Government Support for Community Composting Part 4: A Menu of Options – Zoning, Grants, and Contracts

  • Nov 18, 2022
  • Brenda Platt
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  • Presentations & Events
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    In Part 4 of our Government Support for Community Composting webinar series, you will hear a menu of options on how urban, rural, and suburban governments are supporting on-farm and community composting. San Diego County has changed its zoning to facilitate decentralized composting sites. Many jurisdictions in the San Diego region have contracted with the Solana Center for Environmental Innovation, resulting in the spread of on-farm and other local composting. Across the country in rural Vermont, the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District has seeded Neighborhood Compost Pods in collaboration with a local town and local farmer. And in an urban city, under contract with the City of Albany, an urban ecojustice and ecological literacy nonprofit is composting food scraps to regenerate urban soils.

     

    This live webinar took place on: October 27th, 2022

    A recording is available at the link below for those who did not register for the live session:

    CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE RECORDING

     

    The fee to watch this webinar recording is $20
    Participation in this series is free for Community Composter Coalition members (use code CCC), farmers (use code FARMER) and for local government (use code LOCGOV)!

    This webinar is one in a series the Institute for Local Self-Reliance offers to support a distributed and diverse composting infrastructure that includes community-sized and on-farm composting. To view and listen to our library of past composting-related webinar recordings, click HERE.

     

    PRESENTERS

    Tyler Farmer – Planning Manager
    San Diego County Sustainability Planning Division (California)
    Tyler Farmer is a Program Manager with the Sustainability Planning Division of Planning & Development Services in San Diego County. Tyler will talk about how San Diego County has changed its zoning to facilitate decentralized composting and to leverage interest in on-farm composting and new commercial opportunities.
    Jessica Toth – Executive Director
    Solana Center for Environmental Innovation (San Diego, California)As executive director, Jessica Toth oversees daily operations and management at the nonprofit Solana Center. Solana Center established curbside recycling in southern California and now fosters environmental change through education and consulting. Jessica will share developments in policy in San Diego and greater California that have removed hindrances to local composting. She will also touch on how multiple jurisdictions have funded the Solana Center’s composting outreach and education, compost demonstration sites, manure management, and other initiatives. Jessica holds a Master’s degree from MIT in Business and a Bachelor’s degree from Cornell in Engineering. She also completed UCSD Extension’s certificate program in Sustainable Business Practices. She has received many awards for environmental leadership: San Diego Business Journal’s 50 Over 50 Women of Influence in San Diego (2022) and the US Composting Council’s Leadership in Outstanding Service (2019), to name just two.
    Lisa Liotta  – General Manager
    Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District (Vermont)

    Lisa Liotta joined the District in 2019. She has an Associates degree in accounting and business administration, and in 2016, earned an Associates degree in Environmental Science from the Community College of Vermont, followed by a Bachelors in 2018 from the University of Vermont in Environmental Studies. Lisa will talk about how a grant from CVSWMD helped launch Neighborhood Composting Pods, a new residential food scrap collection option for neighborhoods in the City of Hardwick. A Pod is a group of subscribing neighbors who separate their food scraps from non-food materials and collaborate to aggregate their food scraps in one location so they can be composted at a local farm, Black Dirt Farm.
    Scott Kellogg – Educational Director
    The Radix Ecological Sustainability Center (Albany, New York)Scott Kellogg is the Educational Director of the Radix Center, an urban ecojustice and ecological literacy non-profit in Albany, NY, that advocates for just urban transitions. For the past 12 years, Radix has operated a community composting initiative that promotes composting as a decentralized and democratic process that can regenerate urban soils. The City of Albany now funds the program in part with a contract. Scott has a Ph.D in Science and Technology Studies from RPI and teaches Environmental Education and Citizen Science at Bard College and Urban Policy at SUNY Albany.

    MODERATOR

    Brenda Platt – Director, Composting for Community Initiative, Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), Washington, DC

    Brenda and her team at ILSR are supporting community-scale composters via forums, webinars, podcasts, guides, policies, training, and more. In 2017, the US Composting Council awarded her its H. Clark Gregory Award for outstanding service to the composting industry through grassroots efforts. In 2019, BioCycle magazine featured Brenda as one of its organics recycling trailblazers. She has a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from The George Washington University.

     

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