Extreme Composters Get Creative in NYC

Most people who collect and compost food scraps have a backyard or a garden to dump them in. But in New York City residents without a pinch of earth are taking extreme measures to compost. As part of a collaboration with northeast stations WNYC’s Amy Eddings reports on what motivates these new urban composters.

The wide stoop of Dianne Debicella's apartment building looks like many others in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It's got pots of plants on the steps. What makes it stand out, though, is a tire-sized green compost container.

Several months' worth of rotting food shifts inside the round container, as Debicella spins it on its base. A cloud of fruit flies emerges.

DEBICELLA: [laughs] I’’ve actually been trying to get rid of them last two weeks. and nothing that i'm doing is working.

That's not good, especially when Debicella's landlord doesn't understand that she's trying to save the planet.

DEBICELLA: He came up the stoop and looked inside the compost, and saw a bunch of rotting vegetables and fruit. And he said, ‘you know, I’m really happy to help you bag all of this stuff up that is in there and put it on the curb.’

Debicella had to explain that she was composting in order to turn that rotting food into a fertilizer for her potted plants her "garden." For Debicella, who lives in a small, 550-square-foot apartment, her front stoop is her great outdoors, her only forum for flexing her green thumb. Composting is also her way of reducing the amount of garbage she puts into the trash, and by extension, the greenhouse gasses escaping from landfills.

She's not alone. An increasing number of New Yorkers are composting, and going to great lengths to do so, not only in their backyards, or their front stoops, but in their apartments, using worms.

JOSI: So if you hold the newspaper like this, you would rip the newspaper into perfect strips, like this.

Teacher and composter Micki Josi is holding an after school workshop at her middle school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She's showing about eight adults and six kids how to turn a plastic bin into a home for red wriggler worms, using shredded newspapers as bedding. 12-year-old Mack Ferris had Ms. Josi as a teacher last year, and volunteered to care for the worm bin over the summer. His mom was worried. She thought it would stink.

EDDINGS: So is that a deterrent, do you think, from people doing it?

FERRIS: Not really. I guess if you get used to it? I didn't get used to it, I almost threw up.

Okay, Mack's being a little dramatic. Composting, when it's done right, doesn't smell. You've got to turn it frequently, like Dianne Debicella with her rotating compost bin, or, in the case of worms, keep the moisture level under control with newspaper. The Ferris family forged ahead. Mack says they put the worms in an electrical room in the basement of their co-op building in Park Slope.

FERRIS: We didn't want anyone to know that we had a worm compost. So we put it in there, because only the superintendent goes in there.

EDDINGS: Did you tell the superintendent about it?

FERRIS: Oh, yeah. We told him not to touch it. We put a sign on it, 'Science experiment, do not touch.'

It worked. The worms, well-fed, quadrupled in number. At the workshop, Mack Ferris got to "harvest" the compost from his worm bin. That process, in a nutshell, means pulling the worms out of their poop, the "compost", and setting them up with fresh bedding, and food scraps. He didn't gag once.

Then there are New Yorkers who have no desire for indoor composting. They donate their vegetable peelings, apple cores, and coffee grounds to community gardens, to let them do the work.

It's Saturday in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and the weekly farmer's market is buzzing with shoppers. Several gardens have set up five metal cans here, to take compost contributions from the community. Jesse Leed has brought a week's worth of old food.

LEED: I actually put it in a big Tupperware container in my freezer and pack it up and bring it every Saturday. I have two bags in here.

EDDINGS: So do you have a big freezer?

LEED: No, but i guess i don't freeze a lot of stuff. Except compost.]

She lifts a lid, and dumps the frozen lump of food into a can.

Jesse Leed froze her compost-in-the-making, to cut down on fruit flies and smells. But Chris Blake's contribution is slimey and gooey, after a week of sitting in a plastic container under his sink.

BLAKE: It’s an interesting question as to why I bother to do it. I just like the idea of making something that would normally be thrown away into something that can be used into something good.

Few people, whether they live in the city or the country, go to this kind of trouble Only three percent of food scraps get composted nationwide. But composting programs across New York City are reporting a surge in interest. Christine Datz Romero offers workshops at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, in Manhattan. She attributes the compost craze to Al Gore's 2006 documentary on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."

ROMERO: Our workshops fill up, we have 50 people signing up and we have to turn people away, it is just so popular, and people are really eager to learn about composting.

Just as interest in composting is waxing, money for these education programs is waning. New York City recently made deep cuts to its budget. Among the casualties: the Sanitation Department's fall leaf collection and composting program all those leaves went to landfills and its funding for composting workshops offered around the city. But intrepid composters like Dianne Debicella aren't giving up.

DEBICELLA: And it makes me feel a little less like I’m living in a city, if I’m somehow dealing with earth and that it’s not just me wasting stuff and throwing it away, that I’m seeing this process of it moving from one thing to the next.

Soon, when it's decomposed enough, her old food will be moved from her green plastic compost bin to her flower pots. And Debicella thinks it's worth it -- fruit flies and all. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.

Northeast environmental coverage is part of NPR’s Local News Initiative.