Got compost? Take your trash to the Baltimore Farmers’ Market.

By Taylor Montford
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Hate to waste food, and not sure what to do with kitchen scraps because you don’t have a compost pile at home? Here’s a solution.

Baltimore residents are heading to the downtown Farmers’ Market and Bazaar under the Jones Fall Expressway to not only shop for local produce and handcrafted items, but to donate their food waste for free.

Every Sunday, market visitors are taking compostable food scrapings from their kitchens to the “Food Matters Program” booth. The scraps are then sent off to local farmers to be repurposed and composted.

Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability, in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council, launched the program earlier this spring in an effort to cut the municipal’s food waste in half by 2030.

“We provide a free, residential pop-up composting program that really provides an option for people who are interested in composting and reducing or diverting their organic food waste,” said Ava Richardson, the technical adviser for Food Matters.

Richardson said the program provides an option for visitors to compost and is easily accessible for most people in the city, or outside the city who are likely already here every Sunday.

“Otherwise it’s kind of hard to find a location to take trash,” Richardson said. “There are services in the city that do curb side pick-up, but sometimes that creates a financial barrier for people who can’t afford that added utility.”

Compost fruit and vegetables, uncoated paper products, leaves, coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, pasta, grains and bread are sent to farmers every week from the market to be turned into nutrient-rich compost for crop soil and chow for their animals.

Richardson said one farmer feeds her hogs with the compostables, and the other, a vegetable farmer, does traditional composting by adding it to his soil. Both are frequent users of the program.

“In both instances we are diverting that organic material from our landfills and our incinerators so that it’s not sitting there producing methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas or being lost and burned to the incinerator, where those resources are gone forever,” Richardson said.

Baltimore City throws away nearly 100,000 tons of food waste each year, according to the Baltimore Office of Sustainability. The city also produces 430,000 tons of municipal trash each year, and most of it is sent to the incinerator, according to the Food Waste & Recovery Strategy plan released in 2018.

Baltimore City resident Kelly Swickard said she has seen a tremendous decline in food waste that she throws out thanks to Food Matters.

“I live in an apartment with my husband in Mount Vernon, so we don’t really have a place to put our waste,” Swickard said. “Since the city comes by to pick up recycling one day a week, and garbage the other, coming here helps to rid a ton of waste out of our garbage bag. I feel good knowing it’s not going into the landfills.”

Richardson said that there are people in the city who are already conscious and are thinking of ways to reduce their waste.

“I think generally the people that are composting or dropping off their compostables are kind of our early adopters,” Richardson said. “It’s not a massive number of people who are participating, but in terms of just getting the word out and providing this service, it’s a critical first step for the city to be taking.”

Officials planned to expand the collection service to other farmers’ markets in the area and recently did Saturday, Nov. 2.

“We have expanded to the Waverly Famers’ Market on 32^nd Street, so we’ll be there every Saturday and is a year-round event,” Richardson said. “We are also launching a network of community composting sites and that’s where people can not only drop off their food scrapes, but they can actually volunteer and become educated when processing the materials, too.”

Richardson says the goal is to help people become more conscious of the garbage they’re producing so that consumers aren’t just throwing food waste away but also acknowledging that these are valuable resources.

“We want to recirculate this very valuable resource and material back into our environment, back into our food system,” Richardson said. “When we do that we enrich our soils and foster more judicious management of our natural resources.”