I submitted this to the legislative assistant of Philadelphia Councilmember Cindy Bass, sponsor of resolution 140626 authorizing the Joint Committees of Streets and Services and the Environment to hold hearings on the feasibility of and benefits to the City of residential food waste recycling including its impact on environmental quality, hunger prevention, economic savings and job creation.

Hello, 

I’ve been passionate about zero-waste for as long as I can remember. 

Many of you may know me as the co-founder of PhillyFreecycle in 2003, which was a free online materials exchange with over 15,000 households, no paid staff, no warehouse and no inventory.  A great way to promote Reuse. 

Some of you know me from the original RecycleNow Philadelphia Steering Committee, which spearheaded single stream weekly incentive-based residential recycling.  

When I began composting my own household waste in 2001, I documented a waste diversion  of 86%, of which 48% was composted.  By 2005, I was sharing my backyard compost bins with several neighbors, and built a map to encourage others to offer up and contribute to neighboring shared compost bins. By 2008, I co-founded Philly Compost to collect & process food waste from Mt Airy restaurants. 

So, residential composting is an excellent idea whose time has finally come. Thanks, Councilwoman Bass, for initiating this in Philadelphia. 

The few people that I’ve shared your initiative with have been surprised and excited. They began remembering their experiences when visiting Toronto, Seattle and San Francisco.  And what they remembered was how easy it was to participate in. 

We could begin with a pilot program by neighborhood. Mt Airy is the neighborhood I know best and would highly recommend we begin with it. So, here’s my 2 cents. 

There are 3 components to any composting venture: collection, processing, and the end product.

Collection has a possibility of creating jobs. To reduce transportation emissions, the distance traveled should be short, and in a zero emissions vehicle such as a cargo bicycle or an electric pickup truck. Even a standard pickup truck would have less emissions than a compacter truck currently used for trash collection.  

The ideal collection frequency would be weekly. Best if same day as trash day to avoid confusion. The container would be a 5 gallon covered bucket per household, which has proved to be adequate. The full buckets would be emptied into a 10 gallon on-board container, and delivered within a 3 mile radius to a neighborhood park and/or vacant lot. Lifting and moving the filled 10 gallon container should be a manageable weight for almost any able-bodied person.

The material we collect would be all organics: fruits, vegetables, tea, coffee, even meat scraps. Yard waste brings up a different scale in volumes and belongs to another pilot program.

Optionally, to encourage more participation, we could connect with the resident’s RecycleBank account.

Processing also has a potential of creating jobs. So long as the processing is kept low-tech, our investment would remain in training people versus delegating our funds to mega-corporations towards management & capital equipment. The recommended technology is in-vessel aerated static piles. The vessel can be built locally out of lumber, and intended to keep the pile hot enough and the rodents out. If land is available, windrows would be simpler and could still be managed manually. Carbons (leaves and wood chips) to mix in with the collected food waste can be sourced from Fairmount park and/or local landscapers. If managed correctly, there should be no odor or complaints from neighbors. I’ve had experience with this in my own Mt Airy backyard, and also on a lot in Germantown, adjacent to a block of row homes.

Keeping the processing local would also add a transparency and an educational component to the process.

The end product is a natural soil amendment that could be used to improve the soil of the very same park or vacant lot. We would have the option to sell and/or give it away to participating residents to improve their own soil for their own gardens. What a multiplicity of benefits!

The resolution mentioned hunger prevention. Commercial food waste has quite a bit of edibles that could be salvaged. In my experience, residential food waste typically doesn’t. 

The resolution also mentioned environmental quality.  Reduced transportation of a very heavy waste stream is one. There would be fewer trash trucks on each route. And fewer landfills to build. And much less methane emissions from the landfill. We may even get carbon credits for the reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The outdoor labor involved in the collections and especially the processing is a form of restorative mental health; it’s nice just being outside for several hours a day.

Lastly, the resolution mentioned economic savings. The landfill tip fee avoided could be the budget to set up a team for local collection and processing.  My initial estimate is $182,000 per year for a Mt Airy pilot. 

Thank you for your time.
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