On a shady street in Baltimore, Maryland, a white electric van pulled up to the curb. A sign on the back read “Caution: youth working.” Sylvia Laciny, 21, hopped out, found a green bucket waiting for her on the sidewalk and popped off the lid to find a ripe-smelling mix of eggshells, tomatoes, zucchini and what looked like tulip bulbs.

“Sometimes they’re nasty,” she said. “But we haven’t gotten to the bad ones yet.” 

Laciny is a youth composter with the Baltimore Compost Collective, which picks up food scraps and yard trimmings from customers around the city and composts them for use in local gardens. Laciny dumped her small bin into a larger one in the back of the van, hopped into the seat next to driver Marvin Hayes, and it was on to the next stop.

“We collect up to 1,500 to 2,000 pounds on a weekly basis,” said Hayes, the collective’s founder and executive director. “Starving the incinerator and keeping it away from the landfills.”

When buried in landfills, Hayes said, food waste produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. If it’s burned, it produces planet-heating carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. But if that material is left to decompose in a compost pile or bin, exposed to oxygen, microorganisms break it down into a nutrient-rich fertilizer.

“It’s a soil enhancer, so it helps sequester carbon and put carbon back into the soil,” Hayes said. 

To divert food waste from landfills and incinerators, more cities are offering curbside compost collection alongside their trash and recycling pickup. A 2023 study from BioCycle counted more than 250 municipal curbside collection programs around the country. In some cities — including Seattle, San Francisco, and parts of New York — separating food waste is mandatory. 

Hayes would like to see Baltimore offer a municipal collection service. He started the compost collective almost a decade ago to train young people in job and leadership skills, and to prevent waste from ending up at a 30-year-old incinerator in Southwest Baltimore, where most of the city’s trash is burned. 

The incinerator emits not just greenhouse gasses, but pollutants that can cause asthma and other health problems, said Shashawnda Campbell, environmental justice coordinator with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, a group that’s been fighting the incinerator for years. Toxic ash from the incinerator is buried in a nearby landfill. 

“I grew up in that community where I’ve seen the struggles of health impacts happening because of the way that we’re dealing with our waste,” she said. “It’s not fair and it’s not right that it is disproportionately affecting communities of color.”

Campbell’s group recently filed a civil rights complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency, asking the agency to investigate the incinerator’s health effects on the surrounding neighborhoods and require the city to spell out a plan for diverting more waste. The group estimates about 40% of what’s burned at the incinerator could be composted.

“We’re saying we want compost, we want curbside,” said Campbell. “We want to have that option, and we need the city to get on board.”

The city says it is on board, at least with the idea.

“Achieving curbside composting for us is an ultimate goal for Baltimore City,” said Richard Luna, deputy director of Baltimore’s Department of Public Works. “I would say the biggest challenge right now is just a dedicated funding source.”

The city recently received a $4 million grant from the EPA to build a medium-sized composting facility, which he said will take about three years to build, but the agency would also need a new fleet of specialized trucks to collect food waste.

“About 60% of the curbside collections that we do are in alleyways, but our alleys here in Baltimore are so very narrow, and so we actually have to order specialized custom trucks just to fit through the alleyways,” he said. 

A 2020 waste reduction plan estimated the cost of starting a curbside organics collection, including new trucks and dedicated bins, at $30.8 million. 

Right now, Luna said, the agency is focused on outreach, encouraging people to drop off their food scraps at collection centers or use private services like the Baltimore Compost Collective, where Marvin Hayes is doing his best to spread what he calls “compost fever,” sometimes through his spoken-word poetry.

“We don’t have to burn or bury our organic material; it’s time to compost and adjust,” he said. “I won’t stop until I see the incinerator raised and crumbled in the dust. Let’s take a stand for compost to make Baltimore a better place for all of us.”

Composting in Baltimore has come a long way, Hayes said, since he started with just five customers, in an upscale area where suspicious neighbors would report him for “stealing” something — they weren’t sure what — out of buckets. Today, the collective has 400 customers and counting.