Nurture BK Compost, a neighborhood food scrap collection and sustainability group, is raising funds to purchase new equipment to expand and sustain long-term operations in Flatbush.
Leader
Sydney Pereira
Location
Parkside and Ocean Avenues Brooklyn, NY 11226
Early in summer 2020, New York City had just begun to emerge from the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak. The crisis prompted composting programs to be cut from the city budget. In the beginning stage of these crises, Nurture BK Compost was born to fill the gap. Neighbors showed up each Sunday at the corner of Parkside & Ocean Avenues in Flatbush, Brooklyn to collect food scraps from neighbors for composting.
Since then, the operation has grown to include volunteers who schlep equipment back and forth from a storage location in the alleyway of a generous neighbor’s building, conduct quality control of scraps by removing stickers and other contaminants, chop up the scraps to collect as much as possible in toter bins and begin the decomposition process, and collect food and other items for various recycling initiatives. We collect around 2,000 pounds of food scraps per week, sometimes nearly 3,000 pounds, which the non-profit Big Reuse processes into finished compost.
In addition to collecting food scraps, we host a free food table, in which we collect food to distribute to neighborhood community fridges. We lead recycling initiatives to collect myriad items in order to keep them out of the waste stream. We are raising funds to sustain and expand Nurture BK Compost's operations in the long term.
June/July 2022 - purchase equipment and supplies to replace worn down items and make collection day run smoothly
August 2022 - use funds for additional educational opportunities/workshops/zero waste initiatives
October 2022 - replace equipment that has worn down over the summer & purchase weather gear/PPE for volunteers to prep for winter
While some neighborhoods have had curbside composting reinstated since funding was reduced during the pandemic, our community relies on food scrap drop-off sites like ours. Our food scrap collection reduces the amount of waste headed to incinerators or landfills, which reduces greenhouse gasses that cause climate change. Food scraps make up a large percentage of residential trash and can exacerbate cockroaches and rodents that can harm residents’ respiratory health and take up limited pedestrian space on sidewalks. But our efforts now extend beyond food scraps and compost alone.
Nurture BK Compost started as an emergency measure to keep composting services afloat in Flatbush in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now we collect food and food scraps, host zero waste workshops, collaborate with mutual aid groups to use our site as a collection site, collect other hard-to-recycle initiatives, hold companies accountable for greenwashing tactics, and educate neighbors about waste reduction and composting. We are a community of neighbors dedicated to waste reduction, sustainability, and grassroots community connections. We hope these funds will help us sustain and grow.