Diedree Odum, 59, walked up to the Rosa Keller Library on Saturday morning with two bulging tote bags of frozen food waste — 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.
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.
“I hate to throw food away,” said Odum, as she emptied the frozen lumps of fruits and vegetables into Compost NOW’s two trash bins. Most Saturdays, Odum is accompanied by her fiancé, who collects coffee grounds at his workplace in 5-gallon buckets.
“Not wasting — that’s the main thing,” said Odum, who lives in the 7th Ward and has participated in the city’s 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.
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. “It has reduced my trash tremendously,” Odum said. Research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that compostable materials — including grass clippings, vegetation, leaves, paper, paperboard and food waste — makes up 56 percent of municipal solid waste by weight.
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’s Alvar pickup, where she brings food waste from her own household.
“Ideally, we want more and more citizens of New Orleans to realize that they don’t have to put all their food scraps into their garbage,” Sylvain-Lear said, noting that garden waste after the tornado in eastern New Orleans was brought to a local composter.
At this point, Sylvain-Lear said, about 41 percent of eligible households recycle through the city’s residential program, which picks up recycling at homes and at apartment buildings with four units or less. “That number, while it’s not bad, should be higher,” 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.
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