Food Composting in Chicago

By composting your food waste, you can greatly cut down on your garbage output and greatly reduce the smelliness in your garbage. It also reduces greenhouse emissions and provides a cheap way to enrich soil for growing plants or more food. Where I grew up, we always had a compost pile in our yard. But in a city, we don’t usually have that space. But we can still compost.

Food Scrap Drop-Off is free and available to everyone, and if you’re close to one of the locations, you should use that. You don’t get any dirt back, but it goes into all the community gardens and planters throughout the city that you know and love.

Otherwise, I’ve used WasteNot Compost for years and their service is fantastic. You pay a monthly fee and they bring you a clean bucket every couple weeks (choose your own interval), taking away your full/old bucket. Then, every few months, you get back a free bag of clean composted dirt to use in your garden, driven to your door in their electric vans. Use this referral link for a discount.

Honestly, I would use the city-provided drop-off if one was closer to me, and I hope they expand locations.