Welcome to Team Tuesday!
In a wonderful story about the great community composting battle in New York, Civil Eats highlights a group in Bushwick, Brooklyn called BK Rot. What an inspiration they are!
According to Civil Eats, “BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants…it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed [processed]. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.” BK Rot also offers consulting and other related services.
So, in addition to creating valuable compost and diverting organic waste from landfills, BK Rot “provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce,” though many Black and brown residents remain there. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps sit in garbage bags attracting rats, or filling up trucks and landfills that typically operate near poor neighborhoods like Bushwick, creating noise and pollution. It’s a win-win.
Neoliberal Waste Management vs. World-Building
Civil Eats contrasts this community-supportive system with what Guy Schaffer, board member of BK Rot, calls “neoliberal waste management,” where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste.
An example is a “waste strategy” in NYC called an “anaerobic biogas digester,” developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company. It processes a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.
Civil Eats says, “Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane created in the process, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.” How ridiculous is that?
BK Rot has a labor-centric approach, while other organizations focus more on volunteers; there are a number of different approaches to community compost. “These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Guy Schaffer writes in his book, Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”
Bravo.
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