Photo: Stock Exchange/Potato Peels

Composting is an obvious and inexpensive technique that would improve our soil and food quality while keeping rotting food out of landfills. Constructing vegetable bins on parking lots or vacant lots and using the rich compost as organic soil would be a win for everyone.

Putting a compost bin on every corner and educating people about what goes go in, and what must be kept out (meat, dairy and oil), would dramatically reduce the volume, and improve the quality, of our landfills. Wouldn’t keeping landfills free of rotting food be a huge improvement?

Landlords could get a tax break for allowing vegetable beds to be placed on empty lots. Take what you need and leave some for others. If a crop is at its end, take it all as a tacit agreement would be important for this to work well. This is merely a shift, maybe a radical one, but not rocket science. If the owner has an opportunity to sell the property, vegetable beds cannot stand in the way. In the meantime, with twenty-one percent of households with children—yes, twenty-one percent!—hungry and malnourished, what is the logic in lots sitting vacant?

For more info: New Community Vision is working to spawn a movement to think about our social and housing paradigms in a new context. Community gatherings to address our universal challenges are the fertile soil in which durable solutions take root. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

Tags: compost, hunger, organic food, urban gardening