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Curbside Composting: No One Said It Would Be Easy

Katie Campbell
/
Earthfix

Portland and Seattle are working to reduce the environmental impacts of food waste by offering curbside composting. But no one said it would be easy. We’ve been taking a look this week at the challenges and opportunities of wasted food.  Cassandra Profita from our EarthFix team looks at what two Northwest cities are doing to get people to put the right things in the compost bin.

Paul Kelly was assigned a new task this year. He's standing in a lake of purple liquid, picking through a pile of rotting food with a pitchfork.

Kelly: "It's not too bad once you get used to it. You've got to have good boots and stuff. It can get a lot deeper than this."

Kelly works for Metro, the agency that oversees trash collection in the Portland area. His task? Removing cardboard and plastic from the food waste businesses put in their compost bin.

Kelly: "Our goal is to just get organic stuff sent to the facility we send it to."

Last year, Metro had to stop sending commercial food waste to the nearby suburban composting facility. Neighbors complained the waste was too stinky, and the county government decided food waste from businesses couldn't go there anymore.

Ehinger: "I think the folks there were very tolerant, to be honest with you, of what it must've smelled like some days."

That's Paul Ehinger. He's the solid waste manager for Metro. He says the smell is the reason commercial food waste from most Portland businesses now goes to a methane digester near Eugene, 100 miles away.

The digester extracts gas from food waste and burns it to produce electricity. But it can't handle cardboard or compostable plastic flatware. So the rules for what businesses put in the compost bin had to change.

Ehinger: "We expected there would be problems because this is actually a pretty unique facility. It's one of the largest food-only digestion facilities in North America."

Starting this month, many Portland-area businesses can't put cardboard in the compost bin anymore. By March, their compost collection will be limited to food scraps only.

Credit Alan Syvestre / OPB
/
OPB
Zdenka Novak, a Recology employee contracted by Metro, pulls unacceptable plastic and cardboard out of the commercial food waste piles at the Metro Central transfer station.

And until the new rules are in full effect, Ehinger says, workers with Metro are picking through the piles of commercial food waste to remove unacceptable items.

Ehinger: "Our concern is this could kill the program if we can't find a place to keep processing."

Meanwhile, Seattle is tackling another challenge with curbside composting: just getting people to do it. Officials have found even with curbside pickup, Seattleites are only putting a fraction of the city's food waste into the compost.

Tim Croll is the solid waste director for Seattle Public Utilities. He says if that doesn't change, the city won't reach its recycling goals.

Croll: "Our recycling rates have really flattened out. We really have to do something different. We can't just sit out there and root more, encourage people more."

So, the Seattle City Council voted in September to make residential curbside composting mandatory and enforceable. That means residents will be fined a dollar each time their trash can is found to contain 10 percent food waste or more.

But the new rules don't address another chronic problem with curbside composting.

Thoman: "Plastics are really a big problem."

Susan Thoman works for the Cedar Grove composting facility. It processes most of the curbside food waste from the city of Seattle. And she says everyday mistakes – like leaving fruit stickers on banana peels – wind up littering her company’s giant piles of compost with little bits of plastic.

Thoman: "People take their baby carrots that get a little soft and don't look too good to eat anymore, and they throw the whole bag with the carrots in it in the yard bin. They don't take the wrap off the old lettuce."

Cedar Grove had to add a second screening process to remove pieces of plastic leftover in the finished compost.

Thoman: "All those things accumulate and add up in our system and all those things add a lot of cost, time and resources."

Pretty soon, a lot of that plastic won't be going to Cedar Grove anymore. The company opted not to renew its contract to collect compost for the city of Seattle.

Leaders in Portland and Seattle say they’re willing to take on the challenges of foul smells, low participation and plastic contamination. But they advise other cities to consider those hurdles before launching curbside composting programs of their own.

Copyright 2014 Earthfix

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