The Garden Of Resilience will host a Food Scraps Drop Off Site (FDSO) in Springfield Gardens in the new year. Starting January 23, 2021, the community garden will serve as a vegetarian food scraps site. Every Saturday from 9AM-1PM the garden will be open to accept food scraps from the community.The community garden will accept the following scraps: fruits, vegetables, yard waste, dried flowers, leaves, and grains. The food scraps will be collected by The Queens Botanical Garden (QBG) and converted into compost that will nourish the community garden.
In the Spring of 2020, the DSNY cut it’s organic recycling program amidst the fiscal crisis due to COVID-19. According to a City Limits article:
Advocates were able to save some aspects of organics recycling from budget cuts this year, preserving $7 million for community composting. However, two of the seven community composting sites—Big Reuse’s location under the Ed Koch Bridge and the Lower East Side Ecology Center—are being shut down, the former because its temporary lease with the Parks Department is up and the latter because a resiliency project is going to tear up the park where it’s located.
The Queens Botanical Garden is serving as one of the partners of the The New York Compost Project. QBG provides tools and bins for community members to host a public food scrap drop off site. In addition, QBG will haul food scraps from The Garden Of Resilience and provide assistance in learning about the art of composting.
Why is composting important to Southeast Queens? By reducing the tons of solid waste sent to landfills in our communities, we can directly impact the air pollution in and Black and Latinx communities. According to Cafeteria Culture, a grassroots organization composting:reduces our garbage to landfills and incinerators, builds soil, creates local green jobs, sequesters carbon. All of the food scraps provided by community residents has the potential to directly impact the issue of climate change and food insecurity. All food grown in the Garden Of Resilience will be given away for free to the community .
