About two months ago, I was composing my list of resolutions for the coming year — forty-three of them in all, thanks to the goal-setting-slash-social-networking site 43Things. I tried to think up things I'd been meaning to do but never seemed to get around to, and somewhere in the mid-20s of my list I added the following: compost my garbage.

For those of you who didn't know already, I live in Manhattan. No yard for a compost bin; no car to tote stuff away to a municipal site. Composting my garbage wasn't going to be easy — or so I thought.

Did you know: in 2002, 180,000 tons of food went into landfills — in the Portland metro area alone?

Nationwide, 48 million tons of food produced for human consumption is thrown out as waste. To put it into perspective, those 48 million tons we just threw out equals 27% of all the food produced.

Now, granted, a lot of that waste comes from grocery stores and restaurants, but if we're only looking at what comes from our own fridge, Americans throw away an average of 163 pounds of food per person every year.

Source: USDA, “Estimating and Addressing America’s Food Losses”

A couple years ago, I had read about vermicomposting: indoor composting using a small bin of worms that eat organic waste and turn it into worm "castings" (i.e. worm poop). So, worms — pooping worms — in my house. On purpose. Yeah, that's not gonna work for me.

So, I needed to look elsewhere if I was going to stick to this resolution.

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After Googling some variations on "NYC compost," I struck upon the Composting Green Map of Manhattan from Green Apple Map, and found there are three drop-off locations for organic waste in Manhattan.

There are also almost two hundred community gardens in Manhattan, many of which allow members to drop off their compostable materials for the garden. But seeing as I'm not really the joining-in type, I figured I'd go with the drop-off site at the Union Square Greenmarket instead.

First though, I needed something to bring them. I started leaving that (emptied) Fluff container out on the counter, to hold the scraps as I prepared food. In the first week or so, I'd get so distracted by making dinner, only a small portion of the food scraps would actually end up in the container and not in the trash. And once my countertop container filled up, I emptied it into a shopping bag in the freezer — and kept doing so until I had two big bags worth of scraps.

I admit, I let the scraps really pile up at first because, well, I was a little afraid of the Lower East Side Ecology Center's bins. Not the bins themselves, but the LESEC volunteers sitting behind the table at the Greenmarket. They always look so dour and unapproachable. They definitely didn't look as though they'd take a shine to dumb questions.

So, what did I do instead? I cased the bins. I casually walked past them four or five times — until I saw an elderly woman wheel her walker over and toss a bag into a bin. I stopped short of looking in the bag she put in, but I was pretty sure that was all there was to do. Just dump and go. No questions, no conversation.

And that's what I've been doing ever since — and I have to say, it totally thrills me to know my food scraps will be turned into something that will make new plants grow.

You know what? Next time I go, I'm gonna hold the bag aloft and start singing "Circle of Life." Let's see what those sour-faced volunteers think of that.

Ready to try composting?

List of what can be composted (includes some NYC-specific info):
http://greenmap.org/images/Composting_Green_Map2.pdf

Regional and state composting programs: http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/composting/live.htm

The science of composting:
http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/compost/process.html

Compost bins for small spaces:
http://www.yougrowgirl.com/garden/urbancomposting.php

Vermicomposting:
http://www.worms.com (Seriously.)

As always, for more random cultural references from me, visit my blog at http://gezellig-girl.com.