Fighting For Scraps: What It Would Take For Chicago To Get Citywide Composting

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Minneapolis and San Fran do it. Even Oak Park’s got a program. What gives? Photos of how municipal composting works in Oak park, interviews and the prospects for change in Chicago.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When were the...
0:03.7	What school's up?
0:06.1	Who decides what the next...
0:07.8	Where's that story?
0:09.3	Why they keep the look?
0:11.2	What is this?
0:13.6	It's a curious city.
0:14.8	Where WBEZ answers your questions about Chicago, the region, and its people.
0:20.8	Hi, I'm WBEZ reporter Monica Eng, and I'm in Barb Ziamba's kitchen in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood.
0:27.8	Barb and her daughter Natalie are making breakfast.
0:30.6	They crack eggs, chopped veg, and brew coffee.
0:33.9	This makes a lot of garbage, and Natalie worries about it.
0:37.7	I'm a vegetarian, so I produce a lot of food waste, and I was putting it all into the garbage, and it was almost something that haunted me.
0:48.6	She hates sending bagged food scraps to a landfill where they'll belch out methane. A greenhouse gas that's 25 times
0:56.8	worse than carbon dioxide. But that's how it works in Chicago. There's no municipal composting
1:02.5	program. So she and her mom put the scraps in a big orange bucket. Twice a month, a guy on a bike
1:08.5	picks up the scraps and he takes them down the block, where they're made into compost for gardens or whatever.
1:14.2	Really part of his business model is zero emission.
1:17.5	He believes in all bicycling, and that's part of the reason why we love him so much.
1:23.6	Not only that, but he's a really nice guy.
1:25.7	He really is a nice guy.
1:27.2	But that's just a tiny fraction of the compostable waste Chicago homes create in that time.
	...

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