Waste Not Want Not

Good Earth’s innovative compost program reduces food waste

Every year in the United States, a staggering 108 billion pounds of food goes to waste. Mark Squire, co-owner and manager of Good Earth Natural Foods, is working hard to change this. “Fifteen years ago we started a compost program before the county had any kind of meaningful diversion program,” he says. Good Earth formed a partnership with the local organic farm Tara Firma in Petaluma to divert all compostables from the Mill Valley and Fairfax stores that might have been directed towards the landfill and instead turn it into compost. This innovative program allows Good Earth to reduce their food waste footprint by thousands of pounds each year. Mark adds, “We produce about 500 yards of compost per year,” he adds, “so I guess over that time we’ve made a small mountain—most of which has gone to heal our soils.”

The compost journey starts in Good Earth’s Kitchen and Produce departments, where food scraps are sorted into compostables and animal food. The food waste is then taken to Tara Firma, where some is fed to chickens and the rest is used to make a robust fungal compost. After a year, the compost is spread on the farm’s fields to create soil teeming with micro-flora.

Many of the crops grown with this organic compost, such as winter squash and garlic, come back to Good Earth stores for sale or are used in their kitchen.

Why is food waste in the landfill so terrible? Mark explains, “Food waste is one of the big-gest contributors to global warming. This occurs because vegetable matter that decomposes in-appropriately (anaerobic, as happens in a landfill) creates a great deal of methane and methane is a huge global warming gas.” Additionally, wasted food also wastes the valuable resources needed to produce it, including land, water, energy, labor and inputs.

“A lot of the research that our program is based on was done by our friend John Wick at the Marin Carbon Project,” says Mark. Turns out that applying compost to agricultural land sequesters huge amounts of carbon, which prevents carbon dioxide—the most commonly produced greenhouse gas—from being released into the atmosphere. “I believe every grocery store should adopt a farm.”