BALTIMORE — Every day is Earth Day at Baltimore nonprofit 4MyCiTy.
Barbara Tunstall has been going to Baltimore nonprofit 4MyCity since 2020, after she was hurt in a car accident.
VIDEO: Baltimore nonprofit commits to being green
"Through that entire process I've depended on churches, I've depended on friends, I've depended on family, and there have been times when none of those were available. To have this resource be here has saved my life," Tunstall said.
The nonprofit focuses on environmental sustainability with the use of two main practices: giving away free food that otherwise would've been thrown away and composting.
Barbara is one of the 8,000 people who participate in 4MyCiTy's composting program.
"If I don't necessarily get to everything, which sometimes with me, I've got like my stomach gets upset with the health issues and things, so I can put that in the composting bag and feel like I'm not wasting anything. Once you get past a certain age, people think you no longer have anything to contribute. So this is my recognition, my self-validation that I still got things to contribute."
4MyCiTy's founder, Christopher Dipnarine, tells me the star of their composting system is a large composting machine.
"Based on our research, this is largest one in the United States that's able to turn food waste into usable soil within a 24-hour cycle," he said.
"This machine can compost about 6,000 pounds a day; we have an outside machine that can compost up to 4,000 pounds a day, and we have a compost truck that can transport to one of our off site facilities - 2,000 pounds a day."
Participants put about 8 to 10 pounds of food waste and compostable service ware in these bags.
Then after it goes through the composting machine, it gets shipped out.
"We're giving it to farms currently until we continue with the testing, and we're seeing that we're meeting good standard compost testing, so once we get past this phase of testing, then we'll start just giving it out to families. When you think about what we're doing here is we're closing the entire loop of what food waste is and mitigating all the harmful effects food waste would have on our environment."
He said he expects to start being able to give compost to individual families by June.
