Compost: Cornerstone for Change
If you live in Asheville, you’ve probably seen cafés and restaurants offer a compost bin in addition to the standard trash and recycling options, but what happens to the food and compostable products we toss into these receptacles? Let's examine one of the fastest growing sectors in the waste industry—industrial composting.
What’s So Great About Compost?
Compost has a high level of organic content (between 50-75%) compared to quality soil. Because of its organic content, not only can compost be used to enhance soils and increase crop yields and size, but it is a sustainable method of recycling organic waste. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 78 million tons of waste is sent to landfills each year, of which 21 million tons could be composted or reused.
Landfills are the second largest contributors of man-made methane emissions in the country, and a significant amount of what goes into landfills is organic matter. In Asheville, over a quarter of garbage sent to the municipal landfill is organic waste that could be composted and turned into fertilizer. Unlike landfills, which operate as anaerobic digesters (meaning they lack oxygen), composting is usually an aerobic process (it uses oxygen), which doesn’t produce a significant amount of methane. This is a huge opportunity for our city to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support local farmers.
Industrial Composting
Danny's Dumpster, an industrial composting facility in Asheville. Photo courtesy of Danny's Dumpster.
Industrial composters (or conventional composters, as they're also known) use oxygen, heat and intermittent turning to break down waste as efficiently as possible while still aiming to produce a quality compost. There are, however, some composters that are anaerobic and therefore don’t use much oxygen. This type of composting is usually performed when there are excessive vermin present. Another exception to the conventional method is aerated static pile composters, which do not turn compost, but rather force air into it.
Good commercial compost generally has a moisture level between 35-60%, a pH level less than 7.5, an oxygen level of about 18%, and a temperature of around 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pre-processing, a method whereby larger pieces of material are broken down into smaller, more digestible pieces, is also performed at industrial composting facilities.
There are three main types of industrial composters, which are further explained in the video below:
Windrow (the most popular method)
In-vessel
Aerated static pile (most often used for food scraps, paper products and bioplastics produced by commercial food operations)
A breakdown of the industrial composting process. Video courtesy of Eco-Products.
There are tons of reasons to use industrial composters. Here are just a few:
Creates compost for soil remediation
Enhances food security due to land restoration and soil remediation
Reduces need for chemical pesticides and fertilizers
Produces jobs
Reduces waste in landfills
Reduces truck traffic hauling garbage
Feedstocks: The Building Blocks of Compost
According to the NC Composting Council, feedstocks are essentially the components that make up a batch of compost. Feedstocks include organic materials like yard waste that are easy to compost, to materials that are more difficult to compost, such as compostable food service products and biosolids (human and animal waste).
The NC Department of Environmental Quality outlines 4 types of composting facilities, which increase in the variation and complexity of compostable feedstocks in proportion to their type. For example, a Type 1 composting facility (the most basic type) can accept “yard and garden waste, silvicultural waste, untreated and unpainted wood waste”, while a Type 4 facility (the most complex type) is able to compost “Type 1, 2, and 3 feedstocks, mixed municipal solid waste, post collection separated or processed waste, industrial solid waste, non-solid waste sludges functioning as a nutrient source or other similar compostable organic wastes.”
There are 3 industrial composting facilities within Buncombe County (see map below).
There are 3 commercial composting facilities in Buncombe County. Map courtesy of the NC Department of Environmental Quality.
Composting for the Future
Commercial composting is a rapidly growing industry and is largely fueled by waste-reduction legislation in the U.S. According to the University of Georgia Extension, “Oregon and Washington are developing laws that will require all businesses to compost all of their organic waste including food waste.”
Hawaii County is set to open a new industrial composting facility by July 1, 2020 to meet the demands of a new law in the county that will ban the use of Styrofoam food containers. The county is requiring that all restaurants and food vendors switch to compostable food packaging and bioplastics certified by the Biodegradable Product Institute (BPI).
Bioplastics are made from plant biomass and can be composted in industrial composters. Photo courtesy of iBanPlastic.
Sustainable packaging is also beginning to make inroads with businesses and consumers, like Emerald Brands' line of over 300 tree-free and plastic-free compostable packaging and bioplastic options. Though they are still designed for single-use, they can be composted instead of landfilled.
Commercial composting also has the added benefit of job creation. Because large-scale composting is a labor-intensive process involving the weeding out of plastics and other non-compostable items, it offers many new “green collar” jobs.
Join the Movement
While supporting eco-conscious companies that offer compostable single-use products like Eco-Products and Emerald Brands is more environmentally sustainable than supporting the plastics industry, it still costs money and produces carbon emissions to pick up, drop off, and compost these items in industrial composting facilities. If the average person could make or purchase an at-home composter (you can buy one for just 60 dollars) and compost their own food waste and yard debris, or take these materials to a community compost pile, we could all do our part in significantly reducing the amount of organic waste that we send to landfills.
An infochart describing how the compost pickup company CompostNow operates. Photo courtesy of CompostNow.
Asheville even has a service called CompostNow that provides residents with a clean bin each week that they can fill with their compostables (they even accept hard-to-compost items like meat, dairy and greasy pizza boxes), which gets picked up and taken to Danny’s Dumpster, a commercial composting facility in East Asheville. The service starts at just $29 a month, and is even offered on a larger scale to meet the demands of offices and restaurants, like Luella’s Bar-B-Que. CompostNow even delivers compost soil to their customers on demand.
With all of these options, what’s your excuse not to compost?
