Compost Clubhouse combats food waste
Sophie Chapman always envisioned a landfill as a faraway place.
It wasn’t until she took a field trip to the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill with the local youth organization Compost Clubhouse that the reality of our society’s food waste really struck the 12-year-old from Grandview Heights.
“We went and saw it, and it’s very different from anything I had expected,” she said.
Through Compost Clubhouse, Sophie and about 150 other Columbusarea youths are working to divert the food waste that ends up in those landfills.
The organization, formerly called Kids That Compost, began in 2019,
after curbside compost buckets in Bexley caught Mona Barber’s attention as she drove her daughter to school. The mother of two wondered whether her Grandview Heights community could start a similar household composting and pickup program.
In speaking with Grandview officials, Barber realized that starting such a program through the city would likely be a long and tedious process of feasibility studies and budget talks.
“So I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it with kids,’” Barber recalled. She called a handful of other moms in the community to organize their own curbside compost pickup. What started as Barber’s brainchild and the work of about three families quickly morphed into a student-centered organization that spread to other Columbus neighborhoods.
“Pretty quickly, I had friends in Victorian Village saying, ‘We want a team,’” Barber said. Then came calls from other families in Upper Arlington, Reynoldsburg, New Albany, Dublin and more.
For $25 per month, a central Ohio household can sign up to receive a five-gallon Compost Clubhouse bucket, a compostable liner and weekly compost pickup. Participants can fill their bucket with compostable materials including fruits, vegetables, coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, meat, fish, paper towels, tissues and more. Households must place their buckets outside by the morning of their pickup day, when a Compost Clubhouse driver will come pick up the food waste each week. The organization uses compost transport company GOZERO to process the food waste it collects each week.
A study released in March 2020 by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO), which operates the Franklin County landfill, found that about 76% of the landfill waste could be recycled or composted. Food waste made up the largest category that could be diverted, about 15% of the total waste.
Youth participants of Compost Clubhouse help deliver compost buckets to compost subscribers, hold educational events, attend community meetings to share their mission and help create a bridge between Compost Clubhouse and their local schools.
Between school programs and residential compost pickups, Compost Clubhouse is now serving 26 Columbus-area neighborhoods.
Compost Clubhouse has helped establish composting habits at local preschools and elementary schools, Barber said. At middle schools and high schools, the organization has helped initiate the use of food waste containers for students to use themselves in cafeterias, as well as in the school kitchens where food is made. The group recently began conducting audits of how much compostable material is captured in these cafeterias over time, and how students’ behaviors around food waste begin to change, Barber said.
“You know, it’s really just a beautiful, beautiful concept to one teach children at a young age: we don’t put our food waste in the trash, because once it goes to the trash, to the landfill, it does not break down and it doesn’t belong there,” Barber said.
Keeping food waste out of the trash is one lesson. Teaching kids to take less food to begin with is another learning opportunity, Barber said.
“Take what you can eat, and if you’re still hungry, come back and get some more,” she said. “But let’s try to reduce that amount of food, let’s only take that amount of food that we are prepared to eat, and be mindful of our food waste.”
Schools have also served as locations for some of Compost Clubhouse’s events, including its recent post-halloween pumpkin toss, where youth members helped divert thousands of pounds of residents’ pumpkin waste from local landfills.
Anna Keller, a 16-year-old sophomore at Worthington Kilbourne High School, saw the difference such events can make when her fellow community members filled five giant bins with their pumpkins for composting.
“I feel like that event really helped educate the community, that instead of throwing your pumpkins away, you can just compost them,” Anna said. “It’s easy and not that much of a hassle, and really effective.”
Through her family’s garden at home, Anna learned about growing food, composting and recycling at a young age.
“Composting is just an easy and, it can be, a fun way to learn about the environment and how things decompose,” she said. “And it can be a great, educated way to learn about the environment and be a good neighbor.”
Sophie Chapman’s involvement in Compost Clubhouse has already helped changed the habits of her and her family at home, and the 7th grader at St. Andrew School in Upper Arlington hopes others will think about doing the same.
“My message to others would be to learn more about it, and see what you’re throwing away that you could be composting, and to get a bucket and compost those things to help the environment,” she said. jsmola@dispatch.com @jennsmola