Hello Compost
A city like New York, with a population of over 8 million, generates a gargantuan amount of landfill waste. Of that throwaway mess, about 35% is organic matter. And while the city plans to roll out a new composting program this fall–albeit, a voluntary one–New York’s recycling and composting rates have long trailed behind smaller cities, especially on the West Coast.
Hello Compost is a proposed program that offers incentives to change behavior. Under Hello Compost, low-income families, who are throwing away upwards of $1,300 in biodegradables, will be able to turn in compost for produce credits.
Aly Blenkin and Luke Keller, cofounders of HC, and a fellow Parsons design student, developed a multitiered system: Families put food waste into freezable, odor-blocking collection bags. Those bags go to Project EATS (a New York-based nonprofit focused on urban agriculture), where they are weighed and assigned a value that translates into credits for fresh produce, grown by local farmers. Project EATS uses an iPad app to track progress and gamify the program–banking on the human nature to compete, which makes tracking tools like Nike’s FuelBand so successful.
Keller says, “Solving for the incentive to participate has been and will continue to be one of the most important challenges we face moving forward.”
If Hello Compost takes off, it can tangibly improve the kitchens, living conditions, and diets of its users. Blenkin and Keller, of course, see a bigger picture: Changing behavior. “We need to re-imagine the role of food waste from being a smelly, unattractive side effect of eating to an attractive resource for residents to positively impact their community and to help put fresh food on the table,” Blenkin says.