A New Final Resting Place for Foodstuffs

Signage in the entrance of Two Coves Community Garden

On a chilly Saturday morning in late October, bicycles complete with wire basket over the handlebars make trips to and from the Sunnyside Greenmarket to drop off little black bags. Three banana peels, five orange rinds, the leaves from the neighbor’s tree, last night’s salad that didn’t quite make it, the used grounds from a favorite café. They may sound like strange bedfellows, but they lie down together to fill an important role in the local and global environment.

The Western Queens Compost Initiative

All this wonderful treasure, though that would not be the choice term for some people, forms the backbone for a service that is a growing community movement happening throughout the city.

The Western Queens Compost Initiative is one organization that seeks to reduce the amount of food waste being shipped to landfills, and they are giving back to the neighborhood and the planet all the while.

“Our main concern is that the stuff that can be composted does get composted,” said Stephanos Koullias, one of WQCI’s founders. He said that the total amount of compost processed by WQCI this year alone is around 15 tons.

The Two Coves composting site

That may sound like a lot, but Koullias said it is but a fraction of what similar programs, such as the NYC Compost Project funded by the Department of Sanitation, can process in a year, and the demand for composting city-wide is even greater than that.

Alan Lewandowski, a Western Queens Compost advisory board member and co-director of one of WQCI’s programs, said that the community has embraced the idea of composting. Residents bring in around 400 pounds of table scraps frozen or in sealed bags to their drop-off site at the Sunnyside Greenmarket every week on top of what is collected at other sites.  “The people who’ve participated had wished for a system we provide and are pleasantly surprised to see their wish coming true in their own neighborhood,” Lewandowski said.

The collections are the heart of the operation. Currently, there is a drop-off site at the Sunnyside Greenmarket and one in Long Island City, collections from Community Supported Agriculture programs, collections gathered by building and apartment complex tenants, and even scraps from the 5 Borough Bike Tour and other such events. “Queens and the particular neighborhoods benefit by having the chance to reduce the amount of waste they send to the landfills every week,” Lewandowski said. “Ideally, we’d love to see the project grow to the point and develop to the point where more people will have access to the finished product, but that’s not our initial priority.”

Two Coves garden

But their food waste recovery work is funneling down into the local environment. There are numerous community gardens that benefit from the WQCI’s work. One of the major sites is at the Two Coves Community Garden in Astoria, where the initiative maintains 8 tumblers of compost at a given time, and where much of the end result is used in the garden plots. Million Trees NYC is set to use some on neighborhood streets and along the Astoria waterfront as well.

Brooklyn Grange Farm, located on a rooftop on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, also hosts a composting site, which greatly expands WQCI’s ability to process the waste material but also means that the farm has access to material to keep their soil healthy and rich.  Anastasia Plakias, one of the farm’s founding partners, said that the work done by WQCI is a crucial service for Queens and New York City by turning trash into an asset. “The final product allows for a more fertile growing environment without the need for chemical fertilizers – It’s a win-win situation,” she said. “We are looking forward to amending our soil this spring with the natural byproducts of the farm itself and the people it serves.”

In addition to fresh, local vegetables and vibrant, colorful local gardens, the composting brings the community together. “It’s brought a very positive influence and community meeting activity to the participating neighborhoods,” said Lewandowski. “The people who participate show up smiling, talking and interacting; it is wildly empowering for such a modest act.”

How to make compost

Lewandowski said that there were only a couple of instances where community residents complained about nearby composting sites. The first one, Koullias said, involved alleged odor-related complaints that were later found to be unsubstantiated, and the second arose when the compost took the blame for the smell of an unrelated nearby spill. “There is nothing foul about the compost we create, but we nonetheless have to go to great length to prove that composting is not going to ruin people’s quality of life, or bring in some cataclysmic rodent scenario,” Lewandowski said.

Despite any minor setbacks, the popularity of composting continues to grow in Queens. “We always have lively dialogues buzzing around our stand,” Lewandowski said. “We should have no problem raising our drop-off and finished compost numbers.”

This increased community enthusiasm comes partly from education, both from the WQCI and other similar organizations, as well as the NYC Compost Project hosted at each borough’s botanical garden and the Lower East Side Ecology Center in Manhattan. “In part it is to bring awareness to how much waste we produce as a city,” Koullias said.

It is this environment concern that echoes throughout the composting community. “Our most pressing goal is to save useful organic matter from the landfills,” Lewandowski said. “The fact that we can produce high quality, environmentally pro-active fertilizer is only the icing on the cake.”