Dear Neighbors,

We'd like to invite you to join us in a simple effort to shrink our neighborhood's environmental footprint: composting.

Like many of you, we've made small changes over the years — reusable bags, glass milk bottles, chemical-free lawns, less waste overall. But we were stunned to learn that 40% of what goes into landfills is actually compostable. We'd always assumed food scraps just broke down naturally out there. They don't. Buried in a landfill, organic waste decomposes without oxygen and produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas — instead of returning nutrients to the soil. That one fact is what got us started composting at home. We already separate recyclables and returnables — what's one more bin?

The part we couldn't get past was the backyard compost pile itself. Bins, tumblers, pest control, turning schedules — it felt like a project, not a habit. And honestly, we're not avid gardeners, so we didn't need bags of finished compost either. Then we discovered a local commercial composting site where we could just drop off our scraps and let the professionals handle the rest.

That's how CNY Compost got started. We were already making the trip — so why not carry our neighbors' scraps along with our own?

The service is as simple as the idea: fill your provided 4-gallon bucket, set it out on your porch on pickup day, and we swap it for a clean one. Fill it, swap it, repeat.

We'd love to have you join us in keeping Central New York's landscape as beautiful as it deserves to be.