Composting is a great way to reduce kitchen waste, and also provides a great, nutrient rich material for our plants. But if you live in the city, chances are you don’t have a lot of room to store vegetable scraps and food waste. Which is why when I stumbled upon this KickStarter project to bring composting to New York City, I thought it was a great idea to reduce waste in cities.
The group New York Compost has developed a low-cost cargo bike that can be used to pick up food scraps from participating small and medium-sized restaurants. The scraps would be delivered to farmers at local farmers’ markets and CSA drop-offs, to be taken back to their farms and later processed into compost. NY Compost is trying to raise $6,000 by September 1st to retrofit enough bicycles to launch the project.
The whole process takes the inconvenience out of composting for local businesses and puts nutrients back into the soil, instead of waste into the landfills. And since bikes are used for the pickups, it also has the added benefit of not adding any air pollution via car exhaust.
