When you enter Greenspace on Fourth, a native plant garden and community composting site in Gowanus, you soon notice to the right a sort of corridor paved with assorted slabs and tiles, lined on either side by different compost devices accumulated over time – aerobin, tumblers, gourmet composters, wooden bins of varying design (including a basketball hoop hood lid), two 4x4” aluminum community composting cubes. Like that compost corridor, Big Reuse’s partnership with Greenspace over the last year has grown organically – as the context of decentralized composting best encourages. Supporting decentralized composting sites requires attention to the particular, autonomous rhythms and culture of each site – it has to be organic!
The renewed partnership began early in the Spring of 2025, when Greenspace generously hosted a Big Reuse Master Composter cohort for a tour of its compost operations and many devices. More tours followed, Big Reuse installed the community composting cubes; then came regular Master Composter volunteer days and later, delightfully, a three-way collaboration between Big Reuse, PS 456 The Elizabeth Jennings School for Bold Explorers and Greenspace in explorative, hands-on compost education for first graders (dubbed Bold Composting). Going into 2026, Greenspace has secured grant funding to lead its own compost ed programming for high schoolers and has set up a series of compost days for middle schoolers through a nearby school. It is inspiring to see Greenspace develop its role as a compost learning space for younger generations.
On the community compost team, we call Greenspace on 4th a cube partner because the newly designed community compost cubes that Big Reuse has installed in the garden, as well as at dozens of sites across the city, serve as a new way of supporting community composters, facilitating their work, and engaging them in a community of practice. The community compost cubes are rodent resistant, highly durable aluminum compost systems with a greater processing capacity than the traditional cubic yard wooden bins. They also have a high educational capacity, offering consistently fascinating views into the compost pile. You can learn more about the history, role, and impact of the cubes from NYSERA Climate Justice fellow Tatiana Guerra (see Malcolm X Garden and Brooklyn College Garden).
The lead compost operator at Greenspace, Mark Hellerman calls the cubes a game changer. They have allowed the garden to process an average of about 900 pounds of food a week and have pretty much eliminated the rat population. From all the educational programming the composting team at Greenspace has taken on in the last year, it’s fair to say that the cubes have also been a game changer in facilitating greater community engagement through hands-on learning.
So, who are the community composters behind all this activity? Why do they do what they do and keep on doing it?
The compost journeys of Mark Hellerman and Mario Malcolm, a dedicated Greenspace volunteer who is critical to the Bold Composting program, are very different. As an urban kid, Mario didn’t grow up with much of a connection to nature or environmental work he told us – though as an athlete, he always enjoyed the outdoors. It was just in 2024 that he first stumbled on composting as a garden volunteer at Maple Street Community Garden. He gravitated toward it because it made such clear and perfect sense to him. As Mario puts it:
Composting is something that fits in with how I move through life. When I was in technology, I always worked with an eye to efficiency for the future, which is exactly what composting contributes to.
So you can actually save part of your garbage and have it become something useful while also sending less garbage to landfills. You really do see the difference when you go to take your garbage out and it’s really light. You realize how much weight there is in two days worth of banana peels, two days worth of orange peels, two days worth of vegetables husks –all that kind of piles up. You notice that. So, composting is definitely efficient. You get the sense of feeling lighter, feeling unencumbered in your life, when you process things in the right way. And when you are unencumbered in your life, that spreads to being unencumbered in the community. The motivation [to do community composting] is that this makes sense!
By the time Mario met Mark while volunteering at CHIPS pantry, he was already deep in and ready to contribute even more to community composting.
Mark, on the other hand, originally began composting as a very young gardener, way back, he said, when he started growing vegetables in his backyard in Wisconsin. He learned it from his grandmother who would just throw food scraps back into the soil and later taught him how to make a separate pile for better results and how to make leaf mold. Mark’s focus wasn’t compost then — it was “always something for the vegetable garden, that was the reason why.” The reason why changed for him as a baker in the food industry:
I’m pretty much riddled by guilt by the fact that I’ve got it pretty easy. I’m very fortunate. I’ve always had what I needed and I feel that because of that I owe it to the world to do what I can to make the world a better place. And I know that sounds so corny and it’s kind of presumptuous to think that whatever I do would make any difference but it’s kind of like that Ghandi quote; he said something like whatever you do, it doesn’t matter, but you must do it. And that’s the way I feel. I tell people I’m doing this because I basically want to keep methane out of the atmosphere. It’s very simple. Methane is so bad in terms of warming the planet. This is something I can do, something I have a propensity for. I have no problem getting dirty, I have no problem with rotting things, I like the process of fermentation.
As a chef instructor in the Hospitality Program at City Tech, he turned to compost as a teaching tool. Mark taught his students to source separate the trash and leftovers from their baking sessions – recycling was part of the lesson – and he was able to arrange for curbside brown bin pick up with DSNY. That need to act on diverting waste was also what brought him to Greenspace on 4th. As a volunteer at CHIPS pantry, he saw the food waste piling up, going straight to the trash. As a composter, he knew what to do. He looked around for a place to compost it, and just across the street, he found Greenspace on 4th.
When it comes to the community part of the composting they do, Mark and Mario pretty much coincide. For Mario, compost provides:
a lot of opportunity for relationship building. You know when you have an abundance of something and someone else has an abundance of something else you can talk about trading stuff and building relationships, so that life is better on both sides–on all sides.
For Mark:
The community aspect of it is that whenever you’re doing something with people and have some kind of a project you know, things aside from the composting happen, you know, people talk about things or people share things or something else happens. That’s the community aspect for me. It’s kind of the small group, personal, the one-on-one interactions that happen; it’s not necessarily the block association or what’s going on with my neighborhood – it’s a lot smaller than that.
A macro view and a micro view; but for both, community composting is clearly about building relationships and new possibilities.
Finally, this community composting pair have a shared sense of responsibility around the work they do at Greenspace on 4th in terms of the younger generation. Both recognize kids and youth as a key demographic for compost education. “Kids are like sponges,” Mark says. “They pick up things, and they hang on to them when they’re young. I think early impressions, early knowledge, early understanding is never really lost. And they can be messengers back to their homes. They are absolutely the movers and shakers of the future.” Mario expresses a very similar sentiment: “The thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that you have as a kid are real and they don’t go away.” Both value their work with youth in similar ways. Mario:
Kids should learn from the good steps and the missteps of the previous generation. Doing hands-on composting with kids gives us the chance to teach what we’ve learned. I think a lot of even-handed, fair-minded people are saying that we’re losing proper stewardship of what we’re doing in the world; the way we’re going forward is clumsy, sometimes it’s full of hubris and folly. So, through composting here [at Greenspace], we get a chance to tell kids, this is what we’ve learned.
Teaching goes hand in hand with community composting in their practice – a super power set in high relief by the Bold composting program in collaboration with Big Reuse and PS 456.
Mario and Mark each spoke eloquently when we met about the importance of funding community composting and hands-on compost education for kids and youth. For me, there is no better argument for that funding than the work they did together this fall in the Bold Composting program, the pains they took to see from the point of view of many different first graders and to give them each an experience of discovery through the compost cycle at every monthly visit.
Learn more about our composting programs here. Find a food scrap drop off site and see the composting bin installs we’ve completed across NYC here. Download our free guides to Hot Composting and Composting with Cubes.
Volunteer with us to get hands-on composting experience!
Written by Natalia Sucre, Compost Education and Outreach Program Manager