Since starting a composting hub at her community garden, Lissie Stewart says she has collected 25,000 pounds of food waste, diverting it from the landfill.
“As a family, we just know Sundays are composting days. So we'll come out, take out bins, do what we need to do at the garden and then come back and pick them up and put them in our composting heap.”
Compost NOW helped set up this composting hub at Galvez Garden in February of 2022. The organization received federal funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year to add more composting hubs like this one around the city.
“We were expecting to double, if not triple the number of drop off sites throughout the city, because of this grant,” said Lynne Serpe, founder of Compost NOW, which was supposed to receive about $40,000.
But in late April, just a couple days after Earth Day, she found out the USDA terminated the grant.
“My first thought was it meant that I was gonna have to lay off the person that I hired to help meet the deliverables,” she said.
The Office of Resilience and Sustainability and Sprout NOLA partnered with nonprofits and businesses, Schmelly’s Dirt Farm, REALCYCLE and Compost NOW to implement the $400,000 grant to expand composting. The grant they received, funded by the American Rescue Plan Act, was terminated as the Trump administration slashes programs it deems wasteful in an effort to cut government spending.
The money would have paid for more hubs where people can drop off their food scraps, bins for composting at home, increasing composting capacity at existing facilities as well as education and outreach.
“If we want the end part of it, where we have restaurants that are creating this beautiful Cajun and Creole cuisine that is renowned throughout the world, we need to be paying attention to every single part of the process… so we need to be thinking about production, distribution, consumption, and waste.” said Devin Wright, deputy director of producers & sustainability for Sprout NOLA.
”And I think that we have a really beautiful position here because people care so deeply about food.”
When food waste rots in landfills, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. A 2023 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report found that food waste accounts for about 60% of methane emissions in U.S. landfills. It estimated that wasted food releases as much greenhouse gas as 50 million cars annually. Composting diverts that food from the landfill and returns its nutrients to the ground, improving soil quality and reducing emissions.
“We really were approaching this grant with an equity lens and trying to expand efforts to minimize the waste that goes into our landfills, really sequester carbon in the soil and create soil for local gardens, which we have many of,” said Grace Treffinger, the urban agricultural liaison in the Office of Resilience and Sustainability.
The USDA did not answer questions about the grant and instead sent over a written response.
“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be a good steward of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. Secretary Rollins is working to reorient the department to be more effective and efficient at serving the American people, including by prioritizing farmers, ranchers, and producers,” said a USDA spokesperson.
In a letter to the City of New Orleans, the USDA explained that the grant was terminated because it “provides funding for programs that promote or take part in climate change or environmental justice initiatives.”
“It's really hard to be in South Louisiana without talking about climate change or environmental issues, period. Let alone environmental justice,” said Wright. “So, that kind of puts us between a rock and a hard place, I think for everyone that's operating an organization here, to be expected to work without talking about those issues.”
She added that under the Biden administration, they were encouraged to use those terms to apply for federal funding.
“ It's not just that when those administrations change that those expectations about how you work will change because that's reasonable… It's different when you change the rules of the game after they already were named for you,” she said.
Treffinger said the city will appeal the USDA’s decision to terminate the grant.
“ We're pursuing all avenues to be able to hopefully get this grant back online, and if not, finding other funding to be able to keep doing the work,” she said.
