By the Bronxville Green Committee

May 8, 2024: In celebration of International Compost Awareness Week (ICAW), the Village is offering FREE organically rich compost to all residents to make springtime planting more rewarding.

This compost is the soil that results when the food scraps collected in the Village’s residential Food Scrap Recycling program are composted at a commercial facility.

The compost will be available from Sunday, May 5 through Saturday, May 11 (while the pile lasts)! Bring your own container and shovel to the Food Scrap Drop-Off Site behind Village Hall (enter and exit Palumbo Place from Midland Avenue) and help yourself. 

This year, ICAW’s theme is Compost: Nature’s Climate Champion! Composting our food scraps addresses some of our most pressing environmental challenges. Benefits includes:

-Promotes Healthy Soil: By burning or landfilling food scraps, we break nature’s cycle and deprive soil of the nutrients needed to keep it healthy. The Solution:  Composting food scraps restores nature’s cycle and returns to soil the organisms and nutrients needed to grow healthy food, retain water and control flooding, remove toxins, and build resilience in our ecosystem.  Commercial composters sell the compost they produce at local stores.

-Reduces Methane Emissions: When placed in a landfill, where a lack of air breeds anaerobic bacteria, food scraps create methane, the most potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. When food scraps are incinerated, as Bronxville’s are at a facility in Peekskill, they reduce the efficiency of the incineration process because they contain mostly water.  Incineration also requires a lot of energy and is expensive. The solution: When composted in a commercial composting facility, outdoor piles of composting material are exposed to air, which breeds aerobic bacteria that do not produce methane. The result: far less contribution to climate change.

-Addresses Our Waste Disposal Problem: According to the EPA, in the U.S., food is the single most common material sent to landfills, comprising 24.1 percent of municipal solid waste. The solution: By composting food waste at a commercial facility, we drastically reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills or incinerators. That saves money, reduces the amount of land used for landfills, and reduces pollution associated with burning.

-Helps Us Waste Less Food: We waste 40% of the food grown in this country. The solution: When we separate food scraps from our trash, we begin to consider what we’re throwing out. How many peels, pits, shells, bones, and husks are left when we prepare our food.  How much food goes bad before we eat it, or how much on our plate we don’t eat.  Awareness encourages us to take steps to reduce waste!

Interested in a hands-on experience of making compost? Westchester County runs CompostED, a small composting operation and education site located next to the Household Material Recovery Facility (H-MRF) in Valhalla.  Groups can book an appointment to see first-hand how compost is made. It’s great fun to watch a giant thermometer measure the heat generated by aerobic bacteria working hard to break down food scraps!

Food Scrap Recycling is a WIN WIN any way you look at it! And for another WIN, we are extending our free delivery service of Food Scrap Recycling kits when you order online HERE through end of June.

Don’t forget to pick up your free compost behind Village Hall from May 5-11! Learn more on our website!

The Bronxville Green Committee is a volunteer organization that is part of the Village of Bronxville. We work to propose and implement environmentally sustainable programs in our community.