Today’s MI Environment story, published as part of Stop Food Waste Day, was previously published by NextCycle Michigan, an initiative of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).

Collection That Makes Compost Possible

On a fall week in Ferndale, Mich., the city’s food-scrap drop-off bins only get into real trouble when pumpkins show up in the wrong place. The lids cannot close, squirrels get in, and suddenly the system looks like the exact mess people worry composting will become.

But that little seasonal chaos also points to the real make-or-break issue for many food-scrap diversion programs: not whether people care or whether compost can be made, but collection. Collection is the starting point that shapes everything else: convenience, participation, cleanliness, and whether food scraps reliably make it to compost. In fact, most Michigan households still do not have a simple, built-in way to manage food scraps. In 2023, only 10–23% of residents report having access to residential food-waste collection.

Across the state, very different efforts by three NextCycle Michigan teams are chasing the same goal: keeping food scraps out of the landfill by building reliable collection paths. These three different solutions include:

• 24/7 drop-off in a dense inner-ring suburb,
• Curbside weekly pickup designed to feel as normal as taking out the trash, and
• A hub-style model in Detroit, where haulers and businesses bring material to a collection site.

Each model brings a different approach to effectively collect food scraps and help ensure Michiganders can do the right thing. These are solutions we can learn from and scale in regions across the state to solve shared challenges in collection and recovery of food scraps.

Ferndale’s 24/7 Food Scrap Drop-Off: Design Around Real Life