Benefits of Composting Builds Growing Demand

By GREG GERRITT/ecoRI News contributor

San Francisco residents are required to have three bins ready for pickup: trash, recycling and compost.More and more communities are composting more and more materials every day. New collection and composting programs are springing up all over — from Toronto to State College, Pa., to San Francisco.

Massachusetts also has a number of composting operations. Nantucket has mandated composting for more than a decade, ever since the island’s landfill started running out of space.

In Cambridge, for example, the city ran a pilot program in 2008 to collect food scraps from residents at two recycling drop-off centers, and 60 city businesses and institutions compost their food waste through a curbside collection program funded by a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Also, through another DEP program, about 200 supermarkets and groceries across the state compost roughly 27,000 tons of food waste annually.

Nationwide, however, San Francisco and Seattle are the only major U.S. cities that require residential organics collection, according to BioCycle, although more than 90 cities and towns offer some type of food-waste collection.

In San Francisco, nearly 500 tons of compostable material — mostly food scraps — is collected daily from at least 225,000 of the city’s 340,000 or so households, according to Robert Reed of Norcal Waste Systems. So more than two-thirds of all households in San Francisco have access to a compost collection service.

The San Francisco Department of the Environment estimates there are between 4,000 and 5,000 restaurants, coffee shops and other food-related businesses in the city. By the department’s count about 75 percent of restaurants participate in the city’s compost collection program.

Of the city’s 8,547 apartment buildings with six or more units, 52 percent (4,419) of them participate in San Francisco’s compost collection program, according to Reed. This is the largest group of apartment buildings in North America to participate in a compost collection program, said Reed, noting that the number of apartment buildings participating in the program has doubled during the past six months.

In Durham, Ontario, which lies east of Toronto and is home to more than half a million people, residents separate food waste for weekly curbside collection.

In Europe, where energy costs and tipping fees are high and environmental standards stricter than here, there are hundreds of anaerobic digesters. In the United States, however, most digesters are on farms for manure management or at sewage treatment plants. In fact, about 200 sewage treatment plants in the United States currently anaerobically digest sewage sludge. Some of these operations, including one in Berkeley, Calif., are now taking in food scrap to increase gas production.

Elsewhere, some communities have started collecting compostables at drop-off locations. ecoRI News, for example, collects compost at the Wednesday (4-7 p.m.) and Saturday (10 a.m.-1 p.m.) Wintertime Farmers’ Markets at Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket. The nonprofit environmental group collects about 150 pounds of compost weekly, which it gives to local farms.

Other communities have started with residential pick-up services, including bicycle trailer collection systems like the one run by Than Wood in Providence. Some places start with commercial customers, especially food-related businesses, where composting can provide substantial benefits.

Brown University, the University of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island School of Design all have composting initiatives moving forward on campus.

Composting fits well with the local and healthy food movements, and in fact if Rhode Island is to continue to grow its re-emerging agriculture, it’s going to be critical to recycle the nutrients now being landfilled. Less compost means less soil fertility, less emerging agriculture and less food security.