- [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation, harvesting a bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet earth.

With billions of people on earth it is more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas, both new and old about food, energy, resources, health, housing, and more.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

In this series, our field reporters will explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to, "My World Too."

Short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

Literally thousands of tons of food and plant waste is buried in US landfills every day.

But one innovative company in the Heartland is turning waste into life.

Let's join our field reporter Kyle Stanley to learn more.

- Hey, how are you doing, I'm Kyle.

- Hi Kyle, good to meet you, Stan Slaughter.

- Stan you must be staying in the compost man.

- So, they tell me.

(laughing) I've been playing in the dirt for a lot of years.

- Cool.

- What do you think?

- Oh, it's beautiful.

So, what exactly do you do here?

- Well, I'm involved in education and outreach when people call about starting a garden or how to apply compost or possibly you don't understand what to do next.

That's my job, so I get to go out and meet a lot of cool people and look at their gardens and coach them into getting that productive.

And of course, one of the big answer is compost.

- So Stan, what's at the core of your educational mission here?

- It's the phrase I call organic literacy because we want kids to know about the way the world works.

People today are kind of disconnected from the farm.

Don't always know where the food comes from.

Don't know where it goes and our operation here actually completes the cycle.

And so, when I can go teach about composting, it's thrilling for me because I get to see that first, Oh, maybe kids will compost some food scraps in the classroom with worms and then take the worm compost and put it in the pots and grow plants.

And they see the cycle of life for the first time - That's great.

- and they don't own a farm.

They can't go do that in person but they can do it in a classroom setting.

- Plants per seed.

(laughing) - Absolutely, literally.

- So, what do we got going on here?

- So Kyle here at the compost food waste composting operation now.

This is where we do about 300 tons a week at this facility of material just like this.

- Wow.

- And we figure in Kansas city, we're only doing somewhere between five and 10% of that food waste that's out there.

- That's incredible.

- Yeah.

- This all comes from local grocery store?

- Yes, so this is all coming from local grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias.

Just about, well we've got about 250 customers all together.

So, we're collecting in trucks on routes source separated food waste.

- And this is only 10%.

- This is 10% or less of what the waste stream is out there to be composted and recycled, yeah.

- Wow, that's incredible.

- So, it's a shame that any of this stuff ends up in landfills.

And when, even with the material that we produce we take and we compost, the best thing that happens to this material is that it won't end up in a landfill.

It'll get composted to go back to a farm where it makes more food, where the food ends up in the table, where the food actually ends up back here.

Whatever doesn't get eaten, ends up back here to compost.

And then it goes back to the farm.

So, you complete this circle farm to table to compost, to farm, and you're avoiding any of the bad things that can happen when this stuff ends in the landfill.

(piano music) - These is a ton of food here.

What's the typical issue with most of the stuff?

- Well, most of the time it's a date.

Most of the time it's the date is that it's out of date, period.

So, once the manufacturer says that it's out of date and it can't be used or sold, then it has to get compost.

So, that's really the issue with most.

Now, when we take the material to the food bank, the food bank will actually decide whether it's edible or not.

And then they will be the ones that actually call out what they can feed and what they can distribute and then the rest of it will come here.

- Okay.

- So, this material that's coming here has already been called to be able to feed people and then actually we'll make compost out of it, second.

(piano music) So, Kyle, this is a pile of food waste that's come from our routes.

So, grocery stores, cafeterias, food processors, all this material is picked up three times a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

And it comes in in a truck like this.

And what you're seeing here is a load that comes from those locations.

This is the challenge for us though.

So, when we get this food waste in, this material is supposed to be separated at the source.

So, it's supposed to come into as clean.

Well, as you can see with this you've got packaging here wrapped around this Mellon.

And this is how this has to come off.

The question is, do you do it before the compost process or after the process?

Right now, this material goes into the compost row, gets compost and then gets pulled out with screeners and air separators and pickers at the end.

We've got a new machine that we're getting ready to put in, it's called the Tiger Depackager.

This material will go into that machine first.

And then the packaging will be separated from the food.

So, that makes this whole operation a lot cleaner but it is a huge expense and this is a challenge for us every day it's a contamination.

- Right.

So, what do you do with all the packaging?

It looks like there's a ton of it.

- Yeah, so even like stuff like this, if it can be recycled, we'll recycle it or otherwise it goes waste to energy or last case scenario is landfill.

And as a company, we only landfill about 110th of 1% of the times we handle at the week.

- Wow, so pretty much nothing goes to waste.

- Pretty much, (laughing) - Yeah.

- very little that's the idea.

- Yeah.

(string music) - This is the material that gets screened out of the process at the end.

So, the compost process goes on for so long, and then we actually screen this material out.

Now, this material will end up going back into the process over and over again.

And as you can see with the plastic that's in it, that plastic continues to go through the process time and time again.

So, what you're looking at is you're looking at about six, seven, eight years of contamination buildup.

(string music) - This is the basic compost we use in our soul mixes in garden mixes.

Really good soil would be five or 6% organic matter.

This is 30.

If we burned it, 30% of it would disappear, the rest is minerals.

So, this is a big jumpstart in fertility that we get to give and see this increases the water-holding capacity, it increases the plant food it's full of made from yard waste, so there's a lot of leaves in it and leaves are chemical factories.

They're concentrated vitamin pill for the soil and then all that food waste and all that, great nutrition that we missed out on, we get it back here.

And that's what makes the compost really pop.

- Well, Kevin, Stan, thank you guys so much for having us out today, I've learned a ton.

- It's quite a process, isn't it?

- Oh, it's very impressive.

- We really appreciate you coming out and coming to spread the word about organics.

Try and keep waste out of land I really appreciate that.

- Absolutely, you guys are doing good stuff here.

- All right you spread the word, we'll spread the compost.

(laughing) - Deal, sounds great.

- [Narrator] In our next story, "My World Too" field correspondent, Nick Schmitz visits a Midwest community farm established for immigrant refugees, now calling America home that is growing a lot more than just produce.

- Hi Meredith, it's really good to see you.

- Good to see you too.

- Tell me about New Roots for Refugees.

- New Routes for Refugees is a four year farm training program.

We work with refugee families who have come to Kansas city with farming experience and are wanting to put that farming experience to use here in the city by owning a farm business.

So, over a period of four years, they grow with us on our training farm and we help them adapt to Kansas city, adapt their skills to be successful in this area.

And then, the goal is to graduate them off of that training farm and onto land that they are able to purchase and then continue to grow and sell on their own.

- Meredith, why do you do this?

Why do you work with New Routes?

- I believe really strongly in the power of food to connect people.

And I also believe really strongly in the value of the fact that everyone has something to contribute to their community.

So, I think a lot of times people who don't have a lot of resources are maybe seen as taking from our society, taking from our system.

And I think that people actually bring a lot of value.

And this farming program is one of the ways that I think demonstrates that everyone has value and everyone has something to contribute to the community that they live in, and in this case, it's food.

To a certain extent I don't know if there's anything more important than growing food for other people and providing for your community in that way.

There are a lot of really meaningful benefits.

The first one that probably comes to mind is income.

So, new roots for refugees acts really as a secondary source of income, we try to recruit families who already have someone in their family working a full-time job because especially as people are learning, it's hard to make enough to support an entire family.

(slow piano music) We are at Juniper gardens training farm in downtown Kansas city, Kansas which is the home of the New Roots for Refugees program where we work with 16 families every year to grow on a quarter acre piece of land and then grow and sell that to the Kansas city area.

Here at Juniper gardens training farm, we focus on growing, following organic standards.

We aren't certified organic because there's a lot of financial barriers.

And then also barriers in terms of record keeping.

But all of the produce that's grown here is grown following organic methods.

- So, Meredith is everything that's grown here at Juniper farm sold at farmer's markets or some of it for personal use?

- So, we sell it actually 16 different farmer's markets around the Kansas city area.

People grow and eat a lot of the stuff that they wanna take home.

They're welcome to eat anything that they grow.

And then we also sell via wholesale to the restaurants and grocery stores.

So, and this is another really interesting crop.

This is, in Burmese, it's called Chim bong.

It's actually in the Roselle family related to hibiscus.

It's like a sour leaf, it tastes kind of lemony, but I've seen people come to the farmer's markets before and buy literally trash bags for this.

(foreign language) - Hi Sam.

- How you doing?

- Nice to meet you.

So, you're the site manager here at Juniper performs.

What does that mean?

What do you do?

- Well, site managers is just what it is.

I take care of the grounds, the gardens, all of the equipment, high tunnel, cooler.

Things of that nature.

When something breaks, I try to get it fixed.

- Do you find there are a lot of challenges when you're working with the farmers since they come from such diverse backgrounds?

- Yes.

Well like this plant here.

(laughing) - And what is this?

- I just call it - It's beautiful.

- a balloon plant.

One of the Burmese gave me several of these, so.

- Sam, can you talk to me a little bit about this plant?

- This plant is cotton and I grow it personally for myself not to harvest anything, but just to remind me of what I did when I was seven and eight and nine years old because this is some of the things that I had to start work on with my father.

I'd be up four o'clock in the morning getting on the truck, going to the cotton fields to either pick this beautiful white stuff that (laughing) I don't think you could exist without.

And just to remind me where how far along I've actually came and my family has came.

And I kind of get with my kids and remind them of what cotton, where it come from 'cause a lot of people don't know where cotton comes from - Yeah.

- how it got here.

So, it's just like something to keep my head together, keep me reminded of what it took to get where I'm at now how I actually got started.

So, this is my personal little endeavor, cotton.

(laughing) (string music) - Meredith thank you so much for taking the time today to show us around and show us what you guys are doing here at Juniper farms.

This is really spectacular.

- Yeah, we like to say we're growing more than fresh vegetables where growing community and helping these newly arrived refugee families really make Kansas city their home.

And, not only by being comfortable here but also by giving back and supporting their own families and communities as well.

- Well, keep up the good work.

- Thanks.

(laughing) - [Narrator] When you think of houses made of straw you may think of a big, bad Wolf, but in Moab, Utah, an organization is taking an organic industrial byproduct and turning it into a sustainable, affordable housing.

My world to field reporter Kyle Stanley went out West to learn more.

- My name is Emily Niehaus.

I am the founder of Community Rebuilds.

So, this was all my big idea.

(laughing) So, back in 2003 I was actually a loan officer for a local credit union and I was giving loans to people to build and buy housing.

And what I found was that there was lack of affordable housing in Moab and there was lack of people building affordable housing.

And I had friends in town that were doing this thing called natural building.

And I said to them, well, if you're building with dirt and straw, which is an agricultural by-product it's gotta be dirt cheap housing, right?

And I'm looking for affordable housing for the people that are trying to live and work here in Moab.

And they said, well yeah, it's it, it's dirt cheap housing but not a lot of people know how to build it.

So, my idea was to cobble together this idea of combining a habitat for humanity like volunteer based workforce and this housing typology straw bale construction to try to see if a program could address affordable housing.

The cool thing about straw is that it is a renewable resource.

And so, when we think of building products, wood is something we use all the time.

But we don't grow pink insulation, we manufacture it.

And a lot of temp chemicals and toxicity goes into that process.

Straw grows and then blooms the grains that we harvest.

And then what's left is the stock of the plant.

And so, we're just basically stacking the stocks and bundling them together and then building them using them as our bricks.

- There's two different ways to stack straw bale.

You can either go flat or on edge, we're going on edge.

So, it makes them 14 inches.

So, we ended up with a 14 inch wall.

- Can you tell us a little bit about the Plastering process?

What do you guys use?

- We start with earth and plaster which is essentially sand, clay, some straw.

It's just like cooking, you have to have the right ratios and stuff like that.

And on the exterior, we follow it up with a lime plaster which is just a little bit more durable in the weather.

And we use a finer kind of earth and plaster on the inside.

We're like a hybrid of traditional kind of building techniques as well as alternative natural building technics.

So, in the effort to build affordable housing what we find the largest expense on a budget sheet is labor.

And so what the idea of community rebuilds is centralized around is the fact that we have young emerging professionals coming from all over the world to come and be student in part of the solution.

What we have at the end of our program is not only an affordable home but we have a group of people that are trained and experienced in this new kind of housing typology in green construction.

And so, homeowners may someday get into this field and our students actually launch and then become young builders themselves.

- So, I first heard about natural building in a permaculture class that I took in college and it was fascinated by a different way of building and building with what we have and wanted to get more involved.

And also, since I was a kid I wanted to learn how to build.

And I think that can sometimes be intimidating as a woman to kind of dive into that field.

And so this kind of created an amazing combination where I could learn and build and build in a way that felt better to me, or in a way that I believed in.

- Our amazing student interns join us in Moab for four building months and they show up, you don't have to have any building experience and we give them a quick orientation and then we get to work and they're here with us for the duration.

And then at the end of those months, it's funny.

We celebrate a new home being built, a new education learned, but then everyone starts crying because they're so sad to leave.

- I have actually met a lot of alumni of Community Rebuilds Internship programs throughout my life.

And the CRM are very far and wide and everyone is so excited about this program.

And so I looked it up.

I originally wanted to be a build intern, but I have a degree in urban planning and they were looking for an urban planner.

So, it worked out pretty perfectly.

- Interns from this program, actually walk away with the knowledge that ranges from how to use a pneumatic hammer, how to use a power saw, power tools, how to frame, how to pour foundation, how to stack straw for installation, how to plaster interior and exterior that straw to protect it.

So, they come away from the program.

Really understanding what a foundation to finish the construction of a home looks like because they've done it.

So, the raw materials that go into a straw bale home actually pencil out to be less than the materials that go into a conventional home.

Mostly because the materials are agricultural by-product or dirt.

And a lot of the effort is really labor.

When we think about a conventional home, a lot of the materials that go into a conventional home have been manufactured in a plant or have traveled from China or from another country where they've been manufactured.

And so, you're dealing with all kinds of expenses like tariffs and transportation.

The homes that you see getting built behind me here are actually gonna cost half of what conventional construction would cost for these homeowners.

Back when I started community rebuilds we had a lot of principles in place.

We wanted to build low carbon, modern natural buildings through a student education program in a way that was gonna help us replicate this type of housing model.

We built and we built and we built and almost 40 homes later, we said we need to prove our concept and we need to prove it in a way that is data-driven and science-based and measured by somebody other than us.

A lot of people know about lead certification and that's like the 1990s sustainability model of building.

It's less bad than conventional.

What is core to community re-builds is building better buildings, not building less bad.

And so, with the living building challenge because they're so rooted in this idea of regeneration and regenerative design and building practices, I said that's the metric we wanna use.

And we were able to tweak just a couple of things and actualize living, building certification for these homes.

Straw bale construction may seem unconventional but when you drive by or you visit a home that's straw bale construction, it looks and feels very conventional where the walls are just a little bit thicker.

It almost feels more like a farm home, but with finishes and designs and especially contemporary architecture and contemporary interior design, a straw bale home can look and feel just like every other home on the market.

- So, this home looks a little more on the finish side.

Can you tell us a little bit about what these giant tanks are behind us?

- This is rain water collection off of the roof.

This home has been completed.

The homeowners had moved in about three weeks ago.

We are just trying to maximize all the natural resources we can with our house.

Whether it's collecting rainwater off the roof or whether it's the way we orient our house is with a passive solar design.

So, we are taking advantage of how sunlight is moving through the sky throughout the year.

And these homes are pretty groundbreaking in terms of water in Utah.

Water is very contentious in the Western of the United States.

And so, these homes are actually collecting their own water from rainfall to use for non-potable uses like flushing toilet and urban agriculture.

And all of the appliances that are installed are very waterfall.

We did a lot of research on that.

They also have the first legal, residential composting toilets in the state.

They feel a lot like a regular toilet.

It's still a flush toilet.

Basically, there's a big box in the utility rooms that the waste goes into as well as some mulch and you just kind of turn it.

And eventually after a couple of years, that human waste becomes compost that you can use in your garden.

- So, one thing that we do here is a passive solar home.

And so, we orient all of our homes towards the South side, so that it collects as much sunlight as possible.

And we have what are called bevels on our windows that actually we formed them, so they slant out and more sunlight comes into the building.

We also have eaves on our roof that knock out the sun in the summertime when it's really hot and we want our house to be cooler.

And when the sun is lower in the winter time, it comes in and it actually eats up the Adobe floor.

- We have the engineering and we have the ingenuity in terms of building science.

What we don't have is the human capital the people to be able to deploy that information into communities beyond Moab, Utah.

And so my call to action to anybody that is really interested in being part of the solution of being in a regenerative world is, do it.

Find programs like community rebuilds, sign up, learn, work hard.

The payoff is amazing.

It's not just a experience, but it's a portfolio.

We need young emerging professionals to not only see themselves as the solution, but to plant themselves in solution-based organizations to get that education and information so that they can be the birds that spread the seeds of change.

(String music) - So, share with those Rebecca, what is an apothecary?

- An apothecary, a good way to think about it is like if you went into a Pharmacy maybe two, 300 years ago.

So it is sort of, it's like a pharmacy, but what we have is plant-based medicines.

- And you're here at the Kansas State University, a lethal the horticulture center.

We've got about 350 acres, but most of it we farm very intensely on a small portion of the land.

And we do a lot of research looking at high tone of production and trying to improve not only nutritional quality but also the basic productivity and economics for our small farmers.

- Oh, let's see if this works.

It better work, 'cause we just split the power.

Setting up to do the battery tour.

So, we hope our goal is to send see that, we got a solar panel over there you can barely see, we call it the sunshine box.

And we hope to send that to somebody across the world or America who needs electricity.

So, at the battery Tour, we kind of use music, right?

It's the universal language, which bring people together.

To have a good time, dance.

My homie was about to dance too, what's up, bro.

- Music is the most important ingredient to what we do at the Battery Tour.

I mean, ultimately music is a universal language.

It brings people together of all races, all ages, all demographics.

(string music).