How composting turns one person’s trash into another’s treasure

Kate Nevins, a residential landscape designer, is accustomed to getting her hands dirty. But when she found a free compost tumbler through a local Facebook group last spring, she took the opportunity to release the residents of her composting worm bin into the wild.

“It just isn’t a lot of fun to get on your hands and knees and sort out all the worm castings and compost from the worms and rehome the worms in fresh bedding,” says Nevins, who founded Nevins Design and Landscaping last year, “so I just got rid of my entire [vermicomposting] system and put compost and worms alike into my garden to empty that bin.”

Now, she adds food scraps and other compostable material to the tumbler in her Maplewood backyard and turns it with the help of her three sons, a 6-year-old and 3-year-old twins. The tumbler keeps compost contained and is easy to turn, which adds oxygen necessary for decomposition.

“They love to turn the tumbler and it’s great for kids to be involved, getting them outside seeing how the process works,” says Nevins, who’s working toward an associate degree in horticulture from St. Louis Community College.

Composting recycles such organic material as food scraps and leaves into nutrient-rich material that can be added to soil to help plants thrive. The process occurs on its own in nature, but residential food waste and other organic material often end up in landfills, where they rot and produce methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. 

According to data released by the state’s Department of Natural Resources, in 2017, in Missouri alone, food waste accounted for almost 15 percent of residential trash, making it the most prevalent material in residential waste. Tons of other compostable material also makes its way into household trash cans—and landfills—so composting could cut greenhouse gases significantly while enriching soil, says Matt Arthur, who operates BLH Farm. 

“The volume of food waste is just astonishing,” he says, “and in St. Louis, much of that food waste is really high-quality vegetable matter that has a lot of really valuable minerals and potential nutrients as plant food.”

BLH picks up compostable material from a limited number of households to create compost for the farm, one of a handful of operations in the area that provide this service for a fee. BLH isn’t accepting new customers now, but others, such as New Earth Farm and Perennial City Composting, will pick up residential compost for around $25 a month for weekly or $20 for biweekly service. Like BLH, they use the compost that’s produced for farming operations. But their service areas are limited, and most experts agree widely available curbside composting pickup isn’t ideal.

“These guys are not driving all around the entire metro area to pick up your bucket of compost,” says Jean Ponzi, green resources manager for the Missouri Botanical Garden’s EarthWays Center. “That would be inefficient and not a great use of fossil fuels.

I’m just not an advocate for curbside compost collection alongside curbside recycling collection and trash collection. I’m a big advocate for backyard composting.” 

The basic recipe for successful compost is three parts brown matter, such as leaves, to one part green matter, like vegetable peels. Most home composters also prefer, as a means of controlling pests, not to include meat scraps, dairy, or fats. Ponzi uses a basic compost pile, but there are several options, including vermicomposting (worm bins), compost tumblers, and bokashi buckets, in which bran or another grain inoculated with microorganisms is used to accelerate the composting process and ferment food scraps in a closed container small enough to store in an apartment kitchen. Ponzi recommends that residents research methods and check with their local municipalities, but all one really needs to get started is a plan. 

New Earth Farm shares photos of a simple DIY compost bin constructed from heat-treated wooden pallets and chicken wire on its social media sites and hopes to include more educational resources for customers and non-customers alike, says Stacey Cline, who operates the urban farm with her husband, John, in their Old North neighborhood. New Earth, which formally began its residential compost pickup in August 2020 collects more than 1,000 pounds a month from customers.

“So it’s gaining traction and we just want people to know how simple it is and how good it is for the environment,” says Cline.

More businesses, schools, and nonprofits are also getting into the act, says Rachel Greathouse, sustainability coordinator for Total Organics Recycling in Valley Park. Total Organics collects more than 300 tons of organics each week from non-residential customers in the area and recently redesigned its website to highlight them.

“I think there’s a little bit of positive social pressure to help people decide to separate their food waste from the rest of their trash and recycling,” says Greathouse, who notes that some consumers go out of their way to patronize businesses that prioritize reducing waste.

Composting also offers people another way to connect directly to food creation while reducing waste and helping rebuild soil depleted by industrial food production and other unsustainable practices, says Beth Grollmes-Kiefer, who founded Perennial City Composting with husband, Tim. Perennial City currently picks up about 14 tons a month of compostable material from its members, delivering some finished compost back to its customers and using the rest of it on the family farm to grow vegetables and flowers that are also delivered back to members.

“When you see scraps that you otherwise would have thrown away transform into luscious, soil-building compost, you have to put it to good use, closing the loop of food production by literally turning your trash into treasure,” Grollmes-Kiefer says. “Once you get hooked on composting, you really can’t go back to throwing away your food scraps.”