By Doug Bierend for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On an unseasonably sunny day in March, at a community garden in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and hosed down shoulder-high windrows of compost. Tucked underneath elevated train tracks, Know Waste Lands is the home base of the compost-hauling nonprofit BK Rot.

Its quarter-acre lot houses custom-built tool sheds and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized sifter designed by Gross. As the pair worked, a steady trickle of locals stopped at the entrance to drop off kitchen scraps—not trash, but the makings of “black gold.” Thanks to careful management, even on this balmy day the steaming heaps of rotting vegetables didn’t give off an offensive odor. “I actually like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.

BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of community compost organizations throughout New York City. For decades, with crucial support via the city’s NYC Compost Project, community composters have taken a small but significant part of the roughly 4,000 tons of organic waste generated by New Yorkers every day and converted it into a valuable resource.

Food scraps and landscaping debris, rather than going “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are transformed into material that sustains local gardens, fortifies the city’s heat-mitigating tree population, and remediates contaminated soils. Meanwhile, local residents are educated and empowered to manage their own waste, less pollution goes into transporting and processing food scraps, and community bonds are deepened.

Community composting is a cherished part of many neighborhoods throughout New York. But its future is unclear. In November of last year, under Mayor Eric Adams and his sanitation department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the NYC Compost Project was cut entirely from the city budget. So was a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food-scrap drop-off locations throughout the city, processing millions of pounds of scraps each year.

The cuts decimated community compost operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing down numerous processing locations, and curtailing educational programming. All to save around $7 million, a mere 0.006 percent of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally in front of New York City Hall.

After an immense pressure campaign by activists, members of the city council, and other elected representatives, funding was restored at the end of June. With the vote, the budget for community compost was placed under the New York City council instead of the city’s sanitation department.

“I’m hoping that this will be less up for negotiation each budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of NYC’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There’s so much more that we could do, and it ends up by necessity concentrating our efforts onto preserving what’s in existence, versus imagining a more expansive alternative future.”

Saved From the Trash

The NYC Department of Sanitation began supporting community composting in the early 1990s. It launched the NYC Compost Project, establishing and supporting compost operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, along with satellite facilities at various parks and community gardens. The project also supported the beloved, now discontinued Master Composter program, to which many community composters in New York trace their roots.

As community composting evolved, the city also advanced its own curbside collection programs, which rely on contractors for transport and off-site processing. The city generates its own compost at a massive, recently expanded facility in Staten Island, though community composters note that the inconsistent separation of waste going in results in lower quality compost. In 2016, the city’s anaerobic biogas digester in Newtown Creek began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company, the giant “digester eggs” receive a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.

Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.

Biogas and centralized organic waste collection are the other side of the community compost coin. They represent what Guy Schaffer, author of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, calls “neoliberal waste management.”

“There’s this pattern that happens in a lot of places, where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a board member of BK Rot. In his analysis, such market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequities. “We can see the setting of a price on waste so that people have to pay for it, but that often creates a situation where waste winds up getting recuperated by the most marginalized people.”

BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants, including as part of a crop of new additions to the restored NYC Compost Project, it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.

The upshot of BK Rot’s work is that, along with creating a valuable resource and reducing landfill—they claim to have diverted 1.5 million pounds of organic waste to date—it provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps fill trash bags on the street corner to attract rats, or fill up trucks and landfills that typically operate near marginalized neighborhoods.

“Bushwick is such a fascinating focal point for thinking about waste inequity and intersectional inequities as they relate to environmental justice,” Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot, said. “[BK Rot] really is an answer to say, ‘Well, what if we can dream up a different system? What if we can address all of these problems at once, or at least a great number of them?’ . . . We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”

Grab a Pitchfork

Each instance of community compost takes a slightly different approach, responding to local conditions and needs. They are what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, alternatives to the status quo established in its midst. To address the income inequities of the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot takes a labor-centric view, making its priority one of engaging and employing local youth. Other composters may rely more on volunteer labor and try to leverage the value of the material itself, using markets to foster different relationships between communities and waste.

“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”

Despite the struggles for funding, community composters remain supportive of the city’s various efforts to divert organic waste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among its promises were an expansion of tree canopies, curbside rain gardens, and green jobs, along with a reduction in emissions. All these aims are helped by community compost, which makes the recent struggles over funding and access to land particularly vexing to community composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has ample funds for projects like a quarter-billion-dollar police training facility.

The Struggle Continues

The city’s restoration of the NYC Compost Project in June means that community compost can continue developing, though the form that will take is undetermined. A number of small operations will receive restored funding. “GrowNYC is no longer operating the food-scrap drop-off sites in the green market,” Sacks said. “As a result, there was money that we could reallocate to other groups. Something we as a coalition have wanted to see for a long time is not just the established community composting groups being funded by the city, but new ones that are doing great work also being funded.”

But the cuts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January as result of rezoning. Since 2011, it had operated a state-of-the-art composting facility underneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting over 3 million pounds of Parks Department leaves and wood chips. Just last year, it generated 700 cubic yards of compost that went to 154 different parks, schools, community gardens, and various greening projects. The cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce its staff, and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s Parks Department claimed it needed the site for a parking lot, despite owning an empty lot next door.

All of this underscores the crucial role of land, and of a positive relationship with the city, in enabling community composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite immense public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters, and public testimony at various hearings, press conferences and rallies. “It’s literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect community composting. Other community composting operations have been disrupted at least in part, including the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and all four botanical gardens.

Still, many of the city’s leaders do see the value of community compost. Twenty-nine out of 51 city council members, and four of the five borough presidents, signed letters to the mayor and New York Department of Sanitation supporting this summer’s restoration of funding to community composters. More than 49,000 New Yorkers also signed a petition demanding the same, in an effort organized by the SaveOurCompost coalition.

In parallel with the city’s expanding curbside program, community composters will again have the means to develop experimental infrastructures, while also filling the gaps within the city’s waste operations. With proper support, the diverse network of community compost operations can offer a meaningful alternative and complement to centralized, carbon-intensive systems, which in New York currently capture only about 5 percent of organics in the waste stream. The hope among community composters is that the value of what they do is now clear to the city and the public alike, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as trash but an opportunity to improve life in the city.

“I hope that all this drama results in a broader public understanding of what composting is and what is required as a land-based movement,” said Gil Lopez, an activist for community compost and a member of the Queen Solid Waste Advisory Board Board. “Invisibilization of waste is what I believe the mayor and [the department of sanitation] want to make happen. This allows [and] demands the public not think about it once it leaves their home. Community composting humanizes ‘waste’ and transforms it into a local resource and tool for raising ecological literacy, civic engagement, physical activity, and local responsibility for reducing our own impact in environmental injustice.”


Doug Bierend wrote this article for Civil Eats.


get more stories like this via email

Designers and stylists will showcase their "upcycled" garments as models hit the runway for what is being dubbed a "trashion show" at the Waste EXPO in Las Vegas next month.

It is estimated the average American household spends around $1,500 a year on clothing.

Sonja Salmon, associate professor of textiles at North Carolina State University, said whether the items wear thin or go out of style, only a small fraction of them are actually recycled. She noted the industry is realizing more must be done to reuse materials.

"Textile fibers are really amazing materials," Salmon pointed out. "We wear them, they're on our bodies, they feel good, they make us happy. They're also a resource. They have chemistry in them, they have materials in them that deserve to be recycled and reused."

Salmon stressed millions of tons of textile waste end up in U.S. landfills each year. It not only takes a long time to break down but is a lost opportunity for reuse. She added companies have started to incentivize buyback programs, a step in the right direction. The Waste EXPO is May 5-8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Salmon emphasized the Waste360 "trashion" runway will get people thinking differently about the use of fabrics. She explained today's clothes are primarily made up of synthetic fibers like polyester and natural fibers like cotton. Blended pieces are good for durability and comfort but are challenging to break down.

They have to be separated before recycling, so she pointed to the need for better collection and sorting technologies.

"So that large amounts of those materials can go to recycling processes," Salmon added. "I'm actually excited because Goodwill, an organization that we associate with clothing donation, is actually starting to think about its own role in helping the recycling process, in terms of collection and sorting."

Salmon encouraged shoppers to look to Goodwill and other thrift stores to purchase used clothing and participate in take-back programs to help sort materials for recycling. Consumers can also consider renting special-occasion clothing instead of buying.


get more stories like this via email

By Carolyn Beans for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.

Every year, US dairy producers churn out billions of pounds of cheese—over 14 billion in 2023 alone. As that cheese heads to market, producers must contend with what’s left behind: roughly 6 billion pounds of whey by dry weight, says Declan Roche, chief commercial officer of Foremost Farms USA, a Wisconsin-based dairy cooperative.

Untreated whey can’t be released into waterways. Although it’s about 94% water, the whey’s nutrients would trigger algae blooms, sucking oxygen from water and killing fish. Instead, many cheese producers filter out the protein to sell it as protein powder. But this process leaves behind another by-product, known as whey permeate. Producers might then salvage lactose from the permeate to sell for other uses. Even so, recovering lactose through mechanical processes is expensive. The profits are meager, Roche says. “It’s a least loss option.”

Microbes might offer a better way to manage wastewater. Today, researchers across industries, from food production to textiles to tech, are turning to microbes and their molecules to churn out marketable products as diverse as bioplastics, biofuel, metals, and animal feed (1). The ultimate goal is to transform industries, so waste gets cycled back into production rather than ending up in landfills. It’s a field that’s been “exploding” in the last five years, says environmental engineer Ezequiel Santillan of the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering.

Last year, Foremost Farms partnered with a Boston-based biotech company to develop a microbe-powered system that generates new products from the co-op’s waste. And university researchers are moving from the lab to large-scale pilots. “We’re creating a lot more economic value out of what is already there,” says Erica Majumder, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison), who is studying dairy waste. “[Waste] actually becomes another revenue stream.”

A Circular Bioeconomy

Microbes are already at work digesting nutrients in many industrial waste streams. But these systems don’t typically make desirable products. Once the water is cleaned up and released, the microbes left behind become another type of waste to deal with, Santillan says. At the same time, industries use microbes to generate products through fermentation, including beer, biofuels, and insulin. But these microbes need to be fed. Their meals often consist of crops farmed for this purpose, which leaves less land to grow food for human consumption

Santillan, Majumder, and others want to bring these two processes together: Microbes feeding on the industrial wastewater would be generating the marketable products at the same time. “There are lots and lots of different microorganisms that are very capable of metabolizing the huge variety of chemical compounds that are in waste streams,” Majumder says. These microbes could play a key role in shifting societies toward what’s called a circular bioeconomy.

“The idea of the circular economy is to keep materials in use as much as possible and for as long as possible,” Santillan says. The longer materials stay in circulation, the less waste and the more sustainable the industry is. Metals and plastics, for example, can be recycled through chemical or physical processes.

A fully circular bioeconomy, meanwhile, relies on renewable resources to make products and, often, microbes to do the recycling. Microbes are especially good at recycling resources that are dispersed in liquids, even at low concentrations. “When we have highly complex mixtures, that’s really difficult for chemical or mechanical processes to handle,” Majumder says.

From Dairy Waste to Plastics

When Majumder sees dairy waste, she sees the building blocks for bioplastics. Plastics have traditionally epitomized a linear economy. Fossil fuels extracted from the earth get separated and transformed into petrochemicals. Those chemicals are then formed into plastic products that are often used only briefly before being discarded. An estimated 79% of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic discarded globally through 2015 ended up in landfills or the environment (2).

But plastics don’t have to come from fossil fuels. Many bacteria can naturally produce plastic polymers, such as polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). This easily biodegradable plastic performs much like polypropylene, and it is already being used in some applications, including food packaging and disposable utensils. (PHB does release methane as it biodegrades, but no more so than conventional composting, Majumder says.)

Other bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, can be engineered to make these same plastics. In labs, microbiologists have successfully grown PHB-producing microbes on foods like cornstarch. But it’s dramatically more expensive than producing plastics from fossil fuels.

Majumder has been working with Deepak Kumar, a bioprocess scientist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, to identify industry waste streams that could feed plastic-producing microbes at a lower cost. One of the team’s most promising waste targets is another dairy by-product: acid whey. Unlike the whey left over from cheese making, acid whey—from Greek yogurt and cottage cheese production—is highly acidic. That makes acid whey even more challenging to safely discard. But it’s also chock-full of lactose and lactic acid, which many microbes will happily digest.

Majumder and Kumar grew a strain of E. coli engineered to produce PHB on acid whey collected from a local creamery. Untreated, acid whey is so acidic that it would quickly kill off E. coli and destroy any plastics that the microbes managed to produce. But by raising the pH and adding some additional ingredients, such as minerals and salts, the team created an environment where the microbes thrived.

The microbes fed on the lactose and lactic acid, recycling the nutrients’ carbon molecules into the backbone of PHB, which accumulated inside their cells. Ultimately, when the team harvested and dried the E. coli, 70% of the microbes’ dry weight was made up of this bioplastic (3). A dairy producer could extract the PHB and ship it to a plastics company just like any raw polymer derived from fossil fuels, Majumder says. What’s more, in producing PHB, the microbes digested 96% of the whey’s lactose and over 61% of the lactic acid (3).

This team has shown from start to finish how microbes can transform waste that’s available on many dairy plants right now, says Stephanie Lansing, a bioenergy and biotechnology expert at the University of Maryland in College Park, who was not involved in the research. Lansing studies how microbes can generate bioplastics when fed on food waste (4). The environment benefits, she says. “You’re taking something that you might have to treat—and use energy to treat—and you’re turning it into a beneficial product.”

Foraging for Metal

Other researchers have their sights on wastewater from the tech industry. Producing microchips, films, and many other high-tech components relies on expensive metals, including gallium, germanium, and indium. These metals are considered critical elements because they are in high demand, but their supply is not assured, says biochemical and environmental engineer Rohan Jain. Small fragments of these metals end up in wastewater at multiple steps of the production process, including during etching and polishing. The metal concentrations in wastewater are high enough to make the water toxic and expensive to treat, yet low enough to make retrieving the metals difficult.

But Jain is using iron-loving molecules naturally produced by bacteria to capture these metals. Many bacteria send out these molecules, known as siderophores, to bind to iron and retrieve it from the environment, Jain explains. Because gallium, germanium, and indium are structurally similar to iron, siderophores can find and bind to these metals too, even in liquids with metal concentrations as low as 300 parts per million (5).

Jain’s team at the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, in Germany, began developing siderophores into a technology for recovering metals from wastewater in 2016. The researchers first targeted gallium. “Will [the siderophores] survive the wastewater conditions? Can you regenerate them? Concentrate them?” Jain recalls asking. “All those environmental engineering problems were unknown.”

In 2019, the team reported that it had extracted gallium from wastewater collected from a factory after the production of silicon wafers (6). Siderophores found and stuck to 100% of the gallium. The team then added an acid that separated most of the gallium from the siderophores. In an industrial setting, that gallium could then be cycled back into production and the siderophores put to work again, Jain says.

The team is now operating a pilot-scale system that processes 1,000 liters of wastewater daily. The system relies on the only two commercially available siderophores—one synthetic and the other harnessed from bacteria. Neither is currently used by companies for drawing metals from industrial waste streams.

Jain is also screening siderophores to identify the most effective foragers for specific metals. “We know that there are more than 500 types of siderophores with different structures,” he says. He uses computer modeling to predict which siderophores will work best and then grows the bacteria to harness the siderophores and test his predictions (5).

Interest in recycling metals from wastewater is growing, he says, especially after China began limiting exports of gallium and germanium last year (7). While his system might prove economical for extracting a large percentage of many different metals in water, he notes that it can’t recover everything. “That last 5%,” Jain says, “would cost you an enormous amount of energy, time, and money.”

Microbes to Feed the Masses

Instead of generating some useful product, microbes feeding on wastewater streams can instead be the product. In 2020, Santillan’s team began analyzing the contents of wastewater collected from Mr Bean, a soybean processing company in Singapore (8). The water contained nutrients including salts and sugars, as well as a community of microbes that colonized this rich food source on their own. The team placed the wastewater into bioreactors in the lab. “As the microbes grow, they generate protein through their biological metabolism, so you make protein out of simple, or even more complex, carbon compounds,” Santillan says. The result: a protein-rich mass of microbes, plus water clean enough to be discharged or cycled back into production.

In January 2024, the team reported on what happened when they added these microbes into an aquaculture feed for Asian sea bass (9). Today, sea bass and other carnivorous fish raised in aquaculture are often fed fishmeal and oil from wild-caught fish, such as sardines and anchovies (10). But as aquaculture expands, there’s a growing need for alternatives that won’t deplete natural fish populations.

After swapping out half of the fishmeal in sea bass feed with the protein-rich microbes, Santillan’s team found that young fish survived and gained just as much weight as those raised on conventional feed (9).

Turning to microbes for feed could reduce the environmental impact of aquaculture. It could also aid the Singapore government’s mission to increase its food security by producing 30% of its own food by 2030, Santillan says. Currently, the country generates only about 10% of the food it consumes. “In Singapore, the only reasonable animal protein industry that has the space to grow is aquaculture,” he says. “But all the fish feed that they use is imported.” Meanwhile, wastewater from soybean processing is local, abundant, and costly to treat. “The goal is to connect these two needs,” Santillan says.

Based on the success of his soybean wastewater study, Santillan says that he and his team are now collaborating with Mr Bean and other partners to try to develop an industrial-scale demonstration facility adjacent to a soybean processing plant. He’s hoping it will prove the economic feasibility of his system. “We need to have a demonstration plant where we can produce, instead of kilograms of microbial protein, tons of microbial protein,” he says. But pulling it off will require buy-in from companies across the soybean, fish feed, and aquaculture industries, as well as investors.
From Lab to Factory

For any of these processes to work at an industrial scale, companies will have to build bioreactors to treat the waste where it is produced. “If you have to drive tankers full of this waste long distances, that negates a lot of the sustainability gains,” Majumder says.

At the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Research, a 400-liter bioreactor now sits alongside the dairy production facilities. There, Majumder is exploring how her team’s technology could work on a larger scale. Other UW-Madison researchers interested in turning waste into other products will also have access to the bioreactor.

For now, it’s hard for emerging microbe-driven, wastewater-repurposing technologies to compete with decades-old practices, says Piergiuseppe Morone, an economist at The University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza and a co-author of the 2023 book The Circular Bioeconomy: Theories and Tools for Economists and Sustainability Scientists. His research suggests that bio-based certification labels could help tip the balance. Some consumers, he says, are willing to pay more for products derived from bio-based materials and produced in a socially and environmentally responsible way (11).

But moving toward an economy that is environmentally sustainable requires not only the willingness to pay a small green premium, but also radical changes in production practices and consumer mindset, Morone says. “The idea of associating well-being with the accumulation of more and more goods is something that is no longer feasible,” he says. Consumers should instead measure well-being based on their access to goods and services they truly need, he says, such as access to transportation, rather than ownership of a car.

As for Roche of Foremost Farms, he hopes that turning dairy waste into new products will ultimately increase the value of milk—a pressing need for dairy producers who have struggled to cover the cost of production in recent years. What product exactly his team’s new microbe-powered system will generate isn’t yet public. But he says the possibilities extend far beyond food and extend into the chemical and energy industries. “We’re the largest cheese maker in Wisconsin,” Roche says. “But for the co-op to prosper and grow, value-added products need to be generated from every component of the milk.” Microbes, he hopes, will help make that happen.


Carolyn Beans wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.


get more stories like this via email

Kane County officials plan to launch four composting programs at large-scale facilities to reduce food waste, as part of meeting the county's climate goal to reduce greenhouse gases.

A $500,000 federal grant will pay for waste management programs at the Northern Illinois Food Bank and other large facilities that struggle with food waste.

Clair Ryan, recycling program coordinator for Kane County, said the partnerships came about serendipitously, beginning with the food bank. It receives sizable perishable and canned food donations, some of which are already spoiled, and asked if the county had resources to help them address food waste.

"And I said, 'Well no, we don't at the moment, but there's this grant opportunity...'" Ryan recounted. "It kind of got me thinking, 'OK, so if we can make this happen for the food bank, where else can we do it?'"

Northern Illinois Food Bank is one of the largest in the state. Through the composting program, it will implement a process to unpackage fruits and vegetables for anaerobic digestion.

Other program partners include the Kane County Adult Corrections Facility, the Kane County Cougars stadium, and Sherman Hospital in Elgin. Due to a new state law requiring large event facilities to provide recycling and composting bins, Ryan emphasized the partnership with the Cougars stadium seemed like a natural fit.

"The upshot of all of it is that we're going to be able to, over the course of the two-year project, divert about a million pounds of food waste," Ryan pointed out. "Keep it out of landfills, stop it from degrading straight into methane that contributes to climate change."

The program will also provide funds to purchase compost for distribution to small farms and community gardens throughout the county. In the long term, Ryan hopes to establish a dedicated food scrap drop-off point at Kane County's recycling center to encourage more community participation in the composting efforts.


get more stories like this via email