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On a recent Saturday morning, Pamela McGhee and several neighbors were busy at work in a community garden on Detroit鈥檚 East Side, weighing food scraps and assessing compost piles for compliance. Items in the compost are assessed according to a 鈥測uck鈥� and 鈥測ay鈥� system. 鈥淵uck鈥� items, like animal bones and meat, which do not compost well in their system, were discarded; 鈥測ay鈥� items, including fruit peels and coffee grounds, were added to the pile. 

McGhee and her neighbors are participating in a pilot program to build zero-waste systems for Detroit. It鈥檚 something they say the city sorely needs. For decades, Detroit was home to one of the country鈥檚 largest waste incinerators. 

Detroit Renewable Power burned thousands of tons of trash each day, toxic fumes鈥攏itrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead particles鈥攊nto the air. Nearby residents kept their windows closed to avoid the stench. They said the incinerator, located in a , contributed to the city鈥檚 high asthma rates, which are than Michigan鈥檚 state average. 

Three out of four of McGhee鈥檚 children have asthma; her sister does too. 鈥淚t was terrible,鈥� she said. 鈥淵ou could smell it just about every day in the summer, and in the wintertime too.鈥� 

The existence of the incinerator also discouraged investment in alternative waste management systems, like recycling or composting, the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). In 2014, Detroit became the last major U.S. city to implement citywide curbside recycling; today, its waste diversion rate is only 4%, compared with the state average of more than 19%.

East Side residents formed , one of several groups behind a successful campaign to shut down the incinerator; the plant closed in 2019. Now, that same group is working with the city to develop a composting system.

鈥淥ur communities still face a lot of respiratory and health problems because of the pollution that was caused from the incinerator,鈥� said KT Andresky, Breathe Free Detroit鈥檚 campaign organizer. Andresky said many of her neighbors see a direct line between composting and recycling and improving their community health. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food waste is the found in landfills and sent to incinerators in the U.S., comprising 24% of landfill materials and 22% of combusted municipal solid waste.

A citywide composting program would create local jobs, decrease truck traffic and emissions from waste pickup, and provide organic fertilizer for community gardens like the one in which McGhee was volunteering, Andresky said. It would also help the U.S. reach its climate goals: Food that decomposes in landfills is a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Composting and recycling could help reach net-negative waste-sector emissions by 2030, according to a by GAIA. 

But Detroit organizers didn鈥檛 have much experience with communitywide composting, so when they began developing a program, they turned to an unlikely mentor more than 8,000 miles away: the in the Philippines. Over the past 20 years, the organization has earned a reputation for training low-income communities, government agencies, civic organizations, and businesses in zero-waste practices. 

鈥淐ulturally, [composting] has been part of our ancestral practices,鈥� said Rap Villavicencio, a program manager at the Mother Earth Foundation. 鈥淎s an agricultural country, the Philippines has been using and producing a lot of organic wastes since the early days.鈥�

Despite that ancestral knowledge, few citywide systems were helping communities keep organic matter out of landfills, Villavicencio said. 鈥淲e cannot rely on the large-scale anymore. We need to empower every household, every sector, to do their own composting.鈥� 

For more than a decade, the organization has set up compost-training programs in communities across the country; it helped one neighborhood in Manila divert of its solid waste from landfills, according to a report from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

It was that success at the local level that convinced organizers with , a global network of metropolises that collaborate on climate solutions, to connect the Mother Earth Foundation with Breathe Free Detroit. 

Starting in November 2020, the two groups organized monthly calls, in which Mother Earth Foundation organizers offered advice based on their experiences setting up community composting systems.

鈥淚t鈥檚 just really important for us to learn from and be guided by some of the most impacted communities across the world, because these communities are experts in understanding the solutions for the problems that they face on a daily basis,鈥� said Andresky. 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a funder of C40, provided the volunteers, including McGhee, stipends for participating in training sessions and collecting data on her community鈥檚 composting practices. The foundation鈥檚 grant also included money for materials, staffing of the pilot, and data analysis. Next spring, Breathe Free Detroit and its partners plan to share that data with city officials. Members of Mother Earth Foundation and community organizers in Detroit plan to visit each other鈥檚 cities early next year, Andresky said.

The Manila鈥揇etroit partnership is part of a larger effort helmed by C40 Cities to connect U.S. communities with non-U.S. groups to advance climate justice and public health. 

鈥淐limate change is so overwhelming often, and it requires so many innovative ideas and, really, transformation at the root,鈥� said Nia Mitchell, manager of U.S. health and equity climate for . International collaboration has a lot to offer, Mitchell said. 鈥淏eing able to be inspired by and demonstrate that new strategies can work is one really big benefit,鈥� she said. 

The Manila鈥揇etroit partnership isn鈥檛 the only one of its kind led by C40 Cities. Officials in Jackson, Mississippi, have with their counterparts in Barcelona to study how replacing asphalt with vegetation can combat urban heat islands. Community organizations in Lawrence, Massachusetts, have studied Fortaleza, Brazil, on how to make the city鈥檚 streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly. 

Cities learning from one another is easy鈥攊t鈥檚 scaling those solutions that proves challenging, said Josh Sorin of the , another organization working to bring together cities across the world to address climate change. 

鈥淭here are some exciting examples at the moment of cities learning from one another鈥檚 experiments and solutions to address the climate crisis in their cities,鈥� he said. 鈥淗owever, the greater challenge we see is the need for cities to embed and influence insights from individual experiments into broader city policies, and even regional and national policies,鈥� Sorin said. 

鈥淎t the end of the day, it鈥檚 really about relationships,鈥� Mitchell, of C40, said. 鈥淭o have trust amongst these cities, to really confront these problems together, to lean on each other鈥檚 expertise together only makes us stronger and makes our ability to confront climate change, globally, that much more possible.鈥�

This article originally appeared in and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .