Building Waste Equity at NYC Public Housing (ft. Domingo Morales)

Compost Power

Three NYC Composting Failures That Reflect Troubling National Trends

New York Times Profile: The Unlikely Ascent of New York’s Compost Champion

Jordan Ashby:

Across the country, the community composting movement is growing. Locally-based composting provides communities immediate opportunities for reducing waste, improving local soil, creating jobs, and fighting climate change. You’re listening to the Composting for Community Podcast, where we’ll bring you stories from the people doing this work on the ground and in the soil.

My name is Jordan Ashby, advocacy and communications lead on the Composting for Community Initiative here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And I’m your new host, taking over from Linda Bilsens Brolis. In this episode, my colleague, Clarissa Libertelli, coordinator of ILSR’s Community Composter Coalition, joins me to speak with Domingo Morales, founder of Compost Power, a New York City community composting organization that builds sustainable community compost sites across NYC with an emphasis on serving underserved and marginalized communities. Clarissa, Domingo, welcome to the podcast. It is so nice to have you.

Clarissa Libertelli:

Thanks, Jordan.

Domingo Morales:

Thank you, Jordan. Good to be here today.

Jordan Ashby:

Thanks guys. Domingo, we’re really excited to have you today. I was wondering if you could just start by telling us a bit about where you’re from and how you got into composting.

Domingo Morales:

Yeah, thank you. I’m from New York City. I grew up in New York, in all five boroughs, I like to tell people. So I’m not from any specific place in New York. I’m just from the Big Apple. I spent most of my time in East Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn. And growing up, I grew up in New York City public housing, so I spent all of my childhood in New York City public housing. And throughout that time growing up, I didn’t learn much about sustainability, recycling, the green economy, climate change. It just wasn’t something we focused on in my culture. We were more focused on paying bills, putting food in the refrigerator, making sure we have heat, making sure we have hot water. These are some of the daily struggles that we had growing up. So we really didn’t have time to think about sustainability and unsustainable systems that we were placed in.

And it wasn’t until 2015 when I joined Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program based out of Brooklyn, New York that basically takes young adults ages 18 to 24 who live in public housing and teaches them about urban farming. And through urban farming, they basically expose us to many other skills and many other sustainable systems. And that’s where I found composting. I went to this farm even though I didn’t want to be on the farm because I was a germophobe at the time, and I told them, “No, I can’t go on the farm. The farm is a place where people can die. There’s a lot of germs, there’s a lot of bugs.” And also I told them that it was impossible to get me to a farm because I wasn’t leaving the city and there’s no farms in the city.

That was where I started my journey, was not believing that there could be a farm in New York City, and also not believing that I could survive on one. When they took me to the farm, I’m like, “All right, this is not really a farm. It’s a vegetable farm. It’s not like a farm with cows and pigs”, because that was really where the fear was coming from.

But when we got to this vegetable farm in Red Hook, I was just blown away by it and I was like, “Oh, cool, we can grow our own food.” And it was the first time I saw spinach, any kind of lettuce growing out of the ground. We grew peas when we were in school, but that’s about it. That’s where the extent of my botany exposure went was growing a pea out of a little cup inside of my classroom. So I was excited to see fruits and vegetables actually growing in real time. And that was also where I met David Buckel. And David Buckel at the time was running the Red Hook Compost site, which is the largest in the US that processes organic waste without using any fossil fuels.

So a hundred percent human power. And that meant every week, David was having 50 volunteers show up to help him turn those compost mounds. And my team in AmeriCorps had to go three days a week for about half of the day to help David turn these mounds. And that’s where I got my introduction to composting was from one of the best to ever do it, but also one of the biggest sites in the US that didn’t use machines. So I had a lot of opportunity to master the art of human-powered composting.

Jordan Ashby:

Yeah, that’s a great story right there already, and I feel like there’s probably a million other little stories within that. You have now transitioned to founding Compost Power, which is this amazing community composting organization that has a lot of sites at public housing units. And I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that and what Compost Power is, how you got started in it and about the mission.

Domingo Morales:

Yeah, great question. And it all kind of follows each other. So after being introduced to composting and getting so enamored by David Buckel and the Red Hook Compost site, I ended up getting a job there seven months later. So I went from just being a volunteer AmeriCorps member to actually being one of the people running the site. And that was a really cool experience because I didn’t expect to get the job because I didn’t have a college degree or a driver’s license, which were the qualifications for the job. But David basically told me, “Domingo, I’ve met many college graduates, and out of all of them, you probably know more about composting than anyone, including some doctors out there.” So I’m like, “All right, cool. I’ll apply for the job.” And I applied as a joke to show him that it was impossible that they were going to see what I had because they were going to be more focused on what I didn’t have.

And I guess they proved me wrong, because I ended up getting the job. I was the best person for the job, and for the next five years, I basically just stuck it out. I stood at Red Hook and I was able to train the next wave of young adults who came through the same program as me, and I became sort of their mentor and the person they looked up to as their grading rubric for success in the green economy. So that was cool. And for five years, I was just mastering the art of volunteer management, training the young adults that came behind me. But we always had an issue where it was hard for residents to get to Red Hook because it was so isolated in New York City. It’s one of those things where on one side we have water, and then on the other side we have the BQE, which is this really large highway that sort of creates the line for the poor community and the wealthy, middle-class community.

So for my community, it was hard to get out there, and that was always something I struggled with at Red Hook was even for me to get to work when I was living in East Harlem, instead of taking the train, which took two hours, I was biking or rollerblading, and I was doing 22 miles a day just to get there on time. And that was something that not everybody in my community was going to do. So you had a lot of young adults who would getting there late, they just weren’t on time.

And if you know anything about working or being in a program, a job training program, showing up late kind of ruins your day, and it ruins the experience. And if you’re late most of the time when you go into a training site, your experience at that training site probably isn’t that great. So I started to pick up on these, and I always had this idea to build compost sites in the public housing community where these residents were traveling from to make it easier for them to get this knowledge, to bring it to the community.

But I really never had time to do it because I was at the Red Hook Compost site and processing 200 tons a year by hand with only three staff members is a bit of a big ask. It was really hard to maintain that. So that was five days a week of physical torture for people who didn’t like it. So I actually enjoyed it, but they were coworkers who, for them, their body was falling apart with this level of workload that we had. So Red Hook was kind of battling machines at the time, and every time we were asked for more funding for more staff, we were told, “Why can’t you just get a Bobcat? You can process the material a lot faster and reduce the human staff you actually need. You can go from three staffers to one”, which would have reduced the volunteer engagement. It would’ve reduced so much meaningful work that we do by composting by hand.

So we always pushed back on the machines, and because of that, we sacrificed being able to go out into the world and teach people our tricks, to give them the infrastructure that they need to survive. And then in 2020, when the pandemic hit, that was one of the times when the city said, “Hey, we don’t think composting is that important. We don’t have the money for it, so we have to stop composting. Let’s just shut it all down.” And that was when the Red Hook Compost site lost its funding. And I was laid off. And for the first time in five years, from 2015 to 2020, I was back in that headspace of, “What is my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing?” I lost Red Hook, which was my pride and joy, was is my oasis in life. It was where I went to to feel safe.

That was my fish tank. So I kind of lost my fish tank when I lost Red Hook and I kind of got depressed afterwards, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. And I waited two months. I was doing work on my deck at my house just doing random housework. And my wife’s like, “What are you going to do? We have to pay bills. You can’t just wallow in sorrow.” And I’m like, “I got this. I’m going to figure this out.” And while I was doing the housework, I do this thing where I have to move to be relaxed, and composting was that for me. So I had to figure out something to do to be relaxed. So I started doing housework, and in the process of doing housework, it hit me, “I should be composting. I shouldn’t be doing housework. I should be composting wherever I can.”

So I figured since I grew up in public housing, Green City Force took me in and they taught me farming skills and exposed me to composting so I can master it. Maybe I should just go back and volunteer and see what’s going on with Green City Force. So I went to a farm in Canarsie. That was my first time during the pandemic for two months of just solitary confinement, just me, my wife, and my cats. And I’m like, “All right, this is not sustainable.” I went to the farm, I volunteered and they had a three bin system, and they’ve been composting for a while. Green City Force has always been composting, but it just wasn’t up to my standards when I got there. I think there was a few mice in the pile, which is one of my peeves. At Red Hook never had rats or mice in our piles.

So for me, I was a little disgusted. I was like, “Ugh, I don’t want to touch this material anymore.” But this is in a public housing campus, in a public housing community. So I reached out to Green City Force and I said, “Hey, I have a lot of time on my hands. I have some spare money saved up. Can I rebuild this compost system? Can I take over this?” And Green City Force is like, “Well, let’s see what it looks like. Sure, you can build a site.” And that’s where Compost Power got started. It was the idea of bringing composting to the public housing community so they don’t have to travel, but also in an attempt to show the public housing residents that this is actually something they should have. It’s not a privilege. It’s not something that only rich people can have, that only upper-class communities or oases like the one in Red Hook can have.

This is for everybody. Everybody should be doing this. So I built my first site in Canarsie before having the Compost Power idea. And when I built it, I was already an applicant for The David Prize, which is a prize in New York City that is $200,000 of unrestricted funds for anyone who wins. And you have to have a big idea for New York City to make it a better place. It’s modeled after the MacArthur Genius Award.

So I was already in the running for that, but at the time, I think my idea was a compost gym. I think I was calling it Motion with Meaning, where we would use kinetic energy to power this gym and we’d compost in this gym, and that’d be what people do to come and work out. So that was my idea at the time. And I applied before COVID even happened, but when I lost my job and I lost Red Hook, the idea kind of changed and it became like, “You know what? Instead of building this new cool compost gym concept and putting gyms in the New York City, how about I just build actual composting sites in community that never had it.”

And that’s where the idea came from. That’s where Compost Power turned into its concept of bringing compost to public housing, removing rats, removing odors, and just making it seem cool to those residents. And from there, it kind of blew up into this making compost cool for all people that want to know about composting. So I serve predominantly public housing. I have nine sites that are in New York City, eight of them are in public housing, one of them is in a upscale middle-class community. So we definitely see both sides of things. But my pride and joy is really the compost sites in the public housing communities where we’re surrounded by buildings, we’re under a microscope, and any little mistake we make is going to be scrutinized by every resident that lives in the community.

So I love working in public housing because it just raises the standard every single day. The standard in composting has to be raised because we’re in someone’s life. When they wake up in the morning, they hear our shovels scraping, they smell what’s coming out of our compost mounds. So it just keeps us honest and helps us stick to that Diamond Standard of composting. But yeah, it all started as just me trying to compost again after the pandemic and just trying to figure out what community I wanted to call my own and what was going to be my new Red Hook. So instead of one big massive site in Red Hook Brooklyn, I created satellite sites that every single one of them when I’m there makes me feel like I am at a Red Hook in New York City. I am at an oasis. I am at a place where I can move and forget all of the movement going on around me, like the trucks, the cars, the incinerators, the anaerobic digesters, the plastic pollution. While I’m composting, I can forget all of the nasty things we’re doing to this planet.

Jordan Ashby:

I love that. I still think there’s a gem of an idea there in Motion with Meaning.

Domingo Morales:

I’m still developing it. It’s a side copy.

Jordan Ashby:

Yeah, I think that a lot of people would be very interested in that. So just want to put a bit in that.

Domingo Morales:

Yeah.

Jordan Ashby:

You talk so much about the community that you’re around in the public housing sites, and that’s really the reason why you’re there. So yeah, just real quick before we get into that Gold Standard of best practices you were just mentioning, could you tell us a little bit about the impact you’ve seen in that community?

Domingo Morales:

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of impact in the communities that I work with. When I first started composting and public housing, there was a lot of talk about rats, right? Like, “You’re going to bring rats to our community. This isn’t just, this is gentrification.” I’ve heard some things like that. Like, “You’re bringing composting, you’re also going to bring the white people with you.” These are some of the things that I’ve heard in the community, but we’ve watched the impact of that Diamond Standard, the impact of having the highest quality standard composting in the community where residents are now saying, “Can you bring one of these to my site because there’s rats over here and we need you to get rid of them?” And there’s community gardens that are telling other community gardeners, “Get composting, get Compost Power. If you do it, your community garden’s going to look clean, your community garden’s not going to have any rats.”

So I started to see the tone change when it comes to Compost Power and some residents, instead of trying to push us out or not asking how we can get more of this, how we can get more compost sites. So that’s one of the ways in which I think we’ve impacted these communities is we’ve shown them that composting isn’t just composting. We’re land stewards. We’re trying to make sure the green spaces are active, they look good, they look presentable. We’re creating a resource. So at all of our sites, we make that connection with food and plants. So at the sites where residents are getting free produce that we helped grow with their food scraps, it changes the way they think about compost and farming. They connect the dots on those two. So they realize that if you’re going to farm, you need to compost, and if you’re going to compost, you need to farm.

So it creates that closed loop system that we were trying to create in the first place, but now we have residents advocating for it. But for the most part, I think when people think compost, they don’t think it’s disgusting anymore. And I think that’s the biggest impact is showing residents that this is actually beautiful, that this should be nice, this should be something kids want to put their hands into, not something they want to run away from. And by doing that, we’ve had more participation in these green spaces. So you have residents now that because they’ve eaten tomatoes, collards, lettuce from the farm that we contribute to, they no longer want to buy the material in the supermarket. They no longer want to buy the tomatoes that have been sitting in a fridge for weeks. So they’ve changed their habits, and in some cases, the supermarket has had to find different sources of vegetables because the one they had just wasn’t up to par anymore.

They’re battling with farm to table in the community. And when we can’t grow food, residents want that same quality of food. So we’ve seen that locally where residents are now pushing back with the businesses in the area saying, “Hey, this is disgusting. This is not what a collard is supposed to taste like.” And I think for me, starting off as a guy who just wanted to compost more and divert waste from the landfill, I think this is really cool to see that in a way they are diverting waste from the landfill by telling supermarkets, “This food is going to go to my fridge and never get eaten. So we don’t want this on your shelves.” And I think that was the whole goal for me is composting is great. It’s a good way to deal with the waste we have, but how can we focus on the production issue? Where the food’s being grown, the supermarket waste, the restaurant waste, and how can we use composting locally to kind of change that mentality?

So we started to see that shift in culture, and I think that’s where we want to end up one day is the point where we’ve changed all the behavior in the household, and then we can start to focus on, “Okay, if we’re all recycling at home, where’s all this waste coming from?” And that’s the only way we’ll actually get to a zero waste city is by looking in the other direction and stop falling for the tricks of businesses blaming us and putting it on just bad behavior in the households. For me, that’s the north star is to really figure out who’s giving us this waste because we buy this stuff. And if it’s waste, then we’re paying for waste. Then what is waste really? And that’s the dilemma I live with on a day-to-day basis.

Clarissa Libertelli:

I love that we’re getting into the big picture of zero waste, and I hope that we can circle back, but I want to get back to the rats. I want to take it back to the rats. That’s big in New York City. I know that we’re famous for that. I also am living in Brooklyn and we have a rat czar. And you mentioned that the residents at those public housing sites were nervous about composting attracting rodents and prove them wrong. And actually your sites have been recognized by New York Public Housing Authority as a successful method of pest management. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that happened and just the difference that you’ve seen in pest activity in your composting sites?

Domingo Morales:

Yes, rats, right? Our best friends in New York City, they are in everything that we do, and everyone hates them, but no one knows how to get rid of them. Since I’ve started, the goal was zero rats. David Buckel hated rats in the compost pile because he attributed rats in the compost site as less people composting. The more people see rats in a compost pile, the less people that are going to be invested in this idea of composting locally. So since the beginning of time, since 2015, I’ve always been taught that there should be no rats in a composting site at all. And this was at Red Hook where I’m like, “Obviously this is the way it should be.”

And then two years in, I started to dip my feet into community composting in New York City, and I started to visit different sites, and I’m like, “Cool, there’s going to be no rats. It’s going to be clean. This is going to be amazing.” But then when I went, it was the opposite. There was some community compost sites that I wanted to run away from that I’m like, “Oh no, there’s like a thousand mice in here.” One out of five bin systems that I’ve witnessed out in the wild, I’m going to call it the wild in real life, don’t have rats in them. So that’s four out of five, three bin systems that have a rat issue from 2015 to 2020 that I was stumbling across.

When I came to public housing, I’m like, “I have to use three bin systems because I don’t have the space to do only windrows.” So I decided to redesign how the three bin systems were built, and part of it was the hardscape. If you’re not starting with a concrete patio and you’re composting on dirt, then what happens is the rats are able to crawl under the dirt, create their little tunnels because they’re engineers, and they can get into your three bin system that way.

So instead of doing a concrete patio, what we did was we did a multi layered hardscaping. So first we tamped the ground, made it really compressed, so there was no settling. Then we put a steel screen down. After we put a steel screen, we put landscaping tarp. After the landscaping tarp, we then put gravel. After the gravel, we put sand, and then after the sand, we put two-inch pavers on top of that. And that is the base, right? That’s many layers of hardscaping that a rat has to find their way through. That’s going to take years for them to figure out, considering we also block off the edges with an aluminum edging that they can’t really chew through. So we just make it really hard for them to get underneath our three bin systems. What I noticed happening in the wild was, and we’ve established the wild means in New York City, but in the wild when we build bin systems, in the past we’ve used dog fur, which is something that is sort of rot resistant, but under the FBI’s microscope, the fungus, bacteria, insects dog fur does not stand the chance.

Maybe in two years that wood would start to warp, the rats would start to chew it would start to rot, and that is their opening. That’s how they get in. So we don’t use dog fur, we don’t use pine. We either use hemlock or cedar to build our three bin systems, and this is the most rodent resistant wood that you can get. I would say cedar is a lot better than hemlock. So if you can afford cedar, go with that. But with this cedar, we can go 10 years without worrying about that warping, rats chewing it, and it rotting to the point where they can get in. Cedar is going to stand the test of time. So we use cedar wood, and then we also design the system with the minimum openings are a quarter inch. That’s the most space that we can find anywhere on our three bin system. And rats need about a half of an inch to get into the system. So at that quarter inch, we can keep them out.

So that’s the one way which design matters. You have to design your system to be rat-proof in the first place. Once you’ve designed a rat-proof system, the only thing left is human error. If you build a rat-proof system and you start composting in it, and then you put food scraps in your bin system and walk away from a month when you come back, there’s going to be rats in that system because there’s no human presence. So the final key to rodent-proof sites is human presence. And the way we achieve human presence is every seven to 10 days, we actually aerate every single mound on our site. So if it’s a windrow, if it’s a bin system, every single square inch of our compost is going to be touched and adjusted and rotated and aerated at least once a week.

And by doing that, you basically remove a habitat. It’s no longer a habitat because the material is leaving the system and then going back in. So by doing this, what we noticed is the rodents in the community, the rodents in the immediate vicinity started to disappear. And me being a very curious person, I just wanted to know where the rats were going in the beginning. So I’m just like, “Where are they? There were rats here when I first started. Where are they?” So I expanded on our area and I started to do investigations. Very weird. I’m like the rat investigator, but I started to do investigations around the buildings to see where the rats were going, and they were creating tunnel systems that they were able to hide in near the buildings because with the tunnel systems, they were able to go into the building, into the trash compactor, that property still had food scraps, and then they were able to come back out.

So I had my team rig up these sticks with spikes on the end of them to start to collapse the rat tunnels. And by collapsing the rat tunnels we’re basically undoing their work. And engineers, which rats are, they are engineers, they hate to spend a lot of time on something to see it just either ignored or destroyed. And when we destroy the rodent tunnels, they get tired of building it. And if you can do that consistently for about two weeks, just collapse the same tunnel for two weeks, you’ll learn that the rat stopped building the tunnel. And we noticed that, “Oh, we can actually push them even further out of the community.” And then when we stopped seeing the tunnels near the buildings, I got even more curious. “So where are they now? Where are our rats?” If your goal is to get rid of rats, then you start to think like a rat, right?

So I’m already invested now, I’m a year into this. This was in 2022 when I was just really into this. Now I’m like, “Ooh, where are the rats? Where are the rats?” And I started to check on the abandoned community gardens that were run by the seniors, and the seniors were just so old, some of them that they just couldn’t get out anymore to prune the garden, to cut the grass, to get rid of the organics that they pulled out of the ground the year before. So the rats were now hiding in the community gardens near the composting sites, and they were in the garden beds. And so I’m like, “All right, so now that we’ve collapsed their tunnels, they’re not in the tunnels, but they’re creating new tunnels in the garden. So maybe if we cut the grass in the garden and we prune this garden up, they’ll leave because there’s no way to hide.”

And that happens. At our East Harlem site, we cut down the garden, the overs, we didn’t destroy the garden, we just kind of pruned it and maintained it. And the rats just started running. A hawk moved in and started just picking them off one by one for a week. And then eventually the rodents were gone. And this is something that I’m like, “Ah, this is integrated pest management.” We’re using many methods to get rid of a pest, and this is something we learned about on the farm when it came to whiteflies, but I was doing it with rats, which is so much bigger. So I basically just told NYCHA and I went to a meeting and I said, “Hey, NYCHA, this is what we’re doing. We’ve been able to eliminate rodent pressure at most of our sites. We’re also pushing the boundary even further out to try and get them out of the campus.”

And then NYCHA said, “Oh, this is cool. We should try it at two sites that have serious rat issues and see if your method works.” So NYCHA said, “Let’s pick two of the most rodent-infested places in New York City and see if you can get rid of the rats in those gardens. And we did it. We got a two-year pilot with public housing, New York City Public Housing, Pest Control, Department of Environmental Conservation, where we went to these two sites just to see if we can get rid of the rats on the sites. And we have found that we have been able to eliminate the pressure in the gardens in those areas. The tricky part now is like, “Can we do it in the whole campus?” And that’s where we’re at right now is pest control is, “In order for you to get rid of it all over the campus, we need you guys to have a site in front of every building or on every corner.”

So they’re like, “It works where you are, but in order for you to eliminate them and eradicate them completely, you need an army.” So that’s where we are now, where we’re like, “Okay, what’s an army? How many people do we need to get rid of rats in our community?” And that’s where I am now, but we have proven, and they have coined us as integrated pest management solutions for green spaces and composting sites in New York City. So if you’re composting and you have rat issues, Compost Power might be the organization that you want to call to come look at your system, assess your site, and raise your standards so you can get rid of rats. But it’s so cool that we started out as composters and just naturally for our hate of the species turned into pest control solutions for public housing.

Jordan Ashby:

That is so great. I feel like everyone who lives in New York City is like, “What about the rats? What about the rats?” And like you said earlier, that is one of the big resistant forces that a lot of composters come up against when they’re talking about bringing in a new composting system or composting site. So you’ve proven that it can be done, and now you can actually be controlling the rats with a lot of diligence and hard work.

We’ll be right back after a short break. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please consider supporting our work with a donation by going to ILSR.org/donate. Your donations make this show and all the work we do here at ILSR possible. Visit ILSR.org/donate to make your contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And if you’re looking for other ways to support us, consider rating or leaving a review of the show wherever you listen to your podcast. These reviews help us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening. Now back to the show.

Talking so much about New York City here, I would love to ask your thoughts on the changing landscape of composting in New York City. New York City has recently cut funding for the New York City Compost Project, which has been a model for community composting and government collaboration for many decades now. And I don’t believe that you’re a part of the New York Compost Project, but could you speak to that a bit and just your general thoughts on what’s going on in the city?

Domingo Morales:

Yeah. New York City is a very interesting place. It is the place where we have so many community composting. We have the largest network of centralized organics’ diversion programs in the country, I think. But we’re at this moral dilemma right now in New York City where we’re trying to figure out, “Is composting the most important thing or is diverting from landfill the most important thing?” And this is what we’re dealing with right now, where you have the Department of Sanitation in New York that created this centralized system of organic recovery. So they have smart bins that are on sidewalks that you can actually use an app to open up and put your scraps into that smart bin. And then that material is actually taken to anaerobic digesters in some cases, one being the Newtown Creek facility.

What they’re doing is they’re producing methane, and the idea is that DSNY can extract that methane and sell it to national arid or a power company, and they can use that methane to power homes, which is great in theory. If we were taking food waste and we were turning it into methane, and then actually using that methane to power homes, then we’re a little bit more sustainable than where we were.

The problem lies in the technology that they’re using where we’ve read reports of the methane being burned off. So if we’re burning it off, then what’s the point of putting it in a digester? We shouldn’t be burning anything off. Flaring should be against the law. So that’s one of the moral dilemmas. It’s like we actually were happy that DSNY is diverting organic waste from landfill, but can we eliminate the methane flaring? Can we fix the technology to get to that point where we actually using that gas? Another part of that is problematic is the finished product that comes out of those digesters. So the patties that are left over, the solid waste that’s left over from that co-digestion process can’t be used. It’s too contaminated. No one wants to use that on their farm. So in most cases, that material is being sent to landfill.

So not only are you flaring sometimes because you just can’t capture all of the fuel being generated, but you’re also landfilling the byproduct of the material that you’re creating. And for us in New York City, that’s an issue because your bins say compost. If you go to the smart bins throughout New York City, it says compost. It blatantly says, “Make compost not trash.” So if they’re not making finished compost, then change the words. Just say what it is. Organic waste diversion. Organic bin. Organic diversion program. Call it something else if you’re not composting. And then DSNY also has the brown bin program, which actually goes to residential homes, which is really great because for a very long time, only certain neighborhoods have access to this service where you can just bring your meat, your dairy, your bone. If it grows, it goes into this brown bin once a week, DSNY is going to collect it.

You have successfully diverted your waste from the black bag. We think that’s great, until we hear that that material is also going to co-digesters that are not being composted. And then we start to hit that moral dilemma that, “Well, we didn’t send it to landfill, but we didn’t compost it either. So what’s the verdict on this? Are we happy with this?” And that’s what we’re seeing right now. We’re seeing New Yorkers. Some of them are like, “No, this is crazy. No, we want to see this composted.” But then you’re also seeing some New Yorkers that are like, “Well, at least I have service. The service that we had in New York City, the New York City Compost Project didn’t serve my area, so I didn’t have access to this.” So you have those two sides of things.

Then we had the New York City Compost Project, which to give you some history, it was created by DSNY. So when I say DSNY mean Department of Sanitation. The New York City Compost Project is the Department of Sanitation’s baby. They created them for the purpose of educating New Yorkers about composting, teaching residents how to compost, because when DSNY tried to do a brown bin program many, many years before the New York City Compost Project was created, they failed horribly. And the reason they failed is because no one even knew how to recycle regular things like paper, glass. They sure as hell didn’t know how to compost organic waste. So they weren’t able to successfully implement this program in New York City. So Department of Sanitation kind of canceled that program. And a few years later, they said, “You know what? We need to create the New York City Compost Project to educate residents before we ever get to a centralized system again.” So that’s why the New York City Compost Project was created.

The whole purpose for them was to make a successful brown bin program, which they have done. If you look at, everyone knows what the Brown Bin program is. They are actually recycling organic waste. So the New York City Compost Project had successfully educated many New Yorkers. They didn’t only educate New Yorkers. The New York City Compost Project went on to educate the world. Everyone started to learn from these cultural institutions like the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden then came on like Big Reuse and other entities. So they became the educators of community composting, which is really cool. Even David Buckel, my mentor, he got his inspiration from attending a master composting course at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And from that, he created the largest site in the United States that doesn’t use fossil fuels. So the New York City Compost Project is the inspiration. It was the inspiration.

It was the light bulb, it was the, “Hey, create a plan to compost in your city and implement it.” So I think for me, where we are in New York City is we’re trying to figure out what is community composting, right? That’s one big question. What is actually community composting? What are the lines that, “At what point have you become the system? At what point are you still for your community?” So that’s one question. Another question is, “Are we happy with just diverting organics? Are we okay with co-digestion being the model? Are we okay with all of our waste being taken away, us not seeing it again, and the material we do get back probably isn’t as high quality as what you’re going to make in your backyard?” We’re probably not okay with that. We’re probably not okay. I’m not okay with most of New York City waste going to co-digesters.

But we are in that space where if we would get to a point where we actually do partner up, where Department of Sanitation, Compost Power, Green Fiend, BK Rot, the cultural institutions that have made a name for themselves for the last couple of decades. If we all teamed up and did what we did best, compost locally, compost in central locations, if DSNY opened up those smart bins to community composters in the community. So if there’s a smart bin near my compost site, can I process that? Can we not chuck that to another location? Can I get a key to open that and empty that? As a local community composter, I think that’s where we’re really going to get to zero waste. What I don’t like is I don’t like demonizing different entities. So everyone has things to learn. Everyone has ways to get better. So I’ve refrained from demonizing Department of Sanitation because they created the Compost Project.

And by creating the Compost Project, they educated David Buckel. And by educating David Buckel, they created me. The Department of Sanitation, they had a really cool idea. They had a great idea to create the Compost Project. And the Compost Project created even better ideas. So we need each other. Without DSNY, there’d be no Compost Project. Without Compost Project, there’d be no Compost Power, but without the people, there would be neither.

So we need to agree that the people come first, and if we’re going to serve the people, we have to listen to them. And what we found is a lot of people saying they want community composting, they want more local processing. And if that’s what the people want, then that’s what the government have to give them. If we’re really that into composting, and we care that much about what happens with our waste in New York City, we need to do things other than blame the people who are getting it wrong. If we know it’s wrong and we know it’s against our moral guidelines, then as a people, we have the power to fix it. We just need to come together. Sorry, I give long-winded answers.

Clarissa Libertelli:

No, that was good. And if people want to know even more about the situation, Jordan and I actually wrote about it in an article on ILSR’s website that will link in the show notes. But I like what you said about the community composters and the city working together. Definitely still side-eyeing the slogan of, “Make Compost not Trash”, but I do like your Compost Power’s slogan, “Make Compost Cool.” And I wanted to ask you a bit more about that. And I know that you have a music video dropping soon, a song dropping soon about composting, and how does that fit together with Making Compost Cool? How does art fit into that? And can you tell us where can our listeners find that song when it comes out?

Domingo Morales:

So Making Compost Cool, especially for me, I was born in the Bronx. I was born in Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, and my family mostly lived in Soundview projects in the South Bronx. So part of growing up in the South Bronx, music was everything. Rap music, breakdancing, it was everything. It was the culture. So I’ve always been into music, I’ve always been into rap music. And since I was a little kid, I used to write songs and put them together, but I never actually released any music. It was always just for me and my brother. And because we were the ones making music, it wasn’t something that we made to get famous. We just made music just to have fun. It was a hobby of mine, and I used to make a different kind of music back in the day. But I did realize that music was the key to my culture.

Music was the way we communicate with each other. When we used to see new rap songs, we used to get excited about it, and we used to compare it to what was happening in our hood and our projects. So when I started composting and back in 2015, I naturally started making music about farming, about composting. I went from making music about girls, money, drinking to making music about composting and environmental sustainability. And it was a really cool transition. It started off as like, “Okay, let me stop cursing in my raps.” And then after I stopped cursing in my raps, it was like, “Okay, let me start rapping about something that isn’t girls. Or let’s talk about dead zones in the ocean. Let’s talk about over-consumption.”

So my music changed, but I never really finished a song. I would always write a song and not finish it. And then I created this hook for composting for the song called Scraps. Back in 2020, I created the hook for The David Prize for a sizzle video. And that hook was just stuck in my head, and I’m like, “I have to finish this song. I have to finish this song.” And I finally finished it. And part of it was anytime I rap about composting in the community, and I got this from Dior, from Green Fiend, she would rap during workshops, she would rap on public events. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s really cool. I rap too. I could give you some bars.” So I started out with me seeing what Dior from Green Fiend was doing and going like, “Oh, I do that too, trust me.” And then when I made this compost song and let a few people hear it, I just saw some excitement, real excitement from the residents, and I realized that they resonate with the music.

They’re like, “Oh, he’s making a rap song about composting. This is cool.” So I decided to actually finish this song and do the video, and I filmed the video in my Williamsburg site and then also in my East Harlem site. And the goal is to basically take that excitement that I saw in those residents and just kind of spread it through New York City, but also give a gem for anyone to listen to. So I think there’s different things that get people excited. Art. There’s some people that use art to get people excited about composting. There’s one artist that I know that’s helping me do banners, and she had this idea of creating this cool art piece that you build a compost mound, and then you put it on a wall and you just let it age over time. And that’s the art changing over time, and that will get really cool artists excited about this work.

But if you’re going to get New York City Housing Authority residents excited about composting, it’s got to be music, it’s got to be rap music, probably R&B. So the first song I made was called Scraps. It’s dropping soon, you’re going to be able to find it on all platforms, including SoundCloud under my username, Restless. But we’ll definitely let Institute of Local Self-Reliance know and send you guys the link so you can share it with your followers, or should I say our followers. I’m also in the collective, but I’m excited about this song because in the song, I actually teach people how to compost correctly. So if you listen to the song and you follow the rules that I laid out in the song, you can compost correctly and you can compost without odors and without rats. So that’s exciting to me. It’s exciting to make music about what I love because music is my first love.

Growing up in public housing, growing up in foster care, music was the only true constant for me. Wherever I went, the songs in my head would come with me. So I think for me, that’s a little bit of my soul that I’m sharing with people. I usually don’t share my music, so I’m excited to make people excited about composting, and I’m excited for Scraps. First ever music video. So don’t make fun of my awkward hand gestures, but I just really love it, and I want everybody to make Diamond Standard composting a reality. We use Gold Standard composting, but the Gold Standard is not high enough for what we need to achieve. So Diamond Standard, absolutely no rats, no odors, clean sites and beauty where we’re actually making the community better with the material that we make. That’s my goal. And the art piece is just a little piece of me relaxing. That’s me relaxing.

Jordan Ashby:

I’m so excited to see this music video, and I’m sure that everyone will be blown away, and no one will think that the hand gestures are awkward. And thanks for clarifying the difference between Gold Standard and Diamond Standard. I feel like earlier in the episode, I referred to Gold Standard then you’ve mentioned Diamond Standard, and I was like, “Oh, there’s a new standard in town.” So I’m happy that you’re elevating everyone to that standard.

Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Domingo. It’s been such a pleasure and I’ve learned so much, and I’m sure everyone who’s listening has learned a lot as well. Before we close, do you just have any final thoughts that you’d like to share with the audience?

Domingo Morales:

I would like to say as an individual, I get caught up on the impact that I can make as an individual, and sometimes it makes me depressed how little impact I’m able to make. But I would like everyone to know that as individuals, we’re really small in this world. But as a whole, when we put all of our actions together, the consequences are really big. So even if you feel like the little gestures you make aren’t making a difference, it’s those little gestures that add up that make the big difference. So if we can breed positivity by teaching others to be just a little bit more sustainable and everyone was just a little bit more sustainable as individuals, then the consequence of us being would be a lot bigger.

Try not to get caught up in the day-to-day. I think that was something my mentor got caught up on was he kind of lost sight of the impact he was making on that bigger scale of all the people he touched and interacted with. So just keep in mind that even if what you’re doing seems really small, it’s big in the grand scheme of things, and as a network, as a community, we can make the world a better place.

Clarissa Libertelli:

Love that.

Jordan Ashby:

Yeah, I love that so much. And I think sometimes we all need that reminder. Well, thank you again so much for joining us today. We’ll have show notes linked both on our website and on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you’re listening to this podcast. So check those out. And yeah, thanks so much. It has been so great to talk with both of you.

Clarissa Libertelli:

Thanks, Jordan.

Domingo Morales:

Thank you. This has been amazing and I’m excited to see the series back in action, and I’m going to be a heavy listener to every episode you guys release. So thank you.

Jordan Ashby:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Composting for Community Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Drew Berschbach and the ILSR’s composting team. Our theme music is, I Don’t Know, from the Grapes. Be sure to check out the rest of the ILSR podcast family, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and Community Broadband Bits at ILSR.org.