Community Composting
What Is It?
Composting can take place at many levels – backyard, block, neighborhood, schoolyard, community, and regional – and in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Community composting allows more people to participate and benefit.
What Does it Do?
Composting reduces dependency on landfills and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It recycles nutrients back into the soil reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers. Compost also attracts critters and microorganisms that are good for soil and plants. Composting is empowering and educational because it allows people to participate in soil ecosytems.
How Can It Be Accessed?
We may all be compost, as the saying goes. But we don’t always have access to services or spaces with which to practice composting. By Haraway’s logic, this means we lack access to essential parts of ourselves. In studying social change, sociologist Andy Szaz and others have analyzed the steps in between awareness and action. A big one is access, or infrastructure. Quite simply, in urban communities with no municipal compostables collection service, there may be no easy way for residents to recycle food waste—the improper disposal of which has crucial climate impacts.
With that in mind, here are a few composting resources near Hudson, NY. These are for centralized collection and dropoff programs that attempt to work at the city/county/region scale, rather than decentralized, DIY methods like worm bins and compost piles that can be installed and managed directly in homes and businesses.
The ReGen: Compost Project is a teen-run composting project located at the River City Garden of Kite’s Nest at 59 N. Front Street in Hudson. Hudson residents who are monthly subscribers can drop off food waste at the River City Garden, and can pick up finished, top quality compost fertilizer. Subscriptions are sliding scale and proceeds are directly invested back into the project to support the labor and maintenance of the site – managed by Hudson teens – as well as basic supplies and materials for upkeep. Kite’s Nest, a 501c3 non-profit, is a center for liberatory education whose mission is to build the collective capacity of young people to bring about personal transformation, social connection, healing, and systemic change.
Compost Valley is a large-scale composting program that works to increase collection of, acceptance of, and participation in composting in the Hudson Valley, focused on Ulster County (Kingston, New Paltz, and Woodstock) and northwestern Dutchess County (Red Hook and Rhinebeck). They offer daily, weekly and monthly compost collection routes, trainings in urban/suburban composting best practices, and high-quality compost to amend the region’s soils. The finished compost is used in community and school gardens, local farms, private homes, and in public beautification projects.
Community Compost Company is a women-owned business based in the Hudson Valley and Northern New Jersey. With facilities at Arrowhead Farm in Kerhonkson, NY, they provide an opportunity to ecologically dispose of compostable materials while educating on the importance of food waste reduction. Partnering with farms and compost facilities across the Hudson Valley, they are building a distributed model to meet the growing demand for organics recycling and compost products. Their Hudson Soil Co. products division sells finished compost in bags and bulk to garden centers, home gardeners and landscaping companies.
Further, Toolshed is working with its partners Basilica Hudson and CycleEffect to provide a composting service on-site at Basilica in the form of biodigester that will collect food waste from local restaurants and convert it into fertilizer to be used in the Toolshed Garden and also distributed to others. This program could be expanded to include compost waste from residents in the future.
