Composting
Market on Market
Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
The Ahimsa Project supported a community composting program at Market on Market (MOM), a seasonal farmers market in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania connecting thousands of area residents with local farmers and food producers.
The program gave market visitors a simple way to keep household food scraps out of the waste stream. Participants received compost bags to take home, filled them with accepted food scraps, and returned them during the following week's market.
Collected food scraps were directed to local growing projects, including the One Seed Grows children's garden program at Cleve J. Fredricksen Library and Rowan Tree Farm, a regenerative farm in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
By connecting residents, a farmers market, community organizations, and local growers, the program demonstrated how something normally treated as waste can instead become a resource for the local food system.
Project Benefits
Turning Food Waste Into a Resource
Food waste has impacts far beyond the kitchen. When organic material is discarded rather than returned to the soil, we lose valuable nutrients while contributing unnecessarily to greenhouse gas emissions.
Composting offers a simple way to interrupt that cycle.
Through the natural decomposition of organic matter, food scraps can be transformed into nutrient-rich compost that can be returned to gardens and agricultural soils. Compost can help:
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Divert food waste from the waste stream
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Return nutrients and organic matter to the soil
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Improve soil structure and health
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Increase the soil's ability to retain water
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Support the organisms and microorganisms that contribute to healthy soil
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Reduce reliance on outside soil amendments
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Support more resilient local food systems
Healthy soil is the foundation of our food system. By returning food scraps to the soil instead of treating them as waste, composting helps create a more circular relationship between people, food, and the land that feeds us.