Diedree Odum, 59, walked up to the Rosa Keller Library on Saturday morning with two bulging tote bags of frozen food waste \u2014 banana and orange peels, onion tops, apple cores, egg shells, slices of bread and a few bananas that went bad before she and her sister could eat them.<\/p>\n
The weekly Saturday morning collection at the Keller Library in Broadmoor is part of a project called Compost New Orleans Waste, or Compost NOW, which delivers more than 420 pounds of discarded food each week to the nearby Hollygrove Market. There, the food scraps are used to create soil. A Wednesday-night pickup at the Alvar Library in Bywater, meanwhile, goes to a nearby gardening organization called France Street Farms.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hate to throw food away,\u201d said Odum, as she emptied the frozen lumps of fruits and vegetables into Compost NOW\u2019s two trash bins. Most Saturdays, Odum is accompanied by her fianc\u00e9, who collects coffee grounds at his workplace in 5-gallon buckets.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot wasting \u2014\u00a0that\u2019s the main thing,\u201d said Odum, who lives in the 7th Ward and has participated in the city\u2019s curbside recycling of paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic bottles and containers. She brings her glass bottles to the Recycling Drop-off Center on Elysian Fields on the second Saturday of every month.<\/p>\n
Her garbage bins have a lot less in them since since she began freezing food waste in gallon plastic bags that she brings to Keller each Saturday. \u201cIt has reduced my trash tremendously,\u201d Odum said. Research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that compostable materials \u2014\u00a0including grass clippings, vegetation, leaves, paper, paperboard and food waste \u2014\u00a0makes up 56 percent of municipal solid waste by weight.<\/p>\n
The effort to reduce what winds up in landfills is welcomed by New Orleans sanitation director Cynthia Sylvain-Lear. She’s a regular visitor to Compost NOW\u2019s Alvar pickup, where she brings food waste from her own household.<\/p>\n
\u201cIdeally, we want more and more citizens of New Orleans to realize that they don\u2019t have to put all their food scraps into their garbage,\u201d Sylvain-Lear said, noting that garden waste after the tornado in eastern New Orleans was brought to a local composter.<\/p>\n
At this point, Sylvain-Lear said, about 41 percent of eligible households recycle through the city\u2019s residential program, which picks up recycling at homes and at apartment buildings with four units or less. \u201cThat number, while it\u2019s not bad, should be higher,\u201d said Sylvain-Lear, who regularly visits local clubs, libraries and schools to tout the value of recycling, hoping to increase recycling in the New Orleans. Since 2010 alone, she said, the city has saved nearly $1.3 million in landfill costs through its recycling program.<\/p>\n