Community Member Spotlight: Jenny

In May, Jenny Fukumoto and her husband-to-be Steve Pasko signed up for a compost pick-up service from WasteNot Compost at their Logan Square apartment. They pay $12 every two weeks for a biweekly pick-up; Liam of WasteNot drops off an empty five-gallon bucket at their apartment every other week and picks up their full one.

About finally making the choice to start with a composting service, Jenny says, "Composting was always something we'd thought about doing, but we thought it might be too expensive or too much of a hassle for our lifestyle." However, Jenny and Steve have found composting to be simpler than they'd anticipated. "We just take our food scraps and put them in our bin - and if we have something that’s delicious that’s cooking, we hardly even notice the smell when we open our bin at all!"

Right away, Jenny noticed a positive impact on the waste they produced. "Having a place for our food scraps has helped us be conscious of wasting less food, of using more of the vegetables that we’re cutting - we'll decide, let’s make a vegetable stock out of that, or let’s use the broccoli stalks that we used to throw away. Before composting, we threw out at least three bags of trash every two weeks, and now we’re rocking slightly less than a bag per week, which has been pretty incredible to see."

Thank you for sharing your story, Jenny and Steve! If you'd like to get started with WasteNot, or to find other composting options near you in Chicago, click here.

If you choose to compost with WasteNot, we'd be grateful if you'd use the code "ZWC2017" when signing up - this helps us further our mission by better tracking our reach!