Bring Compost to the Queen City
Donation protected
Here in Cincinnati, 30% of what is sent to the landfill could be composted. That’s a third of our waste that we can return to our soils, communities, and plates. However, we don’t have a local composting option. Instead, much of the extra food that we generate in our public spaces - our restaurants, offices, hospitals and classrooms - is thrown into the trash and sent to the landfill.
The human impact on the earth’s climate is becoming more and more obvious. In Cincinnati, springs are becoming wetter (the city spent $50 million on repairing damage from flooding and storms in 2017 alone) and summers are becoming hotter. And we don’t need numbers to tell this story - if you’ve been in Cincinnati in 2019 alone, you’ve felt the torrential rains that were the spring and the scorched heat that has been this summer and fall.
Composting is emerging across the country as a necessary means to remediate our human impact. It doesn’t make sense to send organic scraps to the landfill, where they decay to methane, a gas 30 times more destructive than carbon to our warming planet. The energy in these scraps could instead be used to help us grow food right here in our region. Compost is being embraced across the country as part of the solution. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle already have city-wide composting services available alongside their garbage collection. In 2014, Massachusetts implemented a state-wide requirement that larger organizations divert all of their organic scrap. For five years, our neighbors up north in Cleveland have been paving the way on how Clevelanders divert their food scraps for compost, to feed people, not landfills. We can do this too!
Our mission at Queen City Commons is to harness the energy of our food scraps to rebuild our connection to our local foods and soils. By providing food scrap pickup to organizations and communities, and diverting that food scrap to local farms to compost, we’re helping put Cincinnati on the map as an environmental leader - effectively lengthening the lifespan of Cincinnati’s ever-bulging landfill, significantly reducing the carbon impact of our waste, and building healthy soil for our regional food system.
Our partners are ready! With farms set up to compost on the back end, and businesses open for pickups on the front end, the only thing remaining to connect the loop is a truck to transport it all.
Together, we can change Cincinnati’s relationship to food scraps and build a city that takes a proactive approach to its waste reduction. Your gift today helps make composting in Cincinnati a reality. You can help change our dynamic around our food and around our waste.
Our goal is to raise $10,000. Here’s what your contribution will help us purchase:
Food scraps need wheels! We’ve got to get these food scraps to their compost piles pronto, and that’s where a cargo van comes in.
$6500 goes towards purchasing a used cargo van for transporting bins.
Food scraps are heavy! And while we’ve got some gals with muscles, these bins can be upwards of 400lbs - we’ll need a little hydraulic help to get these hunks into the van!
$3500 goes towards a lift gate on the cargo van, to load bins into the vehicle.
How else can you help? Share our page on your social media, and with your family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Spreading the word helps make this happen.
What we choose not to eat has valuable energy. Your contribution today recognizes the value - to ourselves, our human community, and the nonhuman creatures all around us - in the reuse of nutrients and energy in our uneaten food. Your contribution here helps make composting in Cincinnati possible. Thank you for choosing to help create sustainable change in our Queen City.
With much love and gratitude,
Marie
P.S. Do you have questions, or are interested in becoming involved with Queen City Commons? You can reach us at [phone redacted] and [email redacted]. We're looking forward to talking!
The human impact on the earth’s climate is becoming more and more obvious. In Cincinnati, springs are becoming wetter (the city spent $50 million on repairing damage from flooding and storms in 2017 alone) and summers are becoming hotter. And we don’t need numbers to tell this story - if you’ve been in Cincinnati in 2019 alone, you’ve felt the torrential rains that were the spring and the scorched heat that has been this summer and fall.
Composting is emerging across the country as a necessary means to remediate our human impact. It doesn’t make sense to send organic scraps to the landfill, where they decay to methane, a gas 30 times more destructive than carbon to our warming planet. The energy in these scraps could instead be used to help us grow food right here in our region. Compost is being embraced across the country as part of the solution. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle already have city-wide composting services available alongside their garbage collection. In 2014, Massachusetts implemented a state-wide requirement that larger organizations divert all of their organic scrap. For five years, our neighbors up north in Cleveland have been paving the way on how Clevelanders divert their food scraps for compost, to feed people, not landfills. We can do this too!
Our mission at Queen City Commons is to harness the energy of our food scraps to rebuild our connection to our local foods and soils. By providing food scrap pickup to organizations and communities, and diverting that food scrap to local farms to compost, we’re helping put Cincinnati on the map as an environmental leader - effectively lengthening the lifespan of Cincinnati’s ever-bulging landfill, significantly reducing the carbon impact of our waste, and building healthy soil for our regional food system.
Our partners are ready! With farms set up to compost on the back end, and businesses open for pickups on the front end, the only thing remaining to connect the loop is a truck to transport it all.
Together, we can change Cincinnati’s relationship to food scraps and build a city that takes a proactive approach to its waste reduction. Your gift today helps make composting in Cincinnati a reality. You can help change our dynamic around our food and around our waste.
Our goal is to raise $10,000. Here’s what your contribution will help us purchase:
Food scraps need wheels! We’ve got to get these food scraps to their compost piles pronto, and that’s where a cargo van comes in.
$6500 goes towards purchasing a used cargo van for transporting bins.
Food scraps are heavy! And while we’ve got some gals with muscles, these bins can be upwards of 400lbs - we’ll need a little hydraulic help to get these hunks into the van!
$3500 goes towards a lift gate on the cargo van, to load bins into the vehicle.
How else can you help? Share our page on your social media, and with your family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Spreading the word helps make this happen.
What we choose not to eat has valuable energy. Your contribution today recognizes the value - to ourselves, our human community, and the nonhuman creatures all around us - in the reuse of nutrients and energy in our uneaten food. Your contribution here helps make composting in Cincinnati possible. Thank you for choosing to help create sustainable change in our Queen City.
With much love and gratitude,
Marie
P.S. Do you have questions, or are interested in becoming involved with Queen City Commons? You can reach us at [phone redacted] and [email redacted]. We're looking forward to talking!
Organizer
Marie Beroske Hopkins
Organizer
Cincinnati, OH
