A composting success story

The 2025 Farmers Market season closed on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, marking over 30 years as a key element in what makes Warwick the appealing community it is. Sustainable Warwick’s Food Scraps to Compost program (FStC) was added to the Market’s weekly line-up of services in mid-summer 2022 and in the short 3 three-and-a-half seasons since , the program has grown dramatically, had significant positive impacts on the environment, and forged a win-win collaboration with the Farmers Market.

When the program kicked off, the initial take was very modest — maybe two 5-gallon buckets a week. It didn’t take long, however, for the idea to take hold among Warwick residents and the results speak for themselves: By the end of the 2025 season, annual intake from the weekly Farmers Market was around 220 27-gallon bins, approximately 17,000 pounds of organic matter kept out of weekly garbage pick-up. Thanks to all who participate, this is a shift that results in many hundreds of pounds of methane gas not being released into the atmosphere this year.

Over and above the Farmers Market, there are other avenues of growth. The FStC program has expanded this year, as Jason and Morganne Schuler of Goodmaker Acres now accept community compost on a year-round basis, accounting for more than 1,400 pounds so far this year — a number that is expected to increase dramatically now that the Farmers Market has closed.

This community “success story” couldn’t have happened without the collaboration of the Village of Warwick Department of Public Works. It is DPW that picks up the filled bins each week and then delivers them to Dan Doyle’s Oasis at Warwick, another collaborator in the program, where his team maintains our compost piles until the finished product is ready to be distributed to sites like the Warwick Community Garden.

The future of the FStC program looks even brighter as Town of Warwick Supervisor Jesse Dwyer and the Climate Smart Community Task Force are exploring options (and grant funding) for a municipal composting program.

With the Town and Village working together and key individuals collaborating, Sustainable Warwick’s work to lay a community foundation for composting promises dramatic growth with important benefits for the Warwick community.