ILSR Honors Michael Martinez with Community Composter Groundbreaker Award

Michael is a certified Master Gardener, a former elementary school teacher, and the Founder and Executive Director of L.A. Compost. Michael has over 8 years of experience building gardens and compost systems throughout the County of Los Angeles as well as other parts of the country. Michael has grown L.A. Compost from a group of volunteers collecting organics with bikes to a decentralized network of community compost hubs that span across the most populated county in the country.

We celebrate Michael for:

• Proving that community composting can be rooted in and serve the community
• Demonstrating that community composting can scale up
• Establishing 38 community composting hubs, collecting food scraps at farmers’ markets, and growing his team to 25+ staff
• Creating an upcoming magic compost school bus and teaching the importance of soil
• Continuing this work for over a decade, even in the face of solid waste franchise districts that restricted his right to collect
• Starting with just two bikes collecting kitchen scraps and pivoting to a hub-and-spoke network of community sites 
• Eventually bringing City government on as partners
• Graciously sharing his experience with others so they can replicate your model
• Proving community composting can be done, and in doing so, helping us here at ILSR

With deepest gratitude, it is our privilege to present this first ILSR Community Composter Groundbreaker Award to Michael Martinez.