Standing on top of a mound of rotting food that could’ve ended up in a landfill, Dr. Lanette Sobel demonstrates how this organic waste is diverted to her compost facility at Fertile Earth Worm Farm.
“We are the largest commercial composter here in South Florida. We service all South Florida and we're soon to expand into Monroe County and we work with anybody that produces food scraps,” Sobel said.
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WATCH HEREThe University of Florida estimates about 36% of the trash we send to landfills or incinerators is organic waste that could be composted through programs like the one they have at the Village of Pinecrest, the first municipality in South Florida to adopt this practice through an agreement with Fertile Earth Worm Farm.
“We've collected over 90,000 pounds of compost which is the equivalent of 12 Land Rovers in just a year and a half in one location,” said Michelle Hammontree, the communications manager for the Village of Pinecrest.
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Now, that nutrient-rich compost could be used to restore the Florida Everglades through a partnership with the Miccosukee Tribe made possible by a USDA grant, as well as funding from Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado's office, the Village of Pinecrest and Fertile Earth Worm Farm.
The way the partnership with the Tribe works is the compost they generate in Pinecrest is used to nourish veggie garden beds at places like the Miccosukee’s Swampy Meadows Community Garden.
The idea is to imitate nature's zero waste cycle.
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“We’re talking about re-diverting food waste and making it into healthy soils again,” said Reverend Houston Cypress with the Miccosukee Tribe, who leads the “Love the Everglades” project.
“To me, like, we don't need another study to tell us that incinerators are bad. We don't need another study to tell us landfills are bad; Let's do something better with it,” Dr. Sobel said.
Aside from using the compost to grow veggies, in the future, the tribe could use it to revitalize areas of the Everglades affected by climate change. The Everglades are an important ecosystem for South Florida that acts like a carbon sponge removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
“You must remember over the past few hundred years, the soil quality has been depleted and gone down. A lot of it has been transformed to agriculture and even out here in the Everglades, we're seeing the impacts of prolonged flooding and things like that. So, there's been a lot of deterioration over time and whatever we can do, it's going to benefit not only the Everglades, but the people and the economies that depend on the Everglades,” Reverend Cypress said.
“This is feeding the Everglades. This is giving it its nutrients back so that it's able to thrive and by thriving it's helping the community and it's also not creating pollution,” Hammontree said.
