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Chop it like it’s hot: community composting for a post-growth society

By: Zachary Joseph Czuprynski and Rebecca Marie Serratos

20 / October / 2024

Food systems must undergo radical changes for a post-growth world. This transformation cannot solely focus on agricultural production; it requires a concomitant shift of food waste systems. One movement currently spurring transformation in food waste is community composting. In this visual essay, we provide an overview of community composting in the U.S., zooming into a small-scale composting site in the southwest as we narrate the importance of community composting in decommodifying, relocalizing, and redefining waste management for a post-growth society.

Compost (noun) is a nutrient-rich, humus substrate used to amend soils for water retention, sequestering carbon, and building soil organic matter.[1] Composting (verb) is the process of decomposing organic matter into a finished compost substrate. The history of composting is long and diversified, with strong indigenous roots. Many civilizations and Indigenous peoples have been composting in some form for ten thousand years, using everything from animal manure and fish waste to plant material as organic fertilizer to improve soil fertility and boost crop yields.[2] However, a unique composting method has recently emerged with the potential to transform food waste systems radically—community composting.

Community composting is a hyperlocal method for managing organic materials, relying on active community involvement and support. Burgeoning in the last fifteen years, community composting includes all diverse forms and approaches to composting—the ‘pluriverse’ of compost—but is unique for several reasons. McSweeney[3] describes six principles derived from community composting practitioners :

  1. Resources are recovered
  2. Locally based with a closed loop
  3. Organics are returned to the soil
  4. Community-scale and diverse
  5. Community-engaged -empowered -educated
  6. Community-supported

Food waste is redirected from landfills to nearby compost sites, where it is treated as a valuable resource. This process keeps as much organic material within the community as possible, depending on the capacity of compost facilities. Matured compost is returned to local soils to restore topsoil, closing the food waste loop. Community composting operations are scaled and tailored to the community’s needs while engaging residents in the composting process, educating them to redefine ‘waste,’ and empowering them to start collecting food scraps. This approach fosters a reciprocal relationship between the community and the composting operation.

One of 309 U.S. community composting sites [4] is in Prescott, Arizona’s piney desert highlands. Juxtaposed alongside the ‘world’s oldest rodeo,’ a local economic driver, the Prescott Community Compost Program (PCCP) strives to decommodify, relocalize, and redefine Prescott’s organic waste management.

Decommodifying

PCCP allows Prescott community members to deposit food scraps at a weekly farmers market. Under a distinct purple tent, a tower of green buckets and bumblebee tote bins quickly fill with kitchen scraps. The compost booth presents a visual conundrum for customers roaming the market when they
observe people dumping a week’s worth of food ‘trash’ into receptacles happily received by volunteers. In this sense, the compost booth embodies a paradox wherein the market is a place for customers to shop and consume local products, yet this particular booth collects an undervalued resource from people for free. After providing this service for almost three years, there is now a general acceptance and expectation of the public to contribute their food scraps to the compost program.

Volunteers at the compost tent accept food scrap donations at a Saturday morning farmers market

Composting takes about eight months to a year of management to mature into a stable, organic substrate. Once finished, the compost is bagged and given to small-scale growers and producers at the market, completing the ‘closed loop’ of organics recycling. This nutrient-rich soil amendment appeals to locals dissatisfied with synthetic, fossil fuel-based products. Thus, PCCP provides a natural fertilizer to meet community needs while reducing reliance on fossil fuels and fluctuating global markets.

PCCP’s self-contained organics cycle reimagines social and ecological processes in the local food system by promoting commoning, regeneration, and sufficiency principles.5 It disrupts rutted waste management by encouraging community reliance on local neighbours and not-for-profits instead of paying monopolistic corporations to remove and export waste. In this model, our community owns the means of compost production, viewing organic waste as a resource rather than a cost.

Relocalizing

Food waste is the most prevalent material in landfills, with over 60 million tons of food scraps dumped yearly in the United States.[6] This waste is often ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for many households, yet is an environmental hazard to communities near landfills. Under the anoxic conditions of landfills, food scraps decompose and release methane. This potent greenhouse gas exacerbates global climate change and poses health risks to local populations.[7] Notably, landfills containing harmful pollutants are disproportionately situated in low-income and ethnic minority communities,[8] exemplifying the externalization of costs to marginalized groups—a persistent aspect of environmental injustice within food systems.

Community composting initiatives seek to relocalize food waste management to counteract environmentally and socially destructive practices. By designating food scraps generated within the community as a communal responsibility, these initiatives intentionally recapture organic waste, thereby disrupting the perpetuation of local and global environmental injustices inherent in landfill disposal. The deliberate focus on relocalizing compostable food waste empowers communities to assume ownership, fostering the development of communal skills and capacities necessary to manage these systems effectively.

At PCCP, households, food banks, and restaurants collect and deposit 1,000 kg of food scraps weekly. Processing scraps involves dumping every bin and bucket onto a bed of ‘browns,’ usually composed of carbon-rich woodchips, sawdust, and leaves. These ‘browns’ are a vital ingredient in the recipe of thermophilic composting and are also sourced locally: sawdust comes from a neighbourhood woodworking shop, the City of Prescott grounds crew and homeowners give leaves, and arborists provide woodchips. These inputs are ‘wastes’ that, if not captured by PCCP, would otherwise be landfilled outside Prescott as an externalized cost to another community.

Prescott Community Compost volunteers dump, chop, and mix food scraps (nitrogen) with browns (carbon) during a Sunday work session.

Redefining

Effective community composting relies on informing people about the process; proper information must be shared and co-created through engaged learning. One way the PCCP educates the community is by intentionally including community members in the ‘unlearning’ of waste management. The PCCP site hosts a variety of experiential field trips from local public, charter, and homeschooling groups to college students, agriculture professionals, and retirees. The experience and learning are the same regardless of age or ability, as unlearning old patterns of organic waste management requires a reinforcing re-learning cycle centered around communal ownership, care ethics, and sufficiency.

School children proudly display their handfuls of compost.

The most transformative experience for composters at PCCP is the initial dumping of food scraps. Each green bucket of food scraps collected is like a window into the lives and habits of neighbours—what foods they eat, how much they waste, and what they consider ‘expired.’ This process inspires self-reflection on personal habits and highlights the tremendous amount of organic waste produced within a community and beyond. The engaged intimacy in the composting process is more impactful in shifting mindsets and habits than any statistic or graph of food waste. The on-the-ground labour required to process a single week’s worth of compost is a humbling experience for the newly initiated, and it plants a seed for re-forming shopping and cooking habits. Mindsets shift from ‘yuck’ and ‘ick’ to seeing food scraps as a valuable community resource that can turn into a beautifully dark, nutrient-rich soil amendment.

Giorgos Kallis best summarizes this redefining of mindsets in his book Limits: “Communal stewardship of food systems allows people to experience natural abundance, helping unlearn damaging patterns of behaviour driven by the experience of artificial scarcity under private ownership.”[9]

Aerial view of green buckets filled with kitchen scraps from community members. Each bucket will be dumped and formed into a fresh compost pile.

Re-connecting

A powerful characteristic of community composting is its ability to reconnect people with their neighbors and Mother Earth. PCCP emerged opportunely when COVID restrictions were lifted, and people searched for ways to re-integrate into their communities. A dedicated base of volunteers attends work sessions every Sunday morning to help build new compost piles, wash buckets, and flip mature compost piles. These weekly work sessions have become such an ingrained habit for some volunteers that they refer to Sunday workdays as ‘compost church.’

Volunteers wash food scrap bins at the compost site..

The processes of production, distribution, and exchange intrinsic to community composting are made apparent through the collective participation of individuals from diverse backgrounds. The active social conditions that allow waste to be reabsorbed as a sort of inward asset present a ‘glitch in the matrix’ for people traveling by the compost site who catch only a snapshot of the intentional collection and processing of community waste material rather than the typical obfuscated exportation of organics. Yet, those participating are intimately connected to and familiar with the process. While habits may be established individually, new informal networks are crafted between fellow composters and volunteers as they talk, chop, and share best composting practices. Over time, these networks solidify, and people develop new ‘common senses’ of waste management. Eventually, there is solidarity among composters who can exercise political action for institutional changes. In one case, PCCP mobilized its volunteers to oppose a massive expansion of the adjacent rodeo grounds, where the compost site became the proposed location for a new paved parking lot. One of the volunteers crafted a petition to send to the city council, raising concerns on behalf of the compost site. This activity brings out a sense of grassroots power and collective community decision-making.

Community Composting in Action

It may be easy to dismiss the impact of a small compost site in the Southwest U.S., especially compared to the immense food waste produced at national or global scales. However, PCCP is just one small-scale example of over three hundred community composting sites in the U.S., with more sites likely to open each year. Decentralized community compost sites are spread throughout the states, capturing food scraps, engaging communities, and building local soils. However, as an ‘interstitial’ post-growth strategy operating within the ‘cracks of capitalism,’ community composting is always under a bombardment of pressures like profitability, scaling-up, access to land, and other challenges derived from being in a neoliberal paradigm. Together, the community composting coalition can exert political advocacy to phase out organics from entering landfills, receive financial support and prioritization from local governments, allow expedited permitting processes for small-scale pilot projects, and obtain other incentives to make community compost sites a fundamental asset to any community throughout the world. Through these efforts, the community composting movement is genuinely exercising its capacity to transform food waste systems on a systemic and institutional level.

Prescott Community Compost volunteers warm up around a fire during a winter work session

Through shared values and intentional opportunity, community members of all ages and abilities have proven that decommodifying, relocalizing, and redefining organic waste management within a local food system is possible, even in the arid southwest. The ethos of care—for the Earth, our communities, and each other—is central to the success of the Prescott Community Compost Project. It showcases what is possible when needed systems are allowed to transform under collective community stewardship. We encourage you to look in your neighborhood to see what is possible; you might get inspired to visit your local farmers market, share food with a loved one, plant a seed, and compost your food waste! Together, we exert our greatest power.

References:

[1] Platt, B., McSweeney, J., & Davis, J. (2014). Growing local fertility: a guide to community composting. Highfields Center for Composting. Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Hardwick, Vermont.
[2] Guttmann, E. B. (2005). Midden cultivation in prehistoric Britain: arable crops in gardens. World Archaeology, 37(2), 224-239.
[3] McSweeney, J. (2019). Community-Scale Composting Systems: A Comprehensive Practical Guide for Closing the Food System Loop and Solving Our Waste Crisis. Chelsea Green Publishing.
[4] Institute for Local Self-Reliance. (2024, June 28). Community Composter Coalition. Institute for Local Self-Reliance. https://ilsr.org/composting/community-composter-coalition/
[5] McGreevy, S. R., Rupprecht, C. D., Niles, D., Wiek, A., Carolan, M., Kallis, G., … & Tachikawa, M. (2022). Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world. Nature sustainability, 5(12), 1011-1017, DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-00933-5
[6] EPA. (2019). Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: 2017 Fact Sheet. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
[7] Njoku, P. O., Edokpayi, J. N., & Odiyo, J. O. (2019). Health and environmental risks of residents living close to a landfill: A case study of Thohoyandou Landfill, Limpopo Province, South Africa. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(12), 2125.
[8] Martuzzi, M., Mitis, F., & Forastiere, F. (2010). Inequalities, inequities, environmental justice in waste management and health. European Journal of Public Health, 20(1), 21-26.
[9] Kallis, G. (2019). Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford University Press.

Links and Other Resources:

https://prescottfarmersmarket.org/community-compost/
https://www.instagram.com/prescottcommunitycompost/
https://www.facebook.com/prescottfarmersmarket
https://prescottfarmersmarket.org/give/

Photo Creation Process:

Any volunteers or participants of the compost program can share photos with a Prescott Farmers Market staff member, who uploads the images to a Google Drive folder. Initially, the authors selected approximately a dozen pictures from this folder representing the community composting experience from different parts in the composting process. Then, the seven photos used in the final essay were selected based on discussions between the authors and input from colleagues about which images best emphasize the communal aspect of community composting, which makes it a unique experience.

Gallery