridge, but you’re not sure where to start. You’ve come to the right place.

Finding a fridge

You can search for a fridge in your neighborhood with databases like this one from Freedge. You might have luck finding one near you or a fridge to visit on your next vacation. You can also search for community fridges in your area on platforms such as Instagram, where many groups stay active. And some groups, like in New York, also share maps of their specific city. 

Once you’ve found a fridge at which you’d like to volunteer, the best thing to do, organizers say, is just to show up. “Get to meet the other people who volunteer or the people who use it, and have conversations with them about what they need and what they’re looking for,” says Victoria Jayne, with South Philadelphia Community Fridge. 

Think about what you’re able to offer. Do you have a car? You could help with deliveries of food. Maybe you don’t drive, but you have a spare hour or two every week. One of the most consistently needed jobs is cleaning and maintenance of the fridge. Bring a sponge and paper towels and help out with a few minutes of scrubbing. 

If you don’t have time for regular volunteering, you can still help with the most important part of the community fridge—the food. If you’re doing your grocery shopping, pick up a few extra items to fill the shelves. Do you frequently have work meetings where there are tons of leftovers? Bring them to the fridge. The film and TV industries are notorious for having extra food every day, for instance. Can you connect the organizers to a restaurant or grocery store interested in donating food on a regular basis?

What should you bring?

There are a few things to keep in mind when stocking a free fridge. First, label things, even if it’s just some masking tape or a sharpie. “You’re doing a great thing,” says Julie Haire with Los Angeles Community Fridges. “We love the sentiment, but you also should realize [the food] will be thrown out if it’s not labeled.” Even if you know what that food item is by looking, not everyone will, and they also won’t know when it was made or when it expires. It’s also important to think about how people might be able to eat the food. If it’s in a can or needs to be heated up, that might be OK for some of your neighbors. But unhoused folks are unlikely to have access to cooking utensils. For that reason, Haire says that “grab and go” foods are the best options.

Also, fridges are not your dumping ground for inedible food or ingredients past their prime. A good rule of thumb is to put yourself in the shoes of someone going to the fridge. Would you choose that item? If the answer is no, it’s better saved for the compost bin. 

Starting a fridge

But what if there isn’t a community fridge in your area? You’re in luck. You get to be the person who starts one. 

First, check out if there are fridges in other cities in your state or province. They may be able to help you start a chapter in your city, and you can become a member of their team. Many mutual aid groups are happy to bring on more folks who align with their mission and can help spread the word even further. 

You might even be able to become part of an established group such as Freedge through its fiscal sponsorship. If you want to be a nonprofit to be protected under legislation such as the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, but the process is onerous for a group your size, you could see if a sponsorship would help. “You find an existing nonprofit that says ‘OK, you’re a part of my nonprofit now,’ and all you have to do is report every year with financial statements,” says Ernst Bertone Oehninger, founder of Freedge. As Oehninger found out, a sponsorship is often a great way for smaller groups to get started while still working together under the same umbrella organization. 

Then, go over the resources. Many established fridge groups have FAQs available online to help you get started. Freedge even shares legal guidelines, to help you figure out everything you need to know when it comes to health and safety, as well as your responsibility when it comes to hosting. 

Choose a location

You will need a fridge, a way to plug it in and a host. For some, this is in front of the apartment building; for others, a community center. Oehninger says location is key. “If you are in a place that is more downtown or has a good supply of food services around, then your work as a volunteer is easier [when it comes to stocking the fridge], but it’s more difficult to clean, because of the high turnover,” he says. Ultimately, though, your fridge needs to be accessible. Think about where it might be best seen from all angles and by people both walking or driving by. 

Organizers tell us they frequently find free refrigerators on Craigslist or Facebook, but they especially like models with a glass door for people to easily see what’s inside.

Curb Appeal

Dress it up. A plain fridge is a sad fridge. Think about the curb appeal of your fridge. You’re likely to get more attention and more community engagement with a fridge that looks appealing. For some groups, such as Los Angeles Community Fridges, that means decorating each fridge in a different design and ensuring fridges can hold community bulletins and notices.

Next, it’s important to think about how the fridge might be exposed to the elements and what that might look like. You can find instructions from many groups on how to build a fridge shelter, which is a relatively simple process but can help protect your fridge in the long run. 

Build a team

Think of the fridge as a community resource that isn’t just about combating waste and hunger, but is a place that can bring a neighborhood together. Ask people to join you. There are many ways volunteers can help: pick and deliveries, stocking, cleaning, coordination, finding new donation partners, social media

Fill it up

Lastly, but most importantly, it’s time to stock the fridge. Donations from individuals are always appreciated, but the best way to keep the fridge regularly stocked is to form agreements with businesses that would otherwise throw away their food. In New York City, there’s a partnership with local Panera Bread locations, which nets the fridges a regular supply of pastries and baked goods. Other groups we spoke with talked about setting up agreements with local or chain grocery stores or restaurants. 

If you’re looking for advice on how to approach a business about a partnership, the team at Los Angeles Community Fridges has sample scripts you can use.

But, ultimately, no matter what you are able to do for a fridge, Jayne says getting involved at any level is a help. “It’s really important to have that volunteer base, where you have a group of people who are really committed, because it is work to keep one running and it does require a community.” 

The post Community Fridges 101 appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Preventing waste is one of the main motivations that drives Umpster and has been for the almost 30 years he’s been organizing in his Brooklyn neighborhoods, but it’s not his only one. 

Umpster knows what it’s like to be hungry. As a teenager, he began volunteering with Food Not Bombs, a mutual-aid group dedicated to feeding folks in his community. But when his shift was over, he would “load up my bag with food, instant oatmeal and stuff like that, to get me through the weekend before I went back to school.” 

But it wasn’t until 2020 that Umpster opened his first community fridge- right in front of the building where he lives. In Bed Stuy, Umpster’s neighborhood in Brooklyn, food insecurity and access was already a problem when the pandemic hit. By February, Umpster could see more of his neighbors struggling to feed themselves and their families.

At first, he mostly promoted the fridge and its offerings in the free section of Craigslist. “I’d be like, ‘we got a bunch of free bagels today, a bunch of salad greens…come by the fridge, take what you want, leave what you want,” says Umpster. The fridge began gaining traction in his neighborhood, and he began promoting it on other social platforms such as Instagram. Then, one of his posts was reshared by a popular local radio station, and it took off. 

Umpster got a call from a friend in neighboring Crown Heights and Flatbush and then the Bronx who wanted to start a fridge, so he helped find a few on Craigslist and fill them with food. “Before long, people were setting up fridges without even getting in touch with me, which is awesome. People just started moving.” The mutual-aid network In Our Hearts NYC  helped organize groups and fridges where each neighborhood runs independently but they are all in contact with each other. Umpster describes the group as collectively or “anarchistically” organized, meaning there’s no hierarchy. 

For many, the community fridge serves multiple purposes. It’s a tangible way to help your neighborhood, as food prices continue to rise, and it helps reduce food waste. But it’s also a meeting place and community space, a way to start a conversation with your neighbors. “I have these really tight connections and bonds with people who live on my specific block. And there are a lot of people who I used to just kind of nod to when I went down the street and maybe wave and smile, maybe say hello. And now we know each other intimately. We spend holidays together, we work together on projects, and it’s pretty incredible. The neighborhood comes to the fridge a lot,” says Umpster.

Where it all started

Community fridges have been around for a while. They go by different names, such as “free fridge” or “community pantry,” but the aims are pretty simple. First, they help to alleviate food waste, and second, they directly address food insecurity. 

The rates of food insecurity shot up during the pandemic, with two peaks. The first was at the start of the pandemic, as people lost jobs and so much was up in the air. And the second peak happened once COVID supports ran out. In 2022, 17 million households in the US reported trouble finding food, which is additionally frustrating considering the amount of food that ends up in landfills. 

The amount of food waste in North America is staggering. In the US, close to 40 percent of food is wasted, with 92 billion pounds of food thrown away each year. Canadians create 50 million tonnes of food waste every year, but there are estimates that more than half of that waste could be prevented.

That’s where community fridges come in. 

The food comes to fridges in one of three main ways. Ideally, organizers have consistent larger donations from grocery stores and other retailers. If a grocer has a load of apples, juice boxes or lettuce and they know it will pass the sell-by date, they will often partner with a community fridge. Volunteers will pick up the load of food and stock the fridges as food becomes available. Then there are individual donations. These can be leftovers from your dinner or a loaf of bread you grabbed at the grocery store that you don’t need. For many fridges, neighbors can pick up what they need and drop off what they have to give. Lastly, there are the restaurant donations. Just like retail stores, some restaurants partner with community fridges to pick up unsold meals and redistribute them. 

Independent fridges exist everywhere, with more than 600 recorded across the UK. In Canada, there are fridges in nearly every province; likewise in every state across the US. There are fridges in Singapore, Australia, Sweden and myriad other countries. Eighteen states across the US, including North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, have even introduced legal protections for community members who run the fridges. Those protections are helpful, as most of the fridges are run by volunteers—this is a solution led by community members for community members, so volunteers often live in the neighborhood. They help clean the fridge, stock it and do regular checks to make sure everything is working properly.

Unsurprisingly, some of the biggest cities in the US have the most active networks of community fridges. In New York City, there are fridges across all five boroughs. One of the best tools they have is social media. The volunteers have text threads, a Signal chat, and they post often on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. In their chat, they are often coordinating pickups of food from restaurants or retail stores and deliveries to various fridges around the city. 

The blueprint

There’s no one way to run a community fridge. But if you’re looking for a blueprint, start with Davis, California. 

About a decade ago, when Ernst Oehninger was a grad student at the University of California, Davis, he put a fridge in his yard. It was a shared house; he lived there with other UC Davis students, and they had an extra fridge. Why not put it outside, where it was accessible, and share food with their neighbors, some of whom were other students?

That fridge lasted for a few months, and it was refilled by Oehninger, his housemates and, occasionally, some neighbors. He was feeding people in his neighborhood, and his community was coming together. But, things got serious after a few months. Some neighbors complained; they had some worries that having a free fridge would encourage unhoused people to frequent the neighborhood, and that it would in turn be a safety concern. That didn’t happen, says Oehninger, but there was some pushback. 

“We started having food safety inspectors called, since we didn’t have any food safety licenses. So, the fridge was shut down,” he says. What was frustrating, he recalls, is that what was considered appropriate by one health inspector might be condemned by another; there were no guidelines for community fridges at the time. But, by that point, he was invested in the project. Oehninger spent a year, with his housemates and friends, researching and negotiating with the health department, trying to find a way to have a free fridge on their property. 

And not just their property. Once they worked with the health department to produce guidelines, they started expanding into other neighborhoods, installing fridges at homes, outside of willing businesses or churches with food banks. By 2017, Oehninger’s project had grown large enough that he incorporated, which would allow him to get better insurance and be protected by laws such as the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects people who donate food from legal liability if someone gets ill. 

Just like that, Freedge was born. 

Oehninger and his team (he had enough community members come together at this point to have a team) started tracking other community fridges in the region. They found examples in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Word started to spread, and people in other states began reaching out and asking for advice on how to start their own fridges. “There was one in Colorado we helped set up. There was another one in Texas, and there was one in DC. We put that one in touch with [a group] in Florida,” he says. They had started with about 20 fridges in their region before the pandemic. By 2021, they had a network of more than 400 fridges nationwide. 

Now, Freedge, an official nonprofit organization, acts as an unofficial overseer. It has a section on its website offering tips and guides to folks who want to start their own fridge, including food safety protocols and how to deal with health inspectors. There’s a group Slack channel for fridge coordinators across the country to chat with each other. Freedge still maps and tracks free fridges across the country and even gives out micro-grants to other groups that want to join its umbrella network to start a community fridge. 

The community is growing

During the pandemic, four new fridges popped up in Los Angeles. That’s now grown into Los Angeles Community Fridges (LACF), with more than a dozen locations. 

Julie Haire started volunteering with LACF in 2021, when the pandemic highlighted food insecurity around the country. Haire had always been focused on food waste, often dropping excess food off at local church pantries. But when she connected with LACF and saw how wide community fridges could spread, she was hooked. One of the most inspiring things, says Haire, is how LACF “deputizes the community” to help maintain each fridge. If a volunteer checks the Los Feliz fridge and finds that, for instance, someone threw mashed potatoes all over it, “we could put it up on Instagram and ask ‘can someone help us clean this?’ and luckily, someone from the community will go do it,” says Haire. “We put out the call, and the volunteers go in.” 

Film sets are a particularly fruitful source for fridges in Los Angeles and NYC. Craft services and catering from the film and television industries make a lot of food, and typically, a lot gets wasted. Haire and other fridge volunteers in LA try to connect with as many sets as possible to pick up that extra food—some of it straight from a fresh take. “I went to a filming, I think it was The L Word. And they were doing a grocery scene, and they had all of this really nice produce [in the background]. They had huge things of flour and Crisco and spices, all of this stuff that they would not know what to do with ]after filming].” Naturally, Haire was happy to take it off of producers’ hands when filming wrapped up.

South Philly Community Fridge (SPCF) in Philadelphia, started up in August of 2020 and has grown to include fridges at six locations, with a roster of about 75 volunteers. They’ve found a unique way to raise awareness of their fridges–merchandise, including mugs, sweatshirts and tote bags. All of the designs were conceived by local artists, and they are playful and eye-catching. “I was at a museum with my husband and he was wearing one of our shirts, and someone stopped us and said ‘we’re from New Jersey, and we want to start a community fridge. So we exchanged emails,” says SPCF’s Victoria Jayne. “We want to have fun with the merch. It’s fun to show up.” 

It’s also easy to grab attention from the community when the fridges are colorful and cute. Like many organizations, the LACF encourages community members to decorate and paint their fridges with eye-catching designs, posters, signs—anything to make them stand out and get people involved. The one in Inglewood has a motif of bananas; the Los Feliz fridge features a dancing hot dog with a top hat. It’s fun and quirky and highlights the fridges as a community project. 

Myth busting

There are some myths about who uses community fridges. The biggest one, says Jayne, is the idea that community fridges are for a specific type of person. 

“Something we really try to stress about mutual aid is that it’s here for everybody and anyone. It doesn’t have to be something that’s means tested,” she says, meaning that there’s no prerequisite for using the fridge. No one is going to check your income level or try to determine how much food you “need.” Jayne says that, in her neighborhood, she’s seen people who work full time and don’t have access to traditional food pantries use the fridge or people without cars who can’t drive to out-of-the-way food banks. “Something that people have asked me or other volunteers in passing is ‘how do you know the person who’s taking food really needs that?’ and I’m like, ‘I haven’t met anyone who didn’t need to eat to live.’”

Another myth that Haire works to bust in Los Angeles is the idea that a fridge will attract unhoused people to the neighborhood in the first place. “We have a fridge in Eagle Rock that is outside of a community center, and neighbors complain all the time because of the homeless problem. And we’re like, is it the fridge? Or is it that it’s 2024 and we’re experiencing unprecedented numbers of people living on the streets right now?” For Haire, those are even stronger reasons to continue the fridges, not a reason to stop. 

The fog has lifted

Although the Philadelphia group started during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, Jayne says the need has only grown since then. In August of 2020, there were job losses and many struggled getting to the grocery store. But, there were also enhanced safety nets for people. “There was additional money for unemployment, additional money for SNAP, and there was the child tax credit,” says Jayne. “As we’ve come out of this period of active pandemic, we’ve seen those benefits taken away from people, and that’s resulted in significantly higher usage.” 

When Ernst Oehninger, from Freedge, thinks about the period just before the pandemic, he likens it to a fog that blanketed our collective consciousness before 2020 and dissipated in the midst of lockdowns and COVID protocols. As a community, many were confronted with the number of systemic issues facing everyone, from police brutality around the murder of George Floyd to lack of health care, climate change, and food insecurity. “People started thinking about how they were relying on the state for this or a corporation for that,” says Oehninger. “And a lot of people started realizing that they could work with their community instead.” While Oehninger says some of these issues are inherent to the US, he did clock an expansion of mutual aid programs globally during that time. 

Oehninger says part of what makes the fridges such an attractive option for users is the dignity it affords people. Sadly, there’s still a stigma attached to using a food bank, and there can be administrative hurdles in the process. “A free fridge doesn’t ask for my documents,” says Oehninger. Rather, it’s just a group of people coming together to help, no questions asked. 

As Jayne puts it, the fridge is an exercise in community. “There’s a Mariame Kaba quote that says ‘everything worthwhile is done with other people.’”

The post From Community, For Community: The Rise of the Free Fridge appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In the US, an estimated 77 million tons of food are wasted annually, even as one in eight American families struggles with hunger. Growing all that food that no one eats wastes financial and natural resources, while also contributing to climate change. Food is the number one item we throw into landfills, where it drives almost 60 percent of their methane emissions.

But there is an easy way to cut down a large portion of that food waste: Change the “best by” labeling system. According to new research by MITRE and Gallup, there are more than 50 different date label phrases in most grocery stores today—“sell by,” “use by,” “best if used by,” “enjoy by,” and so forth—leaving consumers confused about whether these terms refer to freshness, safety or other issues. As a result, one third of all consumers “often or always” throw away food that has passed its date label. The end result is that households and food businesses throw away perfectly wholesome food (6.5 million tons annually in the US, which is nearly 10 percent of all US food waste) and spend an average $1,500 a year per household on food that they then toss in the trash. 

The US has set a goal to halve its food waste by 2030. To accelerate progress, the Zero Food Waste Coalition (a group of nonprofits, major food businesses and communities) has come together to help advance two commonsense pieces of bipartisan legislation: the Food Date Labeling Act (FDLA) and the NO TIME TO Waste Act. Congress should pass both these acts in the upcoming Farm Bill.

The FDLA aims to establish a consistent, easy-to-understand food date labeling system, at no cost to the government. The FDLA would streamline food labeling into two simple categories: “Best If Used By” to communicate peak food quality and “Use By” to indicate the end of a product’s estimated shelf life. Most importantly, the act would launch an education campaign to help consumers understand the difference between these categories.

Simplified date labels are one of the most cost-effective strategies to reduce food waste across the supply chain—with the majority of the benefits going to consumers. The FDLA would also make more food available for donation by clarifying that food can still be donated after a quality date (which 20 states prohibit or restrict today). More than 23 industry leaders, such as Walmart and Unilever, have signed on in support of the FDLA.

In addition to the FDLA, the NO TIME TO Waste Act would establish an Office of Food Loss and Waste at the US Department of Agriculture. This office would spearhead a whole-of-government approach to reducing food waste, strengthen food waste research, create consumer awareness campaigns and support public-private partnerships and local food recovery efforts. 

These two pieces of legislation are a no-brainer for Congress to pass. Tackling food waste is good for consumers, businesses and the environment. Meeting our national goal of reducing food loss and waste by 50 percent would deliver a $73-billion annual net financial benefit (again, in large part to consumers), reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 million metric tons and create 51,000 jobs over 10 years. The 2024 Farm Bill is a golden opportunity to make meaningful progress in our fight against food waste, help families stretch their limited food dollars and transition to a more efficient and sustainable food system. 

Pete Pearson is senior director of food waste with World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C.

The Zero Food Waste Coalition aims to inform and influence policy at the local, state and federal levels and share policy updates and opportunities with partners and stakeholders around the country to bring consumers, businesses and government together to make food loss and waste history. The Coalition was launched by NRDC, WWF, ReFE, and FLPC in April 2023, formalizing a partnership that began in January 2020.

The post Opinion: Congress Should Standardize Food Labels in Farm Bill to Curb Food Waste appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

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

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

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

‘One size doesn’t fit all’

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

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

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

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

‘We’re willing to pivot’

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

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

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

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

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

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

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

‘Education can’t be understated’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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