Compost We Must

Who wants my food waste? Anybody? Anybody?

by Bruce Schimmel

When Rina Cutler talks about composting in Philly, the gregarious deputy mayor of Transportation and Utilities shudders visibly.

Last fall at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Cutler shared a nightmare scenario of what composting could become: streets buried under mountains of rot, overrun with rats and insects.

Ugh. Cutler's right. Unattended heaps of garden trash and food scraps would create a sanitary disaster to rival Philly's legendary cholera epidemic. But compost we must. Because organic waste is a shockingly big and even toxic problem. Depending on whether yard stuff is included, organics represent some 10 percent to 30 percent of what cities bury in landfills.

Or, rather, what cities try to bury — because organics have a way of returning from their graves, coming back to haunt us as a deadly gas. As biowaste breaks down, it releases methane — which is at least 20 times more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide.

For now, in the matter of composting, Philly lags well behind San Francisco, Boston and even counties in our own backyard. The commonwealth recently announced "composting infrastructure" grants to businesses, colleges and farms in six counties, including Delaware, Lancaster and Bucks. Philly folks got nothing.

Personally, I'd love to stop grinding my food and flushing it down the drain. A waste of nutrients, food sludge overloads our already overburdened sewage plants. But like many Philadelphians who live in high-rises, for me the logistics of composting are daunting.

So, who wants my food waste? Anybody? Anybody?

Turns out, someone might. Lee Meinicke, a transplant from Oregon with an M.B.A. in sustainable business, lived until just recently with her partner in Mount Airy — which she has recently revealed as a hotbed of composting.

Meinicke, with Meenal Raval and the Pedal Co-Op, put up a one-stop Web site for food waste-upcyclers, which includes an interactive map of backyard composters who may take your stuff. "So, if you compost," asks Meinicke, "please put yourself on my map."

Passing along scraps is primarily a private matter. Backyard composting is essentially unregulated, says Meinicke, something that L&I will ignore if it doesn't incur the wrath of neighbors. To date, it's mostly been a civil and sanitary arrangement.

Beyond the sharing of information via Web site, Mienicke is starting a larger operation, which would serve restaurants and food-service operations by taking food that would otherwise be ground up and tossed down the drain — something on a scale between a private home composter and a big commercial waste processor.

Mienicke recently invested more than $10,000 in an Earth Tub — a mixmaster of sorts, which to the uninitiated looks like a very big hot tub. Done right, says Meinicke, composting doesn't smell. (Though her Earth Tub may still be a hard sell.)

Meanwhile, Meinicke has also been talking with the Redevelopment Authority about composting on its vacant lots.

Oh, I can see Rina Cutler now, quaking at the very thought.

Still, we ignore composting at our own peril. And to become a great green city it'll take lots of good soil — whose makings we fortunately have in abundance. If only we can do right by our rubbish.

Lee Meinicke's Philly Compost Web: phillycompost.com. To hear the audio version of Bruce's interview with Meinicke, visit citypaper.net/canon.