How to build a sustainable business and education organization in an urban jungle.
An excerpt of a conversation with Laura Rosenshine from Common Ground Compost.
Interview by Kyle Calian
Photography by Kyle Calian
Edited by Ashley Goetz
Q: Describe your path to what you are doing now. How did you end up here?
A: Short version is that I was working in advertising but was not doing things I felt were good. I was interested in sustainability but had nothing to show for it on my resume, so I transitioned to a green advertising agency. I liked the clients a lot better, but it still didn’t feel like enough of an impact. So, I said, “Screw it. I’m going to go and get something on my resume.” I went and did a sustainability volunteer program in New Zealand. I learned what composting was and that was eye-opening.
I came back to New York, and I was like, OK. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I know that I can’t throw food in the garbage anymore. I connected with the Lower East Side Ecology Center and had just missed their master composting class for the year. But I kind of befriended one of the people, and she let me tag along to a shortened version of the class that she was giving to the Parks Department.
And from there?
My brother worked at a private school and I was like, “Would your school want to compost?” He said, “Yeah, Chef’s all about it.” And that’s when I started learning the difference between residential waste and commercial waste. It turned out their existing hauler had a compost program, so they started right away. I befriended the sales agent who was working freelance for this hauler, and we started this project where we filmed the compost truck and site, so he could use it as a tool to teach people about composting.
I kind of learned about the commercial side from him. Over the next year or so, I realized the city was starting to support the Ecology Center and all of these great nonprofits that are doing stuff on the residential compost side, but no one was doing it on the commercial side. I started [helping] more schools pro bono. Simultaneously, I was working for a company that had an in-vessel, on-site food waste system.
So, was it in New Zealand that you started to work on sustainability, or did you have an interest in it before?
I was interested in sustainability before, but there were so many avenues of sustainability. I didn’t know which to go down. I just kind of fell into it when I came back, which seems to happen organically to a lot of people. They’re interested in it early on, and then they have to navigate a variety of paths through complicated woods to figure out where they wind up.
Have you always felt a responsibility to contribute to something bigger?
No, and I never wanted to own my own business.
And now you’re a business owner. So, why does composting matter?
In today’s world, we have a problem with landfills. They’ve been on the decline over the last century, and they’re harder and harder to site. They’re more expensive to run, their regulations are increasing and no one wants them in their backyard. So, the more we can do to recycle, to divert things from landfills, the better. What people don’t realize is that there are many more products in our world than the ones we’re used to — glass, metal, plastic and paper — that can be recycled. And food scraps are one of those new things.
Composting is organic decomposition in a controlled environment — you’re helping the process happen. Certain materials, when they end up in a landfill, have different levels of harm on our environment. People don’t really think about what happens to food when it goes into a landfill, but what happens is it gets suffocated. It gets plowed on, it gets compressed, it gets covered. But it still decomposes. And when it decomposes, it creates methane gas that is bad for our environment. Much worse than carbon dioxide.
How much worse?
About 27 times worse than carbon dioxide. And that doesn’t have to happen. If we don’t put food waste in that suffocated environment, we won’t generate methane in the first place. If we can remove food scraps from the garbage — from the landfill — and put them in a controlled environment to decompose, there can be beneficial reuse. Traditional composting converts food scraps to a usable soil amendment (fertilizer) that returns nutrients to the ground. Another option is to digest food scraps in an anaerobic (without air) digester. This process intentionally generates methane in a controlled way, and in some cases through this process, methane can have beneficial reuse by turning back into energy.
Recycling food waste is important, because it’s preventing the uncontrolled release of methane gas into the atmosphere.
And where does Common Ground get their compost?
That’s a great question. Common Ground is mostly a consulting company. We work with businesses, offices and buildings, to help them understand their options. Most of the time we’re linking the business with a compost program. So, a restaurant will separate its food scraps, put them out on the curb and a separate truck will come by to collect those food scraps. Haulers have their own relationships with compost sites, which can get complicated, but we do vetting for them. We say, “This is what’s going to happen to your compost.”
In general, we are educating and putting a program in place, so we don’t really get compost. It’s possible in the future that we’ll increase our relationships with haulers and be able to bring back some of that compost. In some cases the haulers are already doing that on their own.
How does the bike program fit into all of this?
When I was working for a commercial waste hauler, I realized that a lot of the agents are motivated by commission. They’re not really interested in small businesses and their garbage, even though small businesses are sometimes more conscious about their garbage. A lot of businesses in the East Village especially have an eye out for sustainability.
We decided to run a pilot where we collect compost using a bike and trailer, and partner with a garden to process it locally. The idea here is that these are resources. If we could do it on a small scale to keep those resources in our community, that would be great. It’s not feasible for us to work with large restaurants, because they’ll generate hundreds of pounds of compost a night — we just don’t have the type of space to process that. So, we focus on small business. We have a partnership with East Side Community School, and we bring food scraps back here three days a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We’ve got a couple that work for us, and they process the compost using the Bokashi method, which is a fermentation method of composting.
What do you do with the compost?
Most of the time we’re just trenching the compost into the ground and bringing nutrients back to the existing soil. This year, we’re starting to do more controlled cases above ground, so we can monitor inputs and hopefully produce compost that we can sell. Ideally, we’d be selling it in the locations where we collect the compost from in the first place.
So, is this community garden that you work out of owned by the city?
This particular lot is complicated. It’s actually the Department of Education’s property, and they have a joint maintenance agreement with the Parks Department.
We have a casual MOU with the school. They allow us to store our bike and trailer here and to run our compost program if we do some compost education with the 11th graders and make this place more functional by involving community members, because there weren’t any teachers that had the time to manage this space.
When I was going through the master composting class, this is where I did my volunteer work with the organization Earth Matter. Earth Matter went back to Governor’s Island where they do a lot of composting, so no one was here. I had the idea for a bike program and said, “I need a place to store a bike, and we need a place to compost. Let’s do it here.”
How do you get paid?
The clients pay us. We offer 3.5-, 4- or 5-gallon buckets. Generally, the 3.5 is just for residential use, because we do both residential and commercial pickups. Then, we have a 4-gallon bucket for $5 and a 5-gallon bucket for $6.
I pay my haulers that do the work, and we make financial contributions to the garden. For example, they just put in these grow lights and said, “OK, we need to lock the doors now, because we have a heating system in here.” Instead of going through the hassle of trying to get the school to pay for it, I’m just going to do it, because it’s a give back for us. We also paid for all this lumber for the raised gardening beds. I would say at this point I’ve given more money than I’ve made.
So is this your full-time gig?
Common Ground I spend like 95 percent of my time on, and the bike program is much smaller. It’s not a nonprofit yet. We are looking into that in the near future. The garden is registered with Green Thumb. If it ends up making sense to be a nonprofit, we would do it (or we would probably get a fiscal sponsor). I always envisioned the program going that direction, but I wasn’t going to jump through all the hoops, because the program is so small. I wasn’t going to go create a nonprofit if I didn’t know that the concept could work here, which we still don’t know 100 percent.
Residential compost is going to be sanitation run soon. Is that going to make things even trickier?
Yeah. The rule with waste is that the second it hits the curb it becomes city property. So, we get it before it hits the curb. We would love to see the city, and they do, support a combination of community composting and the curbside pilot. They haven’t really figured out how they’re going to encourage people to drop off food scraps when they can just bring them to their basement. But for the purposes of our program, we believe that in the long run taking commercial waste will be our direction.
Do haulers seem enthusiastic about composting?
Some do, some don’t. I can’t speak for them 100 percent. What frustrates me is when they don’t tell people about the compost program, unless the client specifically asks. And sometimes they discourage [the client]. They’ll say, “It’s more expensive. You don’t want to do it.” Well, it shouldn’t be more expensive. I think it fluctuates a lot. But it’s a new thing that they’re still figuring out. Some haulers are definitely pushing their compost programs, some even more because of the legislation. But there are a lot of challenges around it.
Take me through an average day at Common Ground.
Sure. An average day will be a good amount of time on my computer responding to emails. Maybe putting together some quotes of proposals for clients. Maybe designing signage, because we do signage and education. Running around a lot. It’s most beneficial when we see our clients and can make recommendations, so we’re in their space a lot.
Meredith, who works with me, is executing a lot of our work. And I do a little bit of the first stages with new clients. I’m on the phone all the time just answering very basic questions about what composting in New York City looks like — taking potential clients through the concept. It’s very foreign to people. It’s only more tricky than recycling because it’s so unfamiliar. Recycling is bad in New York, so we always help our clients with that too.
You just have to explain to them what you need. Most people think, “We can’t compost here. We don’t have the space for that.” It’s like no, no, no — we’re just separating it and sending it out. Just getting them to understand what urban composting looks like for a business is what I spend a lot of my day doing.
And then you’re here working on this garden sometimes?
Yeah. I don’t work in the reclaimed organics program much anymore. The first two years I definitely did. The first year I was on the bike. When I’m in the garden now, I’m usually just here as a community volunteer.
We have two haulers, and then there’s Max. Max used to be a hauler. He’s very involved in community gardening, and I pretty much just pay him right now to manage the garden. I think it’s a strange situation that the city has created. Right now most community composting is equated with volunteer work. And I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t think it’s sustainable. If you really want to have a medium-sized, successful composting program that diverts a good amount of organics, people should be paid for their time. It’s a job. Our model isn’t perfect, right? And so, we’re just trying to prove that it’s doable.
How can people drop off their compost with you?
If you want to be a community garden that is part of the NYC Compost Project ecosystem, you have to offer a free compost drop-off. So, that’s our yellow box out front. For people that want it picked up, we charge them $30 every two months for our residential collection program, and the commercial program is based on a fee-per-bucket structure. Right now, we collect from all of our businesses. But presuming we have a business that is willing to walk it over, we would create a different pricing structure for them. And if they wanted to move their own compost over here, we would totally support that. Fine by us…
This is an excerpt of an interview that is featured in the first issue of The Regeneration Magazine, coming this month.
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