Turning Commercial Food Waste Into Valuable Compost

A northern California town is launching a compost collection program that includes all commercial food wastes -- including meat and bones, which currently cannot go into backyard-type compost bins.

The new program will essentially pay for itself since the fees that the city has to pay to dump its garbage will be sufficiently reduced (a result of having less garbage to dump) to leave them with the cash needed to cover the cost of the composting effort.  Since the environmental benefits of the program include reduced landfill emissions of the heat trapping gas, methane, as well as creation of free fertilizer that can be sold to the region's citizens and wineries, it's got strong prospects to be a winner.

Reports the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

Officials estimate 30 percent of the current waste going to landfills is compostable food scraps. Sealed in a landfill, the food emits methane, a toxic gas and a contributor to global warming.

A better choice, officials say, is composting. In a mixture of micro-organisms, air and heat, food scraps can be turned into soil in a matter of weeks, a more sustainable solution than the landfill.

“I believe in it,” said Nick Peyton, manager of Healdsburg Bar and Grill and a principal owner of Cyrus. “Restaurants turn out a tremendous amount of waste. This cuts down the waste by a huge amount. Instead of having just a whole ton of garbage, you have a lot of compost and a lot less garbage.”

The cost of the food waste recycling should not impact garbage rates, according to North Bay Corp. That's because start-up expenses should be offset by the decrease in the amount of garbage — and cumulative dumping fees — at the landfills.

We compost all the food scraps we can in our backyard bin.  It's quick and easy, but I sure do wish there was something I could do with meat scraps (which fortunately, we don't have many of).

I look forward to watching this type of win-win program expand to homes and businesses across the state and country.

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Nudging Recycling From Less Waste To None

Recycling and composting is catching on across the country.  The NY Times reports:

At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.

And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.

Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.

One of the key solutions to the crisis in global land use is to use less resources -- and a big key to using less resources is to generate less waste.  Whether it means recycling, composting, and cradle to cradle production (in which products are designed to be returned to the manufacturer so parts can be re-used), or buying recycled and cradle-to-cradle products only, we can and should all get involved.

What do we do? 

In addition to reducing packaging and re-using and recycling compulsively, we buy recycled, and love the fact that instead of buying our laptops from Dell, we can lease them -- and then send 'em back to Dell so they can re-use whatever they can.  We also compost our food scraps, and use fallen leaves from backyard trees as the carbon source that we mix into the green kitchen waste to generate the chemical heat reaction that is key to composting.  Composting provides us with a FREE nutrient-rich, water-retaining dark soil ingredient that I mix with vermiculite and peat to create our garden mix.   So our food scraps provide the nutrients needed to sustain our delicious organic garden!

Municipalities are catching on at varying speeds.  I know that while we have a green bin here in El Cerrito, my wife and I's parents -- from New York and Virginia, respectively -- had no idea what it was for when they first saw it.  Business associates from other parts of the country look curiously at "Compost" bins they see in public places like the Ferry Building in San Francisco.  So many parts of America still have a lot of catching up to do on the Zero Waste front.

That said, our system in California is far from perfect.  What we need more of here in the East Bay, for example, is the ability to put not only food waste, but also compostable cutlery, dirty paper towels, etc. into our green bin, which right now only takes lawn waste.  I know things like compostable cups and forks decompose at different temperatures than food and lawn scraps, so I'm watching curiously to see how cutting edge programs like that of the City of San Francisco handle mandatory composting.

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Turning Waste Into Energy (and Other Things)

What to do with all of our trash.  The Triple Pundit talks about the potential for our trash to help meet our energy needs.

Landfill gas-to-energy (LFGTE) facilities turn landfills – and our daily waste – into a source of clean, renewable energy. According to the EPA, there were 480 operational LFGTE programs in the U.S. as of December 2008. These generate about 12 megawatts of electricity per year – for reference, the average power consumption of a typical American household over the course of a year is about 8,900 kilowatt-hours. Waste Management alone hosts LFGTE projects at more than 100 of its landfills, with the goal to develop an additional 60 projects by 2013. In expanding these projects, Waste Management will produce enough landfill gas to generate 700 megawatts of energy, enough to power nearly 700,000 homes.

The more we can do with less, the better, and energy creation is likely just one of many reasons I think this century will find us looking to our landfills for more and more resources.  Right now, America has unfathomable amounts of wood, metals and who knows what else buried away in our landfills.

I remember when precious metals prices were going through the roof last year, and people were stealing the copper caps on top of the wood fence in front of our house, copper wiring from irrigation systems, and other such items that have always been safe in public.

It was at that point that I foresaw landfill mining as a future industry.  Does anybody know of any companies that do this yet?  Does anyone else predict that companies like Waste Management will eventually start to mine their landfills for metals and other resources that become rare outside of landfills?

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