Beginner's Guide to Composting _ One Small Step _ NowThis

Today, I'm on a mission to find out how my old food gets turned into compost. I'm Lucy Biggers, and this is One Small Step. According to the EPA, every year, food accounts for 20 percent of what Americans throw away. This is a huge issue because food and other organic materials like paper towels and landfills cause 15 percent of methane gas emissions in the U.S. and are a major cause of climate change. Your leftover food doesn't have to end up in a landfill. Instead, you can give it a second life as compost, aka natural fertilizer for plants. I wanted to find out how this works, so I decided to follow my own food scraps. For about a month, I've been collecting my old scraps and keeping them in my freezer so they don't smell. These are the old scraps that I've been keeping in my freezer. You can see eggshells, teabags, tops of peppers. All these things are compostable. And today, I'm going to drop them off and compost them. If you don't live in a city, you can compost in your backyard by getting a big composting container. Search online to see what works best for you. If you're in a city, you can keep your scraps in your freezer or get a small container to keep inside your house or apartment. Check if you're covered by a curbside collection program or a food scraps drop off program. Today, I'm taking my waste to a food scraps drop off site in Union Square. New York's Department of Sanitation and partner groups run 60 food scrap drop off sites covering 3.9 million New York residents. Most locations are open one to three days per week. After adding my food to the collection barrels, I'm ready to follow them to the compost processing site. These barrels are full. We're going to cap them up and we're going to put them in the truck. Then we'll head to the site. The NYC Compost Project and the Lower East Side Ecology Center have been turning New Yorkers' food scraps into compost on a one-acre plot in lower Manhattan for over 20 years. We accept vegetarian food waste, fruits, vegetables, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags. We do not accept any oily prepared foods, meats, cheeses, none of that stuff. And why is that? Because the composting process that we use here is not to the scale that it can break down the pathogens that are present in the meats and prepared foods. Each week, they handle around eight tons of food scraps, and that's just a tiny fraction of the over 14,000 tons of food New York residents throw in the trash every week. After food scraps arrive at the site, they're transported into bins and combined with sawdust. Composting requires two types of materials. Browns, like the sawdust, are high in carbon. Greens, like my food scraps, are high in nitrogen. Compost piles need a proper mix of both to properly break down. Basically, composting, you're creating this ecosystem for the bacteria and fungi to do the work that they're built to do, and that's the decomposition process. The bins protect the material from pests as liquid drains off and the decomposition process is kick-started. Then, after two weeks, the decomposing food is moved to big, long piles called windrows. The windrows' long shape allows oxygen to better reach the decomposing material and creates ideal conditions for the scraps to break down. For the next two to three months, the piles are turned over every week so that oxygen can reach the decomposing soil. The final phase, the compost sits for one to two months in a process called curing. This period allows the pile to cool down and to become even more rich with fungi, bacteria and nutrients that plants love. After curing, the compost is sent through a screen so that only small, fine pieces are left. Anything that's not compostable will remain as garbage at the end of the process. I hate these. They're our fruit stickers. They're everywhere in our compost process. So if you're composting, take off your fruit stickers before you put it in a compost bin. Based on the outside temperature, the full composting process takes about four to six months. The NYC Compost Project gives away or sells the final compost back to residents or to the city. We take our finished compost and we add it to tree beds across New York City to help rebuild the health of trees. One of our one of our strong missions is to rebuild New York City soil. And so by collecting New Yorkers' food scraps, we're able to produce compost to rebuild the soil in the city. The EPA estimates about 5 percent of U.S. food gets composted. Despite that current low rate, composting programs are on the rise across the U.S. It's estimated 6.7 million U.S. households have access to a compost drop-off program like the one I use in New York City. And curbside collection programs have risen by 87 percent since 2014. That same year, New York City launched the nation's largest compost curbside pickup program. So far, around 3.3 million New York residents are covered by the curbside program. Hopefully, my neighborhood will be covered soon. Keeping food out of landfills is an important part of the fight against climate change. When food scraps go to landfill, they don't get any oxygen and so they don't properly break down. Instead, they release methane, which is a greenhouse gas that's around 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. By composting, we're decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere and helping to reduce climate change. Not only that, sending food waste to the dump is costly and it's inefficient. Waste is New York City's biggest export. So we send a lot of organic matter, heavy, wet organic matter, to other states. The whole region accepts our trash as an import so that they can bury it in their own landfills. Not really the greatest system. We're burying a resource in the ground and making it impossible to use it again, creating greenhouse gases and not to mention the crazy amount of resources that are required to transport all of that material. Now I'm going to show you how to use this city made compost on your house plants. What you do is you just take a little pinch of it, a little handful, and you give it to your plant, put it on the top of the soil and it acts as a natural fertilizer, basically like a food for your plant. It's full of nutrients and they just love it. And they don't even need that much, just a little bit on the top. And what's so cool is it's all natural, no chemicals involved. And it used to be your food, now it's feeding your plants. I mean, come on. This is One Small Step. I'm Lucy Biggers. See you guys next time. Bye. Do you compost at home and have any tips or tricks? Let us know in the comments and we'll see you guys next time.