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Last month, the Biden White House released its National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics. ILSR’s Julia Spector joins Building Local Power to discuss how the leading advocacy of ILSR and allied organizations led to community composting becoming a featured component of the national strategy, and how far we’ve come since we aired the 2019 episode of Building Local Power entitled “Why Scale Matters in Protecting the Climate and How Composting Can Help.”
Julia explains how the strategy’s goals — reducing methane emissions and increasing organics recycling with an emphasis on the importance of local and decentralized composting — are met by being mindful of how scale matters in tackling climate change, creating jobs, and building resilient local food systems. Following this introduction, we replay the conversation from the “Why Scale Matters” episode of Building Local Power for a deeper dive into the topic, highlighting the progress from unrelenting advocacy to integrate community composting into federal policies, ultimately showcasing how local power can drive substantial environmental and social benefits.
- See the original episode “Why Scale Matters in Protecting the Climate and How Composting Can Help“
- New Wins for Decentralized Composting in White House Strategy to Reduce Lost and Wasted Food Article by Julia Spector
- Read the full National Strategy here
- Find the Environmental Protection Agency’s Summary of National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics here
Julia Spector:
It’s really extremely encouraging to see that the White House is acknowledging the central role composting plays in protecting the climate and building healthy, thriving communities, but also how important scale is when considering solutions.
Reggie Rucker:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker. Here with my co-host Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?
Luke Gannon:
Hey, Reggie. Doing well. I had my favorite breakfast this morning, French toast.
Reggie Rucker:
Ah, love it. Love it.
Luke Gannon:
Yep. But I’m also like… It’s been 90 plus degrees here in Minnesota and that is just a little too hot for me, and I know it’s this way across the country. It’s probably even hotter in D.C, is that true?
Reggie Rucker:
Yeah, yeah. It’s gross. It’s just gross. It’s just gross. But speaking of how hot it is, you’d think we scripted this stuff the way we moved into the segue, is from like the heat, speaking of compost. So we have another special summer episode of Building Local Power dusting off some old episodes from the archives and freshening up with the latest insights from our team here at ILSR. And as Luke was just saying, with these summer heat waves, we wanted to revisit some of our work on how composting and community composting especially, is an essential tool to combating the worst effects of climate change. But now it’s not just us talking about it, the White House under President Biden has now gotten on board.
Luke Gannon:
So in 2019, we aired an episode called Why Scale Matters in Protecting the Climate and How Composting Can Help about the growing support of composting at the local and state level. Five years later, we are seeing monumental change at the federal level as well. The Biden-Harris administration recently released their National Strategy for Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics. So today we are welcoming a first time building local power guest and ILSR staff member on the composting team, Julia Spector. We are so happy to have you on the show today, Julia. Thanks for joining us.
Julia Spector:
Hi all. Hi Luke, hi Reggie. Thanks for having me.
Reggie Rucker:
Absolutely.
Luke Gannon:
So we’ll just jump right in. Julia, at a high level, what does the White House’s strategy to reduce lost and wasted food aim to accomplish?
Julia Spector:
So the national strategy outlines a plan to meet national and international goals to reduce food loss and waste, reduce methane emissions and increase organics recycling. Organics recycling is collecting and processing carbon-based organic materials like wasted food and yard and tree trimmings, and then turning them into new products. So composting is one method of organics recycling. The plan’s goals are crucial to fight climate change. Production, distribution, retail prep, all of this for food that is currently wasted each year in the US contributes as many greenhouse gases as 60 coal-fired power plants, and also uses enough-
Luke Gannon:
Wow.
Julia Spector:
Yeah. And also uses enough water and energy for 50 million homes. So when food is lost or wasted, it ends up in landfills, which then produces methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term. So methane’s responsible for about 20 to 30% of climate warming over the last two centuries. Even though food scraps can be recycled, such as through composting, food waste is the most common material found in landfills, and they make up about 60% of methane that’s emitted from them. So this is a huge issue that has a lot of potential to curb warming.
The strategy aims to meet these goals in ways that also save households and businesses money, create jobs and business opportunities, build cleaner, healthier communities, and increase food and nutrition security, sovereignty, accessibility, and affordability. And the strategy also emphasizes inclusivity and equity by prioritizing needs of underserved communities who bear the brunt of the adverse consequences of waste mismanagement. So the plan is trying to instead ensure that they directly benefit from the plan’s actions. And composting, especially at the local level, is the perfect solution to meeting each goal in the plan. Composting and compost use tackle climate change from many angles, by cutting landfill methane emissions, building soils that sequester carbon, and building climate resiliency. Local decentralized composting especially has abundant social, environmental, and economic benefits and can address each underlying goal of the plan.
Reggie Rucker:
On that point, walk us through some of the strategy’s action steps. What specifically do we see in the plan that… It’s a large plan so we don’t have time to go through all of it, but what specifically is in there that we were excited to see in there?
Julia Spector:
Yeah, absolutely. So the first two objectives focus on preventing food loss, which occurs during the supply chain before reaching consumers. And the second objective is to prevent food waste, which occurs in retail, food service, or households. But the third objective is to increase the recycling weight for all organic waste, which is where composting comes into play. Key actions that were detailed under this objective are to support the development of organics recycling infrastructure at all scales through grants and other assistance for communities, especially those that are underserved. And the plan also aims to expand the market for products made from recycled organic waste. So for composting, this means finished compost, which can be used to build healthy soils and to grow more food.
The next action focuses specifically on advancing decentralized organics recycling. So this means community scale, on farm, and home composting. And these actions aim to benefit all communities, especially supporting tribal communities and communities with environmental justice concerns. The plan also seeks to develop tools and data to aid decision-making for investments and policies and to also address contamination in the waste recycling stream. Finally, the fourth objective of the strategy is to support policies that incentivize and encourage the plan’s action steps, which is critical in being able to apply these action steps.
Luke Gannon:
So Julia, you mentioned that part of the strategy is to support infrastructure at all scales. Can you dive a little bit deeper into this, how scale is addressed in the White House’s strategy?
Julia Spector:
Scale is critical when addressing climate change. Scale matters to how quickly and effectively we can slow climate warming, how different communities will be affected by climate disruption, who benefits from solutions we’re applying, and also who will bear the brunt of inaction. So the strategy does a really good job addressing scale and the key role that it will play in meeting its goals.
When scale’s considered composting can facilitate a just and equitable transition toward a more resilient planet. Community composting creates six times as many jobs as incinerators and three times as many jobs as landfills on a per ton basis. Decentralized composting typically creates higher quality compost that’s used locally, which builds healthy soils that are resilient to extreme weather, that then results in higher crop yields and stronger local food system. Composting also breaks dependence on incinerators and landfills that disproportionately plague low income and BIPOC communities with fatal health and environmental quality issues. So it’s really encouraging to see the plan’s inclusion of scale, especially when considering who benefits from its investments and the other support.
So some of these key actions that we were really, really excited to see include support for on-farm composting, removing barriers from operating permits, studying de-packaging equipment and its relation to contamination, studying contamination in general in organics recycling, updating federal regulations for landfill methane emissions, and exploring federal procurement of finished compost. The strategy acknowledges that even with federal investments and support, widespread progress can only occur with critical intervention by state and local governments. And because of this, it includes support for other federal agencies, for tribal, territory, state, and local policymakers. So along with the historic funding opportunities, the strategy offers technical assistance, tools and resources, education, and model policy and program examples that can be replicated.
Reggie Rucker:
Thinking about, we’re going to plan an episode from 2019 that talks about why scale matters, why community composting matters, and to think about that conversation from four or five years ago and to where we are now with local community composting being such a focus of a White House strategy, what does that say to you about how progress is made, how to build local power and… Like what we do, build local power and fight corporate control. What does this moment mean to you?
Julia Spector:
Yeah, it’s really extremely encouraging to see that the White House is acknowledging the central role composting plays in protecting the climate and building healthy, thriving communities, but also how important scale is when considering solutions. When environmentally beneficial policy is implemented without attention to scale, too frequently contracts and funding end up back in the pockets of a few monopoly players in the waste industry. So the inclusion of scale in equity issues in this plan is a huge step in the right direction and a huge step moving power away from corporations and back to the people. We are now looking toward the states and local governments to take these directives and apply them in a way that benefit their constituents and not just a handful of corporate actors. As more food and waste policies are being introduced in state and local legislatures, we have to ensure that solutions don’t perpetuate monopoly power, but instead provide ample community and local benefits. We really highly encourage anyone interested to learn more about how to get involved and join the fight that we’re taking.
Reggie Rucker:
Awesome. Thank you, Julia.
Luke Gannon:
That’s great. Yeah, thank you so much Julia. And just on that note, to get involved if you all want to learn more about the White House’s strategy, Julia wrote a great article recently detailing all of this called New Wins for Decentralized Composting in White House Strategy to Reduce Lost and Wasted Food. So to go check it out on the ILSR website. And stay tuned if you want an even deeper dive into why scale matters and how when policymakers are addressing how to protect the climate, they’re also making sure to address community equity, community involvement, and community engagement. Julia, it was so wonderful having you on today. Thank you again for joining us.
Julia Spector:
Thanks so much for having me.
Hibba Meraay:
Hey, Brenda.
Brenda Platt:
Hey, Hibba.
Hibba Meraay:
So the climate crisis is increasingly captivating people’s attention and is at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds, especially given recent headlines like The Burning of the Amazon and Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas and even political plans that we’ve seen are making a lot of news like the Green New Deal and more recently Bernie’s Climate Plan. So we thought it’d be a good time to talk about how our work at the institute protects the climate, specifically both on the composting team, which you direct, but also how climate change fits into our larger mission at ILSR.
Brenda Platt:
So glad to be joining you for this conversation because climate destruction is certainly keeping me up at night.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah, I think I actually read some recent articles about how stress about climate change impacts people in their daily lives, which is increasingly an issue for everyone. So glad to be here as well. So I think first I’d just love to talk about how your work specifically addresses climate protection, and maybe you could talk all about why it’s better to have a community-based system to deal with waste rather than like a big corporations managing our waste system.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. First let me just start by saying there’s a direct link between soil and climate protection, and then again, between compost and soil. New studies are showing that soil can act as a huge carbon sink to help balance out greenhouse gas emissions, and that could have the potential of holding up to three times as much carbon as what’s found in the atmosphere. It’s so crucial that we look at practices that enhance healthy soils. Healthy soils, just to be clear, are those that are rich in microbes, high in organic matter, store carbon, are stable, can retain water. And one of the beauties of compost is that compost provides all of those benefits and it is the best way to add organic matter to soil. So it’s great to be working in a field advancing composting, something that everybody can do, every community can do no matter where you are in the country. And we can make compost from many types of organic materials, yard and [inaudible 00:14:10] trimmings, wood waste, and food waste.
I would just say that food waste is particularly important because when it’s landfilled, it produces methane, which is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in terms of its global warming potential. In the short term, in like a 20-year time horizon, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A lot of people don’t realize that.
Hibba Meraay:
Oh, wow.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. So composting is a win-win because if you don’t send to the landfill, you’re not producing methane, but if you add it to soils, you’re sequestering carbon. So it’s a win-win. And in the US, we are still throwing away 30 million tons of food scraps every year, and landfills are a top source in methane. So it’s really important that we focus on food waste. In fact, the book that many listeners may have already seen, the 2017 book Drawdown, which is a roadmap for a plan to reverse global warming, according to that book, what we eat turns out to be the number one cause of global warming, and they include all food-related emissions from farming to deforestation to food waste, and maintains that if we can transform a source of greenhouse, greenhouse gases into a sink, that’s what we need to be doing.
So instead of releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, improving our food production and the way we reduce and recover food waste can capture carbon. And it can not only increase soil fertility and soil health and water availability, but ultimately begin to address food access issues, food security, nutrition, and other things that we can do. So composting is just one among a number of the strategies that were laid out in the book Drawdown, but one of the critical ones in terms of the win-win for protecting the climate.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. I wonder how many people know that the food system is the number one contributing cause to global warming? I definitely didn’t know that. And I think it’s interesting because it’s hard to imagine a world in which we reverse the huge agribusiness and all of the way that food has grown to mass-feed people today. But I think it is a lot more empowering to think about, okay, what are we doing with the food waste and how could we at least deal with the products of that system in a more sustainable way like you mentioned?
Brenda Platt:
And I think one of the reasons that food waste and the food production is so huge is that we waste so much food. Some studies are showing that 40% of food that’s produced is wasted in this country. So there’s huge, huge potential to avoid food waste to begin with, and then what we can, recycle and recover. We can rescue a lot of food to feed people who need it. And then what we can’t rescue, what we can’t reduce, what we can’t rescue, we can recycle into compost. And a lot of that food, food scraps that can be composted, can’t be rescued. We can’t use watermelon rinds or banana peels to feed people. That can be composted.
And to your question earlier about the scale of the composting systems, this is something that we focus quite a lot of our resources on here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in our work is that scale does matter. So if we can make compost at home in our backyards and in community gardens at schools and elsewhere in urban farms, then that compost gets cycled back into local soils. And at the same time, we’re creating local jobs, we’re educating local youth, we’re producing healthy food in areas that need food the most. So it can be done locally.
And often we’re seeing a huge jump in cities and counties that are doing more on food waste recovery, but often they turn to large-scale systems first. It’s not that we won’t need the large-scale systems, everything’s needed, we need more infrastructure for composting, but don’t overlook small-scale home composting, community scale, supporting farmers in your region who really know all about the soil and want to do more of this. So scale does really matter in how we do it, and the policies and the contracting and everything that can happen at the local level to support community scale enterprises is very, very important.
Hibba Meraay:
Great. Yeah, I think that’s actually a perfect segue because my next question was about how ILSR’s work as a whole is relevant to climate change. What is it about our perspective and our framework that’s useful? And part of it you already mentioned is scale. So we emphasize this issue of decentralization and distribution of power. Yeah, I would ask you, what do you think [inaudible 00:19:11] adding to this conversation?
Brenda Platt:
You referenced it at the beginning of this conversation, the Green New Deal, and equity and community development and job creation is one of the central tenets of the new green deal, and that’s something that we care about too. When you have diverse infrastructure, distributed infrastructure, if you will, or decentralized and small-scale, then you’re creating more enterprises, more jobs. And in the case of wasted materials and discarded materials, if those materials can be remanufactured locally within local economies, then you’re closing the loop. You’re creating the circular economy locally, so that’s really important. If you just take waste of our residential, commercial, retail waste streams, solid waste streams, almost half of what we produce is compostable materials if you include not only food scraps and yard trimmings and some paper in there and wood waste.
And so if you can convert that into compost locally, you’re creating local jobs, and the product itself tends to be used locally. So for local farms, local gardens, but also one of the biggest markets for compost is in managing stormwater runoff and in what’s called green infrastructure. So green infrastructure could be like roof gardens, bioswales, rain gardens, things that help soils retain water, slow, manage. In the case of a storm, when you have big storm runoff, can help manage that. So it’s not all pollutants ending up in our surface waters, rivers and streams, and ultimately bays and ocean.
So compost, it can be used for preventing soil erosion, helping mitigate stormwater runoff. So when it’s used locally, then you’re having all those benefits within your local economy and your local community. That’s huge. And then when you look at the contrast, where does our waste go now? Right now our waste is going to landfills and trash incinerators, and those are owned by big waste companies. So we can take away some of their power, some of their influence and expand decision-making away from corporations to local communities and local people. So that is really key in that sector that we work in waste and composting. And in some of the other sectors, it’s the same thing. We have in our Energy Democracy program is focusing on small-scale solar and wind and community-controlled utilities.
And so again, when you have large, not that we’re not against large wind farms and solar farms, but when you have large, even renewable energy sites, you have a lot of loss of energy across the transmission lines, you’re not creating local jobs. Here in DC, the DC government is supporting a solar energy program where they’re employing… It’s called Solar Works DC, and they’re employing local people and through a multi-week program, giving them the job skills to install solar panels in low-income neighborhoods. So that just gives you an idea of when you have small-scale systems and it’s done locally, you’re creating enterprises and local jobs. And it’s a common thread through a lot of the work we do at the institute.
Hibba Meraay:
Great. I think, like you said, we are really trying to take a holistic approach. So it’s not just about composting for the sake of composting or solar energy for the sake of that. Even though that stuff is great and important, it’s also about, like you said, taking away the revenue stream and the power and the influence from these big companies that would otherwise have the waste. And so when you’re able to bring that back to the local community and empower the local folks to manage their own waste or manage their own energy, then you’re really redistributing the power, not just the economic power, but the political power in that case.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah, that’s right. And in the case of waste, it’s not just the big waste companies that handle the waste that make money off collecting waste and taking it to the know landfills, incinerators that they own. But also if we look at the products that we’re buying, those tend to be big corporations too. So single-use plastics, you look at DuPont and Dow and Solo Cup, all these companies that make money off us buying single-use plastic products just to put in a landfill and incinerate. So looking at recycling commodities and materials and reuse and repair create many, many more jobs than disposal scenarios. I’ve done a lot of work over the last few decades comparing the jobs through landfilling and incineration with reuse, repair, recycling, and composting, and just sorting recyclables creates 10 times more jobs than landfilling and incineration.
Hibba Meraay:
Oh, wow.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah, it’s huge. But then when we make new products from the old or we reuse and repair, that’s the largest economic payoff in the recycling loop. So remanufacturing facilities, repair, which is high labor, high skills, creates so many more jobs. This is like electronics repair, even wooden pallet repair. We looked at textiles we use in recovery. Multi-materials. Across the board, when you reuse, repair, you’re creating many more jobs. And these tend to be, especially repair, reuse, building salvage and deconstruction, those tend to be really local businesses. We can’t ship our bricks from one part of the country to the other to be reused. That tends to happen within a local economy, so.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah.
Brenda Platt:
It’s pretty exciting that we can do this locally. It’s not technological obstacles to doing this.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah. I think one of the things we’ve touched on is basically there’s a lot of evidence that smaller businesses and independent business reduces climate impact. Basically it’s nearly impossible for big corporations that are really centralized to be low carbon. It’s just not possible at scale, like you said, with all of transportation emissions and things like that. So could you talk a little bit more about that and how big corporations are fundamentally at odds with being low carbon?
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. There’s a lot of evidence that smaller businesses reduce climate impacts. We actually did a report. My colleague Stacy Mitchell in our Community-Scaled Economy Initiative, she did a report about five years ago, November 2013, called Walmart’s Assault on the Climate: The Truth Behind One of the Biggest Climate Polluters and Slickest Greenwashers in America. And that report found that nearly after a decade after it launched its, quote, “Sustainability campaign” that Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions have grown substantially and continue to rise, and that when calculating its emissions, Walmart failed to count for major fast-growing sources of pollution in its operations, things like they excluded international shipping. They didn’t take into account new store construction and product manufacturing. And it had many media announcements about solar and wind projects, but our report found that Walmart lagged compared to competing chains and many independent retailers who were making the switch to renewable energy.
The other thing I’ve noticed that, and this will be no surprise to any of our listeners, is that Walmart is a major contributor to the campaigns of lawmakers who are blocking action to address the climate crisis. So there’s that too. So when you have so much control on political power and these big corporations, not only is it harder for them to reduce their climate impact because of the nature of the whole business model being centralized and how they source materials, but then they have the political clout to impact and block actions that are needed to address the climate crisis. So corporate concentration is a huge, huge area that we need to focus on.
Hibba Meraay:
It’s interesting because these big corporations really use climate change and greenwashing you said it’s a marketing tool for them, and they’re not really thinking systemically about what their global or even local contribution is. So that’s not great. But we’re going to take a short break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk more about climate change.
Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. This is the part of a podcast where you usually hear an advertisement for something like an audiobook or something like that, but that’s not really how it works here at ILSR. We are a national organization that supports local economies, so we do not accept national advertising. In lieu of that, please consider making a donation to ILSR. It underwrites our work and also supports the production of this very podcast and all the resources and research that are available for free on our website. So please take a minute to go to ilsr.org/donate. That’s ilsr.org/ donate. Any amount is welcome and appreciated. Thanks so much. And now back to the show.
Great. So before the break, Brenda, you and I were talking a little bit about our work at ILSR and how it addresses the climate crisis. I’d love to hear from you why the climate issues need to be central to the work of all people working in public policy. I think in the public policy space, there’s been a division where there are environmental organizations that work on environmental issues, and there are consumer protection organizations and things like that. But now given that the climate crisis is really coming to a head in the media, in all of these places more people are recognizing this is really related to the work that we do. So would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah, so why do climate issues need to be central to the work of everyone, and especially those working in public policy? I’ll just say nothing else matters if we don’t have a livable planet. And honestly, I don’t understand the false narrative that claims we can’t afford to protect the climate because it’s bad for business. Climate change is the biggest risk for all businesses. And I think the work that we do in being focused on solutions is really encouraging, not only for me and my colleagues who work in this space, but for those that… We work with businesses, we work with local policymakers, elected officials, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and we have to give people hope. We have to give youth and all people actions they can take to make a difference. I believe that everyone has agency and we have to take advantage of that.
I also think that policymakers need to understand that this is not just a case of whether we save the climate or we don’t. We are facing different scenarios, and what we do today can impact whether average global temperatures rise by two degrees, four degrees, or even in horrific eight degrees. And I think this was well delineated by David Wallace-Wells in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, where he lays out the imperative for averting the worst-case scenarios. Again, nothing else matters if we don’t have a livable planet. So climate issues need to be central to all the work we do. And I will just say that equity and keeping things local and involving the community as a voice at the table is also very critical.
In the work that I do with composting, for instance, we are really, I think, making headway and advancing composting because we are involving youth and a lot of community groups and disadvantaged communities. Just to give you an example, in the city of Baltimore, we helped start the Baltimore Compost Collective, which is a youth-engaged food collection and composting service. And Marvin Hayes who heads up that program is in his community every week talking about how we need to compost to avoid burning the trash. Baltimore has a trash burner that hopefully will be closed soon. And he’s making the connections between composting and growing local food and the environmental and health impacts of the incinerator in his community. He says learn so we don’t have to burn.
He’s talking about making black gold for the Curtis Bay neighborhood, which he calls the Wakanda of Baltimore and that black gold the Vibranium of Baltimore. And he’s making these connections that aren’t directly related. When he’s talking, it’s climate as well because we know that poor people are going to be the most impacted by climate issues, but by advancing community-scale composting in a city like Baltimore, you can bring everybody along with you if you talk about the benefits in terms of jobs and equity and youth engagement and youth employment and workforce development and skills development. And that’s why it’s so critical that when policymakers not only are addressing how to protect the climate, but they’re doing it in a way that builds community equity and community involvement and community engagement, we won’t win unless we do that.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah, I think that’s a great example. So yesterday, this will air in a few weeks, but yesterday was the climate town hall where they had all of the presidential Democratic candidates talk about climate change and what their plans are to address it. And I think we’ve really seen a shift in the public narrative for folks that work in policy. People are really starting to understand climate issues through the equity lens. Like you said, disadvantaged communities are the ones that are hit I’ve heard the saying first and worst by climate crisis. And so I think a few years ago, the policy world was more fragmented and like, “Oh, the environmental policy people just do climate change stuff,” but now it’s really an issue of if you want to talk about equity and you want to talk about good jobs for disadvantaged communities, you have to also be talking about climate change and the connections and the climate impact and the connections to race and income and all of that stuff, and health outcomes like you said.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. And I mentioned the Solar Works DC program in Washington, DC and that’s just another example where the city has invested in that program, but it’s not only employing people and giving them job skills, but the solar panels are being installed on apartment complexes in some of DC’s most disadvantaged communities. So there’s a way that we can roll out renewable energy, there’s a way that we can address emissions from the food production sector in a way that builds community and engages people and gets them vested in this work and wants to see more of this, so.
Hibba Meraay:
So I want to talk a little bit more about… Optimistically a little bit more about the promising actions that might be happening. So in lieu of any major federal commitments, we’ve seen states and a lot of cities taking action on the climate crisis. Our Energy Democracy team actually shares stories of cities that have committed to 100% renewable energy through their Voices of 100% podcast series. I’m wondering if you’re seeing any promising momentum and climate action at the municipal local level. A lot of times when we’re talking about climate crisis, the picture’s really grim, and that’s important to be real about that so that we can have the appropriate sense of urgency. But are you optimistic about any developments at the local level?
Brenda Platt:
Oh my God, yes. So much of what’s happening with composting is taking place at the local city and county level and even neighborhood level. And we’re seeing so many more local government-supported programs, particularly on the food scrap collection. We actually led a research study for BioCycle. It’s a journal of organics recycling, and we led research on the growth of local government-supported programs that collect food scraps for recycling, not only for composting, but also another form of recycling called anaerobic digestion, which is another biological process, but it produces a biogas. But we found that food scrap recovery is growing and increasingly recognized not only for reaching high waste diversion levels, but also for protecting the climate and feeding the soil.
We found that there were now 5 million households in the US that have access to curbside programs and another close to 7 million households that have access to drop-off programs. The curbside numbers was an increase in 87% since BioCycle did the survey five years ago. And those programs are in 20 states now. And one of the things I can also add is when we look at the states that are leading with those programs, that state policy is also playing a critical role. California is a perfect example of that. They have more curbside collection programs for food waste, and it was like a little under 100. And California may have some of the best state laws encouraging recycling and composting. Many of those laws such as its mandatory business commercial recycling requirements directly aim to reduce greenhouse gases through recycling and composting.
And one of the things that’s notable about I think some of California’s policies is their laws really are about trying to create re-manufacturing production facilities within the state to create more jobs and close that loop within the state economy. That’s notable. The other thing California has done because they recognize the connection of waste to the climate change and global warming and the benefits of healthy soils is they’ve created a Healthy Soils initiative under which they’re giving multi-million dollar grants to advanced composting and then soil with compost.
Communities at the local level can certainly move forward with promoting drop-off in collection programs. And state policy is important, but in the absence of state policy, just know that your local government can take action even if there’s no state leadership involved. And so of the close to 350 communities that we documented, not all of those are in states that have state policy. And often what is true is that when local governments, local communities are proving that it can happen, then the state pays attention. So it’s a little bit of a give-and-take from the local and the state level.
And Vermont, by the way, is another state where I think we had a couple of dozen communities documented, and Vermont is another state that passed statewide legislation. They passed in 2012 a Universal Recycling Law, and they’re phasing in policies and programs, not just for composting and fruit scrap, but also for a wide range of recyclables. And those materials are going to be banned from landfills in 2020. So if you know this ban is coming, then at the local level, you’re going to develop these programs. I’m very encouraged and very optimistic about what can happen at the local level.
A fun fact is one of the reasons that the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, when it was founded in 1974, has always worked on waste as one of its big issues, is that waste tends to be a local municipal issue. It’s your local departments of public works that are responsible for collecting trash and recycling it or composting it. And so that ends up being a municipal issue and responsibility. Local cities have a lot of power to change how they do things with waste, and it’s not just food scrap collection and composting, but we’re seeing cities pass bans on styrofoam, polystyrene, which is number six. We’re seeing bans and fees on single-use retail plastic bags.
We’re seeing Berkeley, I think is the first one now, to pass legislation that’s going to be looking at incentivizing, getting rid a single-use food service wear items. We can be doing this all over. Cities have a lot of power policy-wise, program-wise with their budgets to take action in this space. And I find that very encouraging.
Hibba Meraay:
That’s great. I feel really encouraged I think after hearing all of that and also just knowing that there are things that people can do in the wake of this giant climate anxiety that we touched on at the beginning of the episode. So that’s all really good to hear. I think in our conversation we’ve sort of scratched the surface. There’s so much more to talk about in climate change, but unfortunately our have to end sometimes. So we’ve given our take on how ILSR views the climate crisis. Are there any resources that you want to highlight for folks that are listening or even recent work by the composting initiative that you’d like to recommend our listeners check out?
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. We’re just launching a new webinar series called Compost Climate Connections, and the first one has been with Dr. Sally Brown with the University of Washington out in Seattle, September 17th. And she’ll be talking about not only the ability of compost to sequester carbon, but also the other benefits to the soil that compost provides. And then we’ll be following that up with Calla Rose Ostrander with the Marin Carbon Farming Project. And the Marin Carbon Farming project, something everybody should check out. That’s a project that was probably founded about a decade ago by John Wick in part. Some of their findings is that if you apply a thin layer of compost once on grazed rangeland, it’s like putting medicine on poor soil. It quickly becomes healthy and on its own starts to promote more plant growth, which sequesters more carbon, which held more water, which promoted more plant growth, and so on. They found that if compost were applied to 5% of the state’s grazing lands, that’s California, the soil could capture greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to removing 6 million cars from the road. So that’s Marin Carbon Project. Check that out.
On a shorter side, I’ll just say there’s a four-minute video that I think is worth saying. It’s called The Soil Story, and it’s by Kiss the Ground. I just think visually and so briefly just perfectly illustrates the importance of soil and carbon cycling and drawing down from the atmosphere into the soil and includes the role of compost. So check that out. I mentioned the California’s Healthy Soils initiative, check that out too. So there’s lots of resources available, but those are just some I’ll just highlight now.
Hibba Meraay:
Yeah. And I’ll remind folks that all of the resources that we mentioned today will be linked on the show page for the episode. I also want to plug our composting podcast. We have a few new episodes that we put out recently, so if you’re interested in learning more about composting, Linda from our composting team interviews folks that are in our community composting coalition about their work and the difference that they’re making in the communities where they’re based. So that’s Composting for Community if you’re interested in checking that out.
Thank you so much, Brenda, for joining us today. I think I’m walking away with this conversation feeling a little bit more hopeful in the face of hard topic of climate change, but excited about what’s going on at the local level and definitely enlightened. So thanks for joining.
Brenda Platt:
Oh, my pleasure. And remember, [inaudible 00:44:49] lucky and we each come into contact with food waste or food scraps three times a day so everybody can make a difference.
Hibba Meraay:
Thank you all for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find the links to what we discussed today at ilsr.org on the show page for this episode. That’s ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. If you like what you hear, please help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. Your ratings and reviews really help us reach other listeners, so please take a minute to leave us a five-star rating or a nice review or both. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and me, Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunctional. I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.