It began with a research assignment on food waste in Ugo Angeletti's AP environmental science class during his senior year of high school. For his project, Angeletti decided to analyze the contents of his neighbors' trash. He went door-to-door in his South Miami neighborhood, asking residents if they would separate their food scraps from their regular garbage. Then he collected and weighed the two piles for each household. He was shocked to find that, on average, food waste constituted 40 percent of his neighbors' trash.

"This definitely frustrated me," Angeletti says, especially in light of what he'd learned in class: Landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, mostly because of rotting organic matter. He'd grown up in an environmentally minded household, and his family always composted their food scraps in a bin in the backyard, so he was surprised to learn that many of his neighbors had never even heard of composting.

Angeletti decided that this was a problem he wanted to tackle. He provided interested neighbors with collection buckets for their food waste, along with a few simple instructions, and offered to pick up the buckets and do the composting himself. His three younger sisters were eager to help, and in spring 2017, the four started a weekly pickup service for about 50 households, riding their bicycles house-to-house each Saturday and emptying food scraps into wagons they pulled behind them.

After three months, Angeletti turned the program into a nonprofit called Back2earth. More people signed up as word of the service spread, and soon the siblings had more requests than they could handle. They recruited volunteers, and gradually they established pickup locations where residents could drop off their scraps.

By late 2019, they had five such spots, each accommodating up to 400 households. The operation had outgrown the family's backyard, and they were now composting all the food waste on a small plot of land donated by a supporter. They gave away the compost for free.

Last November, Angeletti and his sisters began talks with South Miami's mayor and other local officials about partnering to make composting more widely available in the city (a plan temporarily put on hold by the pandemic). Now a junior in college, Angeletti estimates that since its start Back2earth has diverted 40,000 pounds of food waste from landfills and churned out more than 9,500 pounds of compost, preventing 70,000 pounds of greenhouse gases from escaping into the atmosphere. "This experience has shown us that people are willing to change the way they live if given the proper tools," he says. "It's given me an inextinguishable hunger to open the eyes of others."

This article appeared in the November/December 2020 edition with the headline "A Family Affair."