Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, a young girl roaming the vibrant fields of an organic lettuce farm in Kerakekua, Hawaii, learned how to live in harmony with the land before most children learn how to tie their shoes. Nourishing the soil that gave her a regular supply of lush greenery was just a part of life. Like playing with a pile of compost on her family’s farm.
“For me, composting is a lot about the community,” Kilpatrick Cotner said. “It’s about connecting people to food and soil, learning about the process, meeting their neighbors, and dealing with this thing that many people think is a waste that can be cherished and treated and transformed into beautiful things that can be reused to grow more food.”
She currently leads the program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island.
Every day there are three bike teams in the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households and then brought to the community garden. So they sift through plastic and occasional forks, mixing a pound of nitrogen-rich food scraps directed at landfills with carbon-rich materials, such as dried leaves and wood shavings. In doing so, Kilpatrick Kotner creates a menu and habitat for microorganisms that stimulate the decomposition process, turning waste into a spongy source of soil life. Compost will then be available for use at home gardens, yards, or urban farms by people registered with subscription-based services.
New York City makes people’s compost – or pay
US Dispose of more than one-third of food supplycontributes quite a bit Global greenhouse gas emissionsmainly as a result methane This is announced that the food will be broken down in landfills. Ten years ago, the Obama administration set a national target to cut the country’s food waste in half by 2030. It was a surprise when Trump doubled its benchmark, as many observers expected the first Trump administration to ignore its targets due to an implicit climate focus.
Not only did Trump officials attend the 2018 US Food Waste Summit, but his first administration also launched the first interagency agreement to reduce food loss and waste. It included formal commitments to a 50% food waste reduction target from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
But without the federal enforcement mechanism, its ambitious goals remain out of reach. Americans waste about 300 pounds of food per person each year. Trump’s inferenceAnyway, it had more to do with protecting economic interests than climate interests.
In 2023, the EPA launched the Community Change Grants Program, a council-certified program that supports community-based organizations that address environmental justice challenges. In December, the foundation of the RI was one of nine organizations included in the $18.7 million community change grant awarded to the Rhode Island Food Policy Council. Part of the three-year fundraising stream was intended to provide nonprofits with the resources they needed to expand collection services to nearby cities, build larger compost hubs, and renovate greenhouses by earning a paycheck. It has also been possible for Kilpatrick Cotner’s team to launch a free food scrap collection pilot with the city of Providence.
Now, President Trump has not kept a secret in his second term, the fact that his administration is working to unravel climate action and justice-oriented programs across the government.
Last Thursday, after months of freezing uncertainty in Trump’s fundraising, a partner involved in the Rhode Island Food Wast Project learned that the $18 million grant had ended. The official EPA notice shared with Grist acknowledged that their projects were “no longer consistent” with federal agency funding priorities and therefore were “quickly effective.”
Zealan Hoover, former senior adviser to Michael Regan, President Joe Biden’s EPA administrator, doesn’t believe Trump is specifically targeting food waste initiatives, but rather targeting the entire Environmental Justice Program.
“From the termination that has been left, from statements made in court applications, and from the press, it is clear that the EPA is in the process of sending termination notices to all grantees in the Office of Environmental Justice.”
He pointed out that he believes the move will be “illegal” as IRA funds have been allocated by Congress.
“Like the changes to management, the EPA is considering all grant programs and awarding grants to understand that each is a proper use of taxpayer dollars and how those programs align with management priorities,” an EPA spokesperson told Grist. “Maybe the Biden Harris administration should not have forced a futile DEI program and a fundamental agenda of ‘environmental justice’ that favored the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment. “The spokesman did not respond to Grist’s request for clarification of the agency’s legal authority to cancel Congress’s approved community change grants.
Michelle Ruth, executive director of Environmental Protection Network, a national volunteer network of former EPA staff, told Grist that around 400 recipients have ended their contracts. Number of eligible grants It was first released at the end of March by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Recently submitted court documents revealed EPA is expected to end the 781 grant total.
According to Hoover, in previous administrations, it was “very rare” for the EPA to end grants. “This is a big break from the precedent of pulling rugs from under the local community,” he said.
Nessa Richman, executive director of the Rhode Island Food Policy Council, questions how the administration could end the $18 million community change grant. The lead on this project took over a year to develop and gained support from several state departments and the Navy Department. “It’s a sinking feeling,” Richman said.
The funds were set up to create 27 new local jobs, provide food scrap pickup to more than 15,000 households, build 37 food scrap drop-off sites across Rhode Island, and develop a large compost processing facility for land owned by the Naval Base. Additionally, they would have launched a local supply chain to redirect excess food from institutions such as schools and restaurants to community members who impact food instead of landfills. And it would have been a basic pickup collection model where members of the community they serve can freely access the RI pickup collection model, not only to help them fight food waste, but also to learn how to better care for the soil when growing their own food.
“It’s easy for people with a little disposable income to buy a countertop composting food scrap collector, a five-gallon bucket, or a service that picks up food waste at the door. It’s easier for people who do three jobs to spend time separating that food waste than spending time,” Richman said. “Fund losses not only slow down the decline in food waste in real ways, but also establish further disparities.”
At the end of the three years, Richman estimates that at the end of the three years the project had diverted more than 11,000 tons of food waste from landfills, which hindered the emissions of over 15,000 tons.
Hours after she read the notification of the grant end, Richman met an old colleague at a local coffee shop in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. It has been years since they met each other, and the two sat together and caught up until the store closed.
As they spoke in the parking lot for a while, Richman saw frustration as one of the coffee shop employees carried two bags of completely edible pastries and threw them into the trash can.
