There are a lot of reasons to love our local food system, and in the face of climate change, distance has become an even more essential consideration for our food choices – including and especially for food that is thrown away. The production, transportation, and handling of food generates significant Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) emissions, which increases with the distance food must travel¹. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that in 2019, about 40 million tons of wasted food from the food retail, food service, and residential sectors were sent to landfills, where it generates methane, another potent greenhouse gas². As home chefs and gardeners, we can meaningfully reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions both by keeping our wasted food out of the landfill and by keeping it local.

Tilth Alliance’s Community Kitchens Program has been working this spring to answer the question: “I have leftover kitchen scraps and plate waste; how do I keep it from entering the landfill?”. We worked with Tilth Alliance staff and our friends at Restaurant 2 Garden to find creative ways to break down organic materials at home, creating nutrition for the soil in the process!

Worm Bins for Home Composting

At our May Community Kitchen Dinner, guests explored a variety of compost strategies that are utilized at Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands including windrows, digesters, and our favorite: worm bins. This map shows a few of the composting strategies at Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands:

Worm bins are a great choice for home composters because they are generally inexpensive and easy to maintain. These bins are also a good fit for folks who live in apartments or shared living spaces as they are designed to be kept inside. Guests at the May dinner had a chance to ask our staff lots of questions about worm bins; you can watch the conversation here!

You need the following items to create and manage your own worm bin:

1. Two plastic bins
2. A drill
3. Screening material
4. Waterproof glue
5. Shredded paper
6. A little bit of dirt
7. A little bit of water
8. Worms
9. A trowel
10. Food scraps container

For full instructions on creating a worm bin, check out the EPA’s guide on How to Create and Maintain an Indoor Worm Composting Bin.

Bokashi Composting

At our June Community Kitchen Dinner, we partnered with staff from Restaurant 2 Garden, an organization that reduces waste and builds community in Seattle’s International District and beyond. They are transforming local food waste into soil amendments to improve health for their neighbors through a process called “bokashi”. According to Garden of Oz, “Bokashi composting has roots Southeast Asia and comes from the Japanese word meaning “fading away.” Bokashi works with any organic food waste (even meat, citrus, dairy, processed foods and fats) by breaking down food waste through anaerobic fermentation using effective microorganisms. The result is a nutrient rich BioPulp. This fermented BioPulp can then be composted into living soil for two to four weeks in ideal conditions.”

Check out Restaurant 2 Garden’s full guide to find out how you can get started with bokashi at home.

Food Waste Reduction and Community Resilience

Director Amy Bettle Huynh, who also served as guest chef for the meal, shared some of her thoughts with us on how the sustainability of food waste reduction is an ideal partner for community resilience:

“Restaurant 2 Garden transforms local restaurant food scraps into compost in Seattle’s Chinatown International District (CID). Our organization is a community-focused, culturally-appropriate, circular approach to organics management. Our primary community need is an alternative organics waste management system. Our project’s purpose is to activate and transform a vacant lot, 919 S. King St, Seattle, WA 98104, into a community composting site to increase our capacity to serve our community’s needs.

This neighborhood composting effort started in 2020, when two community members saw the vast amount of food scraps being disposed of in the CID and the need for more compost at the Danny Woo Community Garden (DWCG) where elders garden in the neighborhood’s only green space. Restaurant 2 Garden was created to support the CID’s community assets – food businesses, gardens, and people – to increase health, food security, ecological sustainability, racial justice, and economic vitality.

A funded pilot operation began in February 2022 at the DWCG. Like my own family’s garden, DWCG is where low-income elders grow culturally appropriate food. They are able to grow food that isn’t available at grocery stores or to grow them at a lower cost. Compost distribution days are extremely popular, and there is not enough compost to go around. Additional food businesses have reached out to see if we could take their food scraps, but we currently are at capacity. That’s how and why we know we need to scale up operations considerably. We plan to develop 919 S. King St, a small vacant lot, into an outdoor work site that features a 40-foot “Earth Flow” biodigester. This expansion allows us to scale from our current two food businesses to over 30. The ultimate goal would be to provide an alternate organics management solution for the CID’s 110 food businesses. The resulting compost will be distributed at no cost to over 70 DWCG gardeners, and excess compost sales will begin to build our long-term financial self-sufficiency.”

You can find more information about Amy, including her favorite celebratory recipes, in the booklet from the event.

About Community Kitchen Meals

Tilth Alliance’s Community Kitchen program is based at Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands in South Seattle and celebrates the diversity of food and food cultures in our neighborhood. For each event we partner with local cooks and chefs to host an educational, cross-cultural event centered around a nutritious, delicious, and locally sourced meal.

This material is funded through a Public Participation Grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology. Ecology reviewed the content for grant consistency but does not necessarily endorse it.

1. https://home/1505539.cloudwaysapps.com/kbfunrcqcz/public_html.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/food-material-specific-data ↩︎
2. https://home/1505539.cloudwaysapps.com/kbfunrcqcz/public_html.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/food-waste-and-its-links-greenhouse-gases-and-climate-change ↩︎