This hands-on composting demonstration shows you how kitchen scraps, leaves, and yard waste become a useful resource for your garden, grass, and potted plants.
In Edmonton, roughly 270,000 tonnes of food and organic waste end up in landfill each year, even though most of it could be diverted and put to work improving soil instead. The City of Edmonton’s Waste Services team has spent years teaching residents how to close that loop in their own backyards.
This session is run by Sarah McDonald, the City’s Home Composting Programs Coordinator. You’ll see what composting actually looks like in practice, with methods built for Edmonton homes, from apartment balconies to large yards.
By the end, you’ll know what to compost, what to leave out, how to set up a system that suits your space, and how to fix problems when they come up.
OFRE is hosting this session as part of our ongoing work to support food security and waste reduction across Edmonton.
What You’ll Learn at This Composting Demonstration
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Composting fundamentals What compost is, how it forms, and why it benefits soil, plants, and the wider food system.
- What to compost (and what to avoid) The food scraps, leaves, and yard material that work, and the items to keep out of your pile.
- Setting up a system that fits your space Practical options for backyards, small yards, and indoor composting setups.
- Maintaining a healthy pile How to keep your compost balanced, active, and odour-free through Edmonton’s full seasonal range.
- Troubleshooting common problems What to do when your compost smells, slows down, attracts pests, or stops breaking down.
- Putting finished compost to work How to use the soil you make in gardens, lawns, raised beds, and potted plants.
Your Instructor
Sarah McDonald is the City of Edmonton’s Home Composting Programs Coordinator. Since 2017, she has led community composting education across the city, helping residents turn kitchen scraps and yard waste into healthy soil.
Her work centers on hands-on workshops and outreach designed to make composting practical for every kind of Edmonton home and garden.
Sarah focuses on keeping composting simple, low-cost, and accessible. Her approach reduces waste while building healthier urban ecosystems, one backyard at a time.
Sarah works with the City of Edmonton’s Waste Services Waste Education and Outreach Team, which educates residents on composting and on the best ways to handle grass, leaves, and yard materials.
How Composting Closes the Loop on Food Waste
At Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton, our work centers on reducing food waste and supporting food security. Composting fits naturally into that mission.
Every time we preserve fruit, can tomatoes, or press apples for cider, we generate scraps. Cores, peels, pits, stems.
These are not waste.
They are next season’s soil.
Our Apple Cider Celebration is a working example. Each fall, thousands of pounds of rescued apples get pressed into juice across three community leagues. In 2025, over 7000 pounds of apples were juiced instead of being wasted. The pulp left behind from our events doesn’t go to landfill. It feeds local farm livestock or gets composted to enrich the soil that grows next year’s harvest.
One apple. Three uses. Zero waste.
Soil health is the foundation of food security. The fruit trees that feed our community in fall depend on the ground they grow in. The vegetables in your garden, the herbs on your balcony, the lawn that frames your home, all of them benefit from compost made from material that would otherwise end up in landfill.
Edmonton produces thousands of tonnes of organic waste each year. Most of it could feed soil instead.
Learning to compost is the practical companion to learning to preserve. One keeps food on your table. The other keeps the cycle going for next year’s harvest.
Whether you have a large yard or a single tomato plant on a balcony, composting closes the loop. It turns a problem into a resource, on your timeline, in your space, at your pace.
