Almost a month in, residents are taking advantage of the city’s new food scrap drop-off sites.
By Huanjia Zhang, Baltimore Magazine
Just before 9 a.m. on a midsummer Friday, April Welch sets off from her Remington home, carrying a brown paper bag full of food scraps to the city’s Citizen Drop-Off Center on Sisson Street.
Once she arrives, she spots a large green trash bin behind the gate, opens the lid, and spills a colorful blend of apple cores, mango bits, banana peels, and green leaves into a high pile of organic waste.
“It’s really easy,” says Welch, concluding her second compost delivery. Her first, almost three weeks ago, was just days after Baltimore kicked off its first city-wide food waste pilot drop-off program—which aims to promote a sustainable, zero-waste future by gathering food scraps at five residential collection sites.
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Now, almost a month in, citizens are taking advantage of the project as a convenient (and free) way to compost. It’s a good sign for city officials, who hope that the initiative will change how Baltimoreans think about their food waste overall.
“This is the first time we’ve done something like this on city-owned property,” says Kristyn Oldendorf, who leads the program at the city’s Department of Public Works. “Anything we can do to increase composting and reduce waste is really important.”
According to a recent tally of residential trash conducted by the city, food scraps make up roughly 25 percent of the city’s waste stream. If they’re not composted, most of these scraps are incinerated or go straight to a landfill. “It takes so much to create food,” Oldendorf adds, “Just throwing the material away is not the best use of it.”
The inspiration for the pilot project was sparked by the Baltimore Office of Sustainability’s Food Matters Program, which offers two food scrap drop-off sites at the 32nd Street Farmers Market and the Baltimore Farmers Market and Bazaar under the JFX. After observing auspicious participation at these sites, and obtaining extra funding from Natural Resources Defense Council, the city decided to expand its food waste collection to all five of its citizen drop-off centers. At these locations, which are typically used to collect single-stream recycling and large bulk items, residents can now dispose of food scraps six days a week at varying hours.
The pilot program will run about three to four months, Oldendorf says. And depending on people’s participation, the city will then decide whether to keep the program for the long run, or even expand.
