As the 2026-2027 school year approaches, ABCompost is preparing our programming for the year ahead, including workshops, volunteer sessions, and other opportunities for the Concordia community to get involved. As we prepare for the new year, I found myself reflecting on ABCompost’s journey, and wondered how much food waste we diverted last year?
It turns out that, from September 2025 to August 2026, we diverted around 144 kg (or 318 pounds) of food waste from Concordia food groups. After adding this amount to everything we have composted since joining the Concordia Greenhouse in September 2024, the total comes out to a whopping 743 pounds of food waste diverted in only 2 years! It has been incredible to think about how much food waste we have been able to divert in such a short amount of time.
ABCompost started as a group of students hoping to bring more hands-on composting to the campus and make composting education more accessible. When we ordered our first box of worms in October of 2022, we did not know where the journey would take us. We never expected ABCompost to grow into what it is today.
Since then, we have collaborated with multiple food groups at Concordia to help compost their food waste, collaborated with classrooms to advocate for food waste reduction, supplied composting samples for biology labs, produced hundreds of pounds of compost that we’ve shared with the Concordia community and nonprofit organizations across Montreal, and hosted many, many workshops and conference presentations, along with all the other projects we have taken on along the way. How have we been able to divert so much food waste and take on so many different projects? How have we been able to make a positive impact in food waste reduction and sustainability?
I think the most important answer is community. Community building has played a large role in ABCompost’s ability to grow and achieve what it has, and it has made me reflect on how critical community-building really is to foster a more sustainable future.
We live in a Western capitalist society that incentivizes us to think and act for ourselves. We’re encouraged to have our own homes, drive our own cars rather than share transportation or take public transit, and buy our own belongings. The places that we live in have been designed to make individualism more convenient on a day-to-day basis. As our world becomes more urbanized, our food systems allow us to buy and consume food without ever interacting with the people or communities that produce it. We are even encouraged to find individual solutions to problems, as many of our everyday needs can be met through individual consumption rather than collective resources or relationships. But this emphasis on individualism has fragmented us from one another and make us less connected to the communities around us. In a way, this community fragmentation is part of what makes acting on something as massive as climate change so difficult.
When we do think about ways to tackle environmental issues, we are often presented with individual solutions: buy more sustainable products, recycle more, or consume less as a household. These small actions can definitely make a difference, but the environmental challenges we face are massive, interconnected with our social and economic systems, and interdisciplinary, with many different perspectives on what is going wrong and how we address these problems.
It is for these reasons why I think our climate crisis require collective action, shared resources, and communities working together. These communities are formed through relationships of building trust with peers and neighbours, sharing community resources, exchanging knowledge, and creating opportunities for collective action. Our collective efforts become much stronger when we are not acting alone and feel unified with one another.
This is one of the things that makes the Concordia Greenhouse such a special and beloved community to me. It’s not just the physical space. For years, the Greenhouse has brought people with different perspectives on sustainability together, creating a space (not just physically, but socially and collectively) where we can share ideas, learn from one another, and collaborate on initiatives that make our campus and our communities more sustainable.
One of the biggest lessons I learned through ABCompost is that sustainability is not something you have to pursue alone. We have built an amazing community of people who are passionate about composting and reducing food waste. We also have an incredible team of dedicated volunteers, both long-term and new, who help us weekly to support our composting efforts. The knowledge, skills, resources, and motivation we have gained are thanks to the communities that we have learned from along the way and what make real, long-term change possible.
If you want to be part of our community, there are many ways to get involved!
- We will be hosting workshops throughout the semester. If you want to learn more about composting or food waste in general, follow our Instagram, @abcompostmtl, or subscribe to the Concordia Greenhouse newsletter to learn more about these upcoming events!
- We will also be hosting weekly volunteer sessions every Wednesday from 2:30–4:30 p.m., starting on September 16. During these sessions, volunteers will learn about vermicomposting while helping ABCompost collect food waste from Concordia’s food groups, feed food scraps to our worm composting systems, and harvest finished compost. If you would like to volunteer, feel free to email us at abcompostconcordiamtl@gmail.com
As I finish reflecting on ABCompost’s journey, none of this would have been possible without the people along the way supporting us and helping us. Composting 743 pounds of food waste happened because of a larger community coming together, wanting to make a difference. And we hope to continue building that community throughout the coming year 🙂
Written by Catherine, of ABCompost