Compost Cycles
Compost is not soil but a soil amendment, which means that you add compost to soil in order to reintroduce nutrients to those microbiomes. Beyond its ability to foster healthy plant growth or green spaces in urban environments, healthy soil can also sequester carbon and mitigate flooding events. Therefore, incorporation of compost within soil can help reverse some effects of climate change that we currently face today.
In this episode, “Compost Cycles,” Renée Crowley (Deputy Director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center) tells a story about a local compost program in New York City. Crowley discusses how the creation, collection, processing, and reuse and integration of food-waste is a cyclical process and sustainable application of our food resources.
All proceeds from this episode will be donated to the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a community-based organization that offers e-waste and composting services, environmental stewardship opportunities, and educational programming to all New Yorkers.
Further Resources
NYC's Master Composter Certificate Course
Food Scrap drop-off sites across NYC
Institute for Local Self Reliance's Community Composting Resources
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[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]
Listen.
Listen to my voice.
To spoken words and ambient sounds.
[Volunteer workers apply compost to a garden bed. The bag of compost rustles. Community garden visitors chat softly nearby. Birds chirp. Truck reverses with a “beep, beep, beep!”]
Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.
[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]
Welcome to The Sonocene—
[The voice of “Compost Cycles” episode storyteller, Renée Crowley, replies.]
ecological stories told through sound.
[A child hums a melody. The ambient drone of traffic sounds resounds across a public plaza. Somewhere closeby, a police vehicle triggers a single siren warning. Closer, and within your foreground, someone rustles a bag of food scraps and empties them into a large plastic bin.]
[1:00] We're getting people to drop off their food scraps at a farmer's market. We're able to follow those food scraps to a compass facility where finished material is generated. And then that finished compost ends up back on a farm or back in a garden where vegetables can be grown. And you can eat those vegetables again and cook them up. And then you can empty those leftover scraps or leftover food that you didn't quite get to. It ends up back in a compost pile. And it's this cycle of regeneration of our food resources. It's definitely a circular process.
[People continue to deposit food scraps. The soundscape of Union Square Market remains in your foreground.]
[1:41] Today's storyteller is...
My name is Renée Crowley. I'm the deputy director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
[Plastic bags rustle. A small container “taps” against a larger container. And a paper bag is ripped (in unison with the storyteller’s description.]
[2:02] Plastic bag rustling. Some paper bags kind of being like smushed and torn, which people do a lot of times when they bring their scraps in a paper bag and they empty the contents and then they tear the paper bag to be composted as well. All the different collection vessels being like rustled, torn, and even some sounded like they were like being banged onto the the outer rim of our collection container.
[The market soundscape continues. Someone violently shakes a plastic bag empty.]
[2:43] People come out for this weekly ritual of dropping off their food scraps with us. At these drop off sites, there can be from like 1 to 15 of these green, bright green plastic containers. They're about 64 gallons in size, and when they're full can end up weighing up to about like almost like 250, 300 pounds.
[The wheels of large plastic containers rhythmically “clip-clop” against concrete pavers.]
[3:12] At the end of this kind of drop off period is when our staff come with one of our trucks.
[A bay door is cast open on the back of a box truck. A mechanic lift is engaged.]
[3:36] And takes the now full containers and puts them into the back of our truck, which is now destined to a compost facility.
[A truck engine revs to life. It idles momentarily and then slowly drives away. The truck and market sounds are replaced by the calm “hum” of the highway. The acoustics of the space situate your listening from within the truck itself. Soon the truck passes over a bridge with consistent “da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunks.”]
[4:09] Right now we are bringing all of our food scraps to the Staten Island Compost Facility. Hear the wheels of the vehicle hitting different like pavement structures? And I'm pretty sure it's the BQE where it goes like, "da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk."
[A turn signal begins— “click-click-click-click.” The engine shifts gears as the truck accelerates after a turn. The truck slows to a stop. The E-brake is engaged. A window rolls down. A seatbelt detaches. And the truck door swings open. An alarm begins, “beep beep beep,” confirming the open door. The door is shut.]
[4:43] When the truck arrived at the Staten Island Compost Facility. You can kind of hear all these other like beeps of vehicles or other equipment happening in the background. And so you get like a vibe that there is kind of other activities happening (more mechanical activities happening).
[The driver returns to the vehicle. The truck’s driver-side door is opened and closed. And the driver starts the engine. These sounds fade away, replaced by the ambient resonance of a large, outdoor facility. Bins are pulled out of the back of the truck within this space, echoing across concrete walls and a tall ceiling. Bolts “rattle” and lids “slam” as the bins are moved and prepared to empty.]
[5:08] The contents of the bins are emptied. They are then formed into a compost pile. Those food scraps are typically mixed with another material, which is usually woodchips or wood shavings, some kind of like carbon rich woody material.
[The bins are loaded onto a mechanic lift—“THUD!” And the machine whines loudly as it upends the bin. The food scraps, from within the bin, lazily fall into a pile. Loose pieces roll downward until they come to a final stop.]
[5:35] Over the course of 3 to 6 months, the compost piles are turned using large scale equipment.
[The “hum” of a machine drones on. Bits of food scraps and woodchips “click” against the metal grates of the machine.]
They're kind of managed for their moisture levels and their oxygen levels. At the end of that 3 to 6 months period, all of those food scraps are decomposed and you're left with finished compost.
[The machine fades to silence. Crossfade to chirping birds and children playing. Light traffic can be heard in the distance. This is the soundscape of Tompkins Square Park. A Lower East Side Ecology Center staff member addresses a small group of volunteer workers: “It's super hard to like, dig in there. But we just want to make sure that you can create a little bit of forest space at the top, like, inch of the soil. Because as you can see, it's delivered there…”]
[6:09] Compost is technically the finished product after organic materials have gone through a decomposition process.
[The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park continues in the background. But the sounds of churning dirt, raking leaves, and working bags of compost enter your foreground. The volunteer workers begin working in the community garden area. They are clearing and preparing different garden beds in order to apply compost to the soil.]
It looks a lot like soil. It's really dark in color. A lot of people call it Black Gold because it's this like nutrient rich, decomposed organic matter. Finished compost isn't soil, it's a soil amendment. And so it's something that you're adding to an existing soil to add life to it, to add nutrients back to an existing soil.
[The sounds of public gardening crossfade to unnatural “clicking” sounds. There is almost no ambience to these sounds—as if muffled in some way. A contact microphones captures the sounds of hands working compost into soil. A pitch filter has been added to this recording in an attempt to imagine what organic life moving and thriving in soil might sound like. The underground soundscape continues to “click” in quirky patterns.]
[6:50] The process of decomposition is like magic to me. Alright, so what's actually happening is you've got food scraps, which are this like nitrogen rich ingredient. You want to mix those nitrogen rich ingredients with a carbon rich ingredient, such as woodchips or leaves or wood shavings. But you're basically creating an ecosystem for bacteria, fungi, worms, all these other decomposers to thrive. You're creating a habitat for all these decomposing organisms to kind of flock to the pile and do the magic that they're kind of put on this earth to do.
[The underground soundscape fades to silence, as the soundscape of public gardening returns. A volunteer worker rakes a pile of leaves, and then scrapes a top layer of soil.]
[7:47] So us as humans, when we're creating these compost piles, like sure, we're doing the work of mixing the ingredients, turning the piles.
[The raking and scraping swell in volume, as the hum of a compost processing machine joins the crescendo. Then, there is a hard cut back to the underground soundscape as the storyteller says, “but what’s happening at a microscopic scale…”]
But what's happening at a microscopic scale is like much bigger than what we're able to do with our two hands.
[The quirky “clicking” of subterranean life continues.]
[8:08] And what's happening in the soil that helps create a rich environment for plants to grow is that there's this like reciprocal relationship between the roots that are growing underground to the bacteria that are eating other ingredients in the soil, excreting and creating nutrients for the roots of the plants to take up. It's this whole underground ecosystem of further resource recycling and the plants taking those resources and taking them up into the plant to grow zucchinis, to grow your tomatoes. And so adding compost to your soil is kind of creating that ecosystem of life to further support healthy plants and growing food.
[The underground soundscape fades to silence, as another community garden soundscape enters your foreground. A machine churns compost and soil. People casually chat. Birds chirp. Construction equipment sounds nearby. Someone rakes a garden bed, pulls weeds, and picks up trash.]
[9:26] Recognizing from a larger systematic point of view when food scraps or organic materials end up in a landfill and they're trapped underground and they start to decompose underground, they generate methane, and methane is a super potent greenhouse gas. So step one, we shouldn't be putting our organic waste into a landfill. Composting uses an aerobic process where you're able to take those food scraps and organic waste, make finished compost, apply that finished compost onto land or to soil and make healthy soil. And what healthy soils are really good at is sequestering or kind of capturing or holding on to that excess carbon that is in our atmosphere. Healthy soils are able to reverse the effects of climate change.
[The garden soundscape cross fades to the sounds of Coney Island Beach. Seagulls call. Ocean waves crash against the land.]
[10:29] Healthy soils with compost applied to them act more like a sponge and they're able to hold stormwater. This is really important when it comes to flooding events that we experience. Soils that aren't healthy, water just runs over the surface of them and ends up in our sewers and ends up polluting our rivers and our oceans. But if a soil can absorb that water, it's better able to prevent runoff issues and overburden sewer systems, which is a big problem in New York City.
[11:10] Why aren't all food scraps being composted and helping us limit and minimize the impacts of climate change that we're having right now?
[The sounds of Coney Island Beach fade to silence, as the sound of (yet another) community garden enters your foreground. A volunteer worker rips the top of a bag filled with compost. They begin to dump out small portions of compost in order to integrate it within the soil.]
[11:35] I think at the root of community-based composting is an interest and a passion and a commitment to stewardship.
[The volunteer continues to dump and integrate compost. There is also the sound of a cart rolled over concrete pavers, as more bags of compost are delivered to a garden bed.]
[11:53] The application of compost is almost this final act of adding life back into that soil that has been neglected, whether it was through the industrial history of New York City. Of polluting our soils with trash and with chemicals. Or just the neglect of not thinking of our city as like a green space and just kind of pigeonholing it into this like urban concrete jungle. There is so much life in the city. These are our natural resources. These are these, like precious pockets of greenspace we have in the city. Let's care for them. Let's let's give them some TLC.
[The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park returns to your foreground. A Lower East Side Ecology Center staff member addresses a small group of volunteer workers: “And in terms of our stewardship, our parklands, our street tress can really provide a ton of benefits to us. So can our soil. So, for me…” Digging in dirt. Pouring finished compost. Using tools. The sounds of volunteer garden and compost workers takes over your listening experience.]
[12:55] We work a lot with community gardens who are composting and host volunteer work days where we come together at these community gardens. We might do some compost application events. We will go to a block in the Lower East Side and clean up the tree pits and then apply finished compost to this tree pit. So we're adding nutrients back to the soil that does exist on our urban concrete sidewalks.
[The sounds of gardening crossfade to friends laughing and chatting together.]
[13:24] So we do these cooking with food scraps, demonstrations.
[People fill a small room. One says, “Is that a Jalapeño?” Another person says, “It turned over.” The dialoge continues, “Oh my goodness, you've got a whole bag of herbs!” Laughing continues.]
[13:37] Carrot tops, they're onion skins, other materials that might be trickier or hard to use in your cooking, but definitely have ways to be reused.
[Vegetables sizzle in a hot pan. A cook explains, “so we're just going to, you know, very basic start to any recipe. You've all probably done this many times.” A wooden spoon thuds against the food in the pan. The cook is stirring the soon-to-be meal. She continues, “I think our stock is done, too. So I'm going to turn it off and I'll bring it over and give you all a…” Cooking sounds begin to lower in volume. As garden sounds enter your listening experience. All the sounds from the episode begin to blend and overlap.]
[14:15] I like to think of our work as kind of creating these like human networks of people all coming together around this, like shared passion for composting and waste reduction and community care. The work that we do, much like the work of our fungal networks are doing in our compost pile, is creating a process of reciprocity. Where, we're taking people's food scraps, we are transforming those food scraps into a finished compost material, that then is coming back to those communities and rebuilding the soils in the communities that are generating these food scraps. And so there's like a human, biological, fungal, bacterial, like we're all kind of connected in this process of composting in New York City.
[All the sounds from the episode continue to blend and overlap with growing intensity. Machines hum. Lifts strain. Food sizzles. Microbial organisms “click.” Leaves shuffle. People chat. And the compost cycle resounds across the city.]
[15:22] And I think that's just really beautiful as a way to break down these barriers of connecting with our natural world and our microbial world.
[All the sounds swell in volume and hard cut to the original soundscape of Union Square Park. People deposit their food scraps. Paper bags rip. Plastic bags shake. And small containers are struck against the compost drop-off bins.]
[15:41] It's definitely a circular process.
[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]
[16:14] If you ever have a chance to turn a compost pile or get your hands in the process of food waste, decomposition, go for it. It is like pure magic seeing food scraps be transformed into something totally else.
[16:30] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to the Lower East Side Ecology Center. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.
