Composting on and off campus: Wagner’s partnership with Snug Harbor

The Bonner Program and Josh Mullenite, a visiting assistant professor focused on environmental anthropology, have partnered with NYC Compost Project

hosted by Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden.

Through the program, students get training and hands-on experience

on composting that they plan to give back to Wagner’s community.

Olivia Golden, Outreach Coordinator of NYC Compost Project,

shares insights on this partnership.

Where did this compost initiative come from?

The NYC compost project started like a city movement in 1993 and is funded by the Department of Sanitation. We’re employed by Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden to support different programs throughout the community – community compost sites, workshops, work days, training programs.

What is your mission statement?

Our mission is to rebuild New York City’s soils by providing New Yorkers with the knowledge, the skills and the resources to make and use compost locally.

What are your goals on the partnership with Wagner?

Our goal is to be able to have events for students to learn and take food scraps or organic matter – anything that was once living – and turn it into compost on campus. Having regular volunteer work days – that's what we'd really love to see. The frequency and the design of it all is up to the students. We’d also like them to be able to do outreach and talk about the benefits of compost on campus and maybe connect to different classes that are going on, for example, environmental studies, biology or social sciences.

What's the structure of this program?

Students take the class now – five training sessions with us – then there's three sessions where they do independent work, which means composting and doing different tasks like inventory at their site and planning for future events. The goal is to hold and lead one work day by the end of the semester, where volunteers can come into the site and help them compost. The students will be able to facilitate and help teach other students how to compost. This will be an opportunity for other Wagner students to be involved and learn how to compost. Our hope is that this experience will give them all the knowledge to continue to teach students in the future and continue to have work days at the site next semester.

How did you develop the curriculum?

We have developed a basic syllabus first. We did a very soft pilot with some Bonner leaders last year, in the spring semester. But it was very cold, so we adjusted it to be in the fall. When we had this syllabus, we had meetings with different faculty and staff from Wagner. We met with professors Sarah Scott, Alison Arant and Joshua Mullenite, as well as Arlette Cepeda, CLCE Director, and Elaina Boncich, Bonner Program Coordinator. Then we met with student Shannon Harris, Sustainability Senator. They all gave us feedback as to what would be helpful or how to get a better understanding of what the student needs are and what would work for the students and we kind of worked from that and matched it with our goals and our mission to rebuild New York City soils.

The curriculum is inspired by the master compost. It's sort of like a hands-on course. We do some talking and different activities, but a lot of it is hands-on learning like making compost, so it's not a traditional classroom setting. We want the students to be able to lead their own community compost sites. So it really started from that backwards process of what are the things that they need, the skills that we want them to have, things that we want them to be able to do.

What is a community compost site?

A community compost site is basically a site that makes compost and it's accessible to the community. We work with community gardens, different schools, parks, churches and they make compost on those sites. We saw this as a way that we could help Wagner and other colleges to create their own community compost sites and support them in leading those sites. As mentioned earlier, we want the students to be able to lead their own community compost sites.

What are some of the benefits of composting?

There’s so many. One of the ones that are mission is focusing on is building soils. Composting basically relies on what we call FBI (fungi, bacteria and invertebrates), so by composting you’re basically making a home for them to thrive and multiply and then you’re adding that to the soil, which makes it healthy. And when your soil is healthy, your plants are healthy – vegetables, fruits or flowers. Another effects is that with compost, your soil will absorb more water, so you won’t have as much flooding. You are also helping to filter out some of the sediments; composting helps to hold them together.

Another thing that a lot of people recognize with composting is the waste reduction aspect -- over 30% of New York City's waste stream is organics that can be composted and a lot of that is actually going to the landfill and in the landfill those food scraps generate methane which is over 20 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. When you're composting, you're introducing oxygen into the decomposition process which is absent in the landfill, so you're helping to mitigate that methane emissions. That helps mitigate some of the climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re also supporting community organizations with that compost they use to grow new stuff, support new life and amend their soils locally with compost that was made on Staten Island.

Give me some examples of how can students compost on campus:

For a small community scale or backyard scale composting system you want to keep it vegan with your compost so no meat, dairy, fish, eggs. You can use banana peels, apple cores, even bread or rice that doesn’t have any salt or oils in it. So basically a lot of fruits and vegetable scraps and sometimes bread or grains.

Then you mix that with wood chips or leaves or different things like that. There's two different ingredients we need – greens and browns. The greens are nitrogen-rich materials and the browns are carbon-rich. Having those different feedstocks and mixing them together creates compost.

What happens to the compost after it’s made at Wagner?

That's up to the students, but I think it's going to be used at the garden there to help support what they’re growing and to improve the health of the soil, so their plants will be healthy. It's a beautiful thing – they’re using the quality of a feature after decomposing to support the next plants, flowers and vegetables.

Why is composting useful for our planet/city?

A lot of people see compost as garbage, but it's not -- it's a beautiful resource that can be used on to support new things. We’re talking about a regenerated practice, a cycle – we're supporting the life in the soil, we’re supporting new plant life and we're supporting ourselves because we're connected to nature.

Students Thomas Mcguiness, Katherine Campbell and Braith Dicker are enjoying the sun while having the theoretical part of their class outside. The teachers are Olivia Golden, the outreach coordinator, and Carol Hooper, the project manager.

Students have a compost session on campus, lead by "graduates" of the

NYC Compost Project.

This article was written by Rebeca Zoicas (Bonner Leader) for The Wagnerian

(Issue 3 of Fall 2019).