by Megan Campbell 11th Hour Racing
This Thanksgiving, Americans will throw away roughly 305 million pounds of food – the equivalent of approximately 1,525 blue whales! But imagine if things were different. What if this food waste could become healthy soil, protecting the sea by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our reliance on synthetic fertilizers?
The good news is that we’re already getting started. In 2023, our grantees have helped divert 3,280,900 pounds of food waste from landfills!
Our support for composting initiatives started small and grows steadily as we witness success. We’re developing school compost programs, increasing access in historically marginalized communities and supporting BIPOC-led businesses and initiatives. We’re also supporting new processing sites, increasing demand through an advertising campaign, and supporting a network of community compost leaders.
Just last month, our grantee, Groundwork Rhode Island, was named a sub-awardee of the City of Providence’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant from the federal infrastructure bill. The funding will support their West End Compost Hub, a remediated brownfield site. Further south, Baltimore Compost Collective is rallying its community around compost, diverting food waste from incinerators with its electric car pickup program. The EPA recently awarded Baltimore City a $4 million grant to develop a solar-powered, scalable composting facility.
Composting at home requires minimal effort and expertise and can be as simple as placing your food scraps in a bin on the side of the road for collection. As families gather for this holiday season, help us bring the conversation about composting to the table.
To start this conversation, we pulled together composting solutions to kickstart your journey #fortheocean. On our website, you can find over 80 compost collection services in the Northeast United States. Or, explore national resources from literless.com.
If you want to witness the magic of food waste transforming into organic compost, try it in your backyard. Learn how to compost at home from the EPA, and dive deeper into the community composting movement from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
By simply composting food scraps instead of throwing them in the trash, you remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mitigating climate change. Watch nature’s ability to restore itself, like magic.
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