Thank you for volunteering
with Compost NOW!

Our volunteers are vital to Compost NOW's mission to reduce community food waste. With the help of volunteers, we have been able to divert over 400,000 pounds of food scraps from landfills and donate them to local farms who turn them into nutrient rich compost or use them to feed their farm animals.

While volunteering, you may get asked a few questions and you may not have all the answers. We’ve compiled a list of potential questions with answers you can use to help better educate our community. If you receive a question while volunteering that you do not know the answer to, please reach out to us so we can help for next time and add it to the list for others.

FAQS

(Q) Why do my food scraps have to be frozen?
(A) Food scraps being frozen helps avoid smells that attract flies, roaches, and rodents. Sometimes our bins sit full of food waste for a day or two and we don’t want to invite unwanted guests to our partner’s businesses, gardens, and parks. Freezing your scraps also breaks down the cell membrane, speeding up the decomposition process meaning an easier job for the farms we donate scraps to. It’s a win-win-win for everyone!

(Q) Why do I have to empty out my scraps if I bring it in a compostable bag?
(A) Dumping out scraps allows volunteers to see the contents inside, ensuring there isn’t any meat, bones, dairy, rubber bands, or twist ties. We also ask that participants tear up their paper bags a few times to help them break down faster. Bio-plastic compostable bags that people purchase produce in from Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and other places are great but they break down slower than the food inside so the scraps begin to rot. They don’t have to rip up the bio-plastic bags, they just need to toss them in after emptying.

(Q) What do you do with all these food scraps?
(A) Food scraps from City Park are composted at Schmelly’s Dirt Farm or used at Edible Schoolyard schools for educational purposes. The Green Project and ABC Garden scraps are picked up and composted at Sugar Roots Farm and sometimes fed to their animals! Paradigm Gardens keeps the scraps collected and uses them to feed their goats and chickens or composts them to be used in their gardens.

(Q) How can I get compost from Compost NOW for my garden?
(A) Because Compost NOW doesn’t do any of the actual composting, we do not have control over how the compost is used. Sometimes our partner farms and gardens have excess compost and offer it to the community. It’s best to follow their social media pages to keep an eye on that information. Compost NOW does offer a small amount of free compost once a year to participants during International Compost Awareness Week in May.

(Q) Why are you no longer collection at the libraries?
(A) We had over three successful years partnering with the New Orleans Public Library, under the leadership of former Director Charles Brown and Acting Interim Director Jessica Styons. Compost NOW kept our food waste collections going while NOPL was closed during the first months of the pandemic, primarily by adapting a direct-to-farm drop off model. In those intervening months, and since, we have expanded to additional sites and new partners who share our commitment to waste reduction and environmental stewardship.

VOLUNTEER INSTRUCTIONS

Please select your volunteer site below for pictures and information pertaining specifically to that location. It’s also helpful to download these instructions directly to your phone just in case you have bad signal at a site and need to access them.

If you are able and have access to a printer, feel free to print a couple sheets of the Compost NOW flyer at the bottom as well.