DETROIT (WXYZ) — At the corner of Georgia and Vinton Streets in Detroit, you can find a lot of love growing.
The intersection is home to the Georgia St. Community Collective.
"We grow, in this community garden space, collards, cabbage, kale, broccoli, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans," said Mark Covington, founder of the Georgia St. Community Collective garden.
Covington says the garden started in 2008 after he moved back home with his mother and grandmother and noticed an illegal dumping site just a few steps away. He says he cleaned up the lot and began planting vegetables and cutting the grass to prevent people from dumping there in the future. The space has since blossomed into a four-lot community space that helps to feed neighbors battling food insecurity.
Covington says a part of the success of the garden is due to composting. In each one of his garden beds, you can find the nutrient dense material at the bottom.
"I would go to other gardens and they got these big, giant collard plants, the bean bushes are huge and I was like what am I doing wrong? And then I found out about composting," said Covington.
Composting is described as the process of recycling organic materials into an amendment that can be used to enrich soil and plants. Covington say she's now been composting for 16 seasons.
"It’s like a recipe. We do two parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Nitrogen would be like fresh grass clippings, food scraps, vegetables, fruits, coffee grounds. We do egg shells. You try to chop those food scraps up into 2 inches and then we mix it 2:1 put it in a bin," said Covington.
Covington says he also adds things like leaves and mulch. The materials are then heated and turned several times over the course of two to three months until it's broken down into nutrient dense material that can be used to plant more fruit and vegetables.
After the process is finished, it goes through a sifter and into a garden bed.
"It provides extra nutrients in the soil that the plants take up so you have high nutrient dense vegetables or fruits but it also reduces what goes into the landfills," said Covington.
Environmentalists say food scraps going into landfills is more harmful than most people might realize.
"Your food waste, if you’re sending it to landfills, it’s a huge producer of methane which is a super harmful greenhouse gas. But if you put it into a compost bin, it doesn’t produce that methane because it’s mixed with oxygen. So it’s just continuing to break down rather than sit and rot and release greenhouse gases," said Wayne State University student Jenna Steele.
According to the EPA, Municipal Solid Waste Landfills (MSW) were the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the U.S. MSW landfills accounted for nearly 15% of emissions in 2021.
To do help reduce those numbers, Wayne State University launched its Compost Pilot Program. As a part of the program, students who are referred to as compost warriors, have been collecting food waste from nearby restaurants and campus cafeterias for the purpose of composting for the last three years.
"We pick up from them three days a week and in the three years we’ve had that program running, we’ve collected around 30,000 pounds of food waste," said Steele who participates in the program.
The university works directly with urban farmers like Covington to deliver the food scraps weekly.
"In the state of the climate now, there’s a lot of climate doom-ism and fear around climate change. So, if you think about it the smallest little efforts you can make in your daily life just make you feel a little bit better," said Steele.
Covington says people who want to start small scale composting should consider beginning with a tumbler.
"What I would advise is to get a tumbler, use your regular kitchen scraps, put it in a tumbler, add some grass clippings, add some leaves or some straw, some woods chips and some mulch," said Covington.
