Food Waste Tops Menu for Compost Facilities

By P.J. Heller

     When it comes to operating a successful composting business, it takes more than just knowing about the meat and potatoes of the operation.
     It also takes knowing about pasta, fish, veggies, fruits and other foodstuffs.
     That’s because of the growing demand on the part of cities and counties to divert food waste to composting facilities rather than to rapidly filling landfills. Food waste is the third-largest waste stream after paper and yard waste, accounting for about 15 percent of the total municipal solid waste stream.
     Of the 32 million tons of food waste generated annually, only about three percent is recovered and recycled, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
     “There’s a tremendous opportunity there in terms of managing that waste stream,” says Loren Martin, general manager of Terra-Grow, Inc., in Lancaster County, Pa.
     Composting food waste not only keeps the material out of landfills and reduces greenhouse gases, but can slash costs to businesses for landfill tipping fees. And the end result is high-quality compost that can in some cases be sold by the same food waste generators to be put back into the earth.
     “The use of recycled food waste (compost) has a myriad of environmental benefits such as improving soil health and structure, increasing drought resistance, as well as reducing, and even eliminating, the need for supplemental water, fertilizers and pesticides,” the EPA says. “Think of it as ‘feeding the soil."
     Nelson Widell couldn’t agree more.
     “I prefer to call our (composting) operation a ‘soil manufacturing plant’ because that’s what we’re doing,” says Widell, a partner in the Peninsula Composting Group which manages the Organic Recycling Center in Wilmington, Del. “We’re making high-grade organic soils. It just so happens that our manufactured soils are considered waste by some people. To the microorganisms and mother nature, it’s food. And it’s the natural cycle.”
     Organic Recycling is among a growing number of companies nationwide that are now taking in food scraps along with such things as yard waste, wood and animal manure to produce compost.
     Terra-Grow manages both Oregon Dairy Organics and Graywood Farms, two Pennsylvania-based facilities known primarily for composting ag waste. They take in a combined total of 1,000 tons of food waste annually from food processing companies, a grocery store chain and area college. Martin says they hope to boost the amount of food waste handled to 3,000 to 5,000 tons annually within the next three years.
     Such composting facilities will become more critical as more cities and counties enact legislation requiring food waste to be recycled in an effort to keep that material out of landfills. Also driving composting efforts are large and small businesses wanting to help the environment and wanting to promote themselves as being more environmentally conscious, not to mention being able to save money. Recycling efforts are also being fueled by a public wanting to be “more green.”
     Whatever the motive, there is little doubt that composting of food waste is going to be a popular item on the recycling menu.
     “Composting is recycling at its finest,” says Marvin Duren, owner of family-run Marvin’s Organic Gardens in Lebanon, Ohio. “I just can’t see all this stuff going in the landfill to be buried forevermore. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
     “This probably represents the greatest growth potential in recycling because food waste composting is recycling,” Widell says. “If there’s another level of breakthrough in achieving high recycling rates, it will have to come from composting.
     “My view is this is a very large looming opportunity that is being demanded not only by corporate America, but also by the general population,” he adds.
     Martin, too, says he is seeing a growing desire on the part of institutions such as colleges and hospitals to compost their food waste.
     “I’m seeing a growing or increasing level of interest from the standpoint of those generating food waste,” he says. “People are becoming much more interested in recycling. There’s certainly a growing awareness of the value and benefit of taking material out of the landfill and turning it into a value-added product that actually enhances the soil.”
     He and others in the industry also point to the substantial cost savings that can be realized, particularly in large urban areas, on landfill tipping fees.
     Widell notes that in Princeton, N.J., for example, the landfill tipping fee is $126 per ton, compared to $45 per ton charged by Organic Recycling. Duren says his fee is about half that of a landfill tipping fee.
     The same is true 3,000 miles away in the Pacific Northwest.
     “With our model, it’s cheaper to compost than to landfill,” says Susan Thoman, director of corporate business development for Cedar Grove Composting.
     Cedar Grove operates two composting facilities, both of which handle yard and food waste. Its 28-acre facility in Maple Valley has a contract for the material with the city of Seattle — the first city in the nation to require all households to compost food waste — and collects additional wastes elsewhere throughout King County; it collects 195,000 tons of waste annually. Its newest facility, on 26 acres in Everett, was constructed in 2004. That site handles 228,000 tons of yard and food waste each year.
     Thoman notes that about 15 percent to 20 percent of the refuse collected is food waste.
     Widell says it makes sense for cities or other jurisdictions to partner with private business for composting rather than trying to do it themselves.
     “I’m not in any way concerned about competition from the public sector,” he says. “There is no city government or county government anywhere that can compete with private industry. Organics processing is a big topic these days; lots of public works departments and engineering departments are talking about what they can do. But they’ll still be talking about it after I’ve got four more plants built. And they’ll spend twice as much as I will and they’ll have twice as many people running it, so they won’t be competitive.”
     Walmart, the world’s largest retailer and grocery chain by sales, may be in the forefront of promoting food waste composting among businesses. The company’s objective is to create zero waste at its 4,300 stores, including Sam’s Club warehouses, in the U.S.
     To achieve that goal, Walmart turned to Quest Recycling Services, a sustainability consulting company based in Frisco, Texas, to help it establish a pre-consumer food waste recycling program.
     Quest, launched in 2007 and which took on Walmart in 2009, arranged for waste-haulers to service Walmart’s stores in 47 states (the exceptions being Alaska, Hawaii and Oregon). Some of those haulers also do composting. Quest does not operate or manage its own compost facilities.
     Although figures aren’t available specifically for Walmart, Matt Hedrick, executive vice president at Quest, says his firm so far in 2010 has diverted about 215 million pounds of food waste from landfills for the clients that it manages. Of that total, 158 million pounds were composted, 52 million pounds were used for animal feed and 5 million pounds went to waste-to-energy (anaerobic digester) plants.
     “Ultimately where we would like to get to with all our customers is where we pick up their organics, we bring it back, turn it into compost, we bag it and put it back into the stores to provide a closed-loop system,” says Hedrick, adding that is something Walmart is looking at.
     Marvin’s Organic Gardens receives food waste from about 160 Walmart stores in Ohio. About 50 tons per week are delivered to Marvin’s by waste-hauler Future Organics, a subcontractor of Quest Recycling.
     Marvin’s combines the food scraps with both yard and animal waste in static piles on its 25-acre composting site to slowly produce compost. The process can take a couple of years, Duren says.
     “I’m in no fancy hurry,” he explains. “I’m 10 years ahead of my need right now.”
     Facilities that produce compost in a fraction of that time are using a lot of energy, Duren says.
     “They’re in a fancy hurry,” he says. “If you can let the organisms consume it, let them do the work. The best compost . . . is highly mature.”
     Duren adds that he could speed up the decomposition process using a product such as synthetic nitrogen.
     “It wouldn’t help the end product, though,” he says, explaining that his goal is “working with nature, not trying to totally control it.”
     Among issues compost facilities must deal with if they accept food waste, in addition to permitting, is odors, pests and pathogens and capital outlay. Also critical is ensuring that no non-organic items such as metals and plastics are included in the food waste, a policy Duren cites as a reason why some businesses are rejected from processing their food waste with Marvin’s.
     “I cannot take even the smallest plastic,” Duren says. “I don’t have 500 years to wait.”
     Hedrick says one of the biggest challenges to handling the amount of food waste being generated nationwide is lack of infrastructure. Duren agrees, noting that in Ohio, only 22 permits have been issued statewide to compost food waste.
     “Right now the infrastructure quite honestly cannot handle it if every grocery store chain decided to jump on board and do this,” Hedrick says. “We’re probably five to 10 years off to handling everyone coming aboard.”
     Composting facilities such as the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, which opened in 2009 on a 27-acre site, are looking to fill that void. It is currently developing two projects in Massachusetts, one in New Jersey and Illinois, three in Florida and another in Maryland, according to Widell.
     The Wilmington plant takes in 300 tons of food waste daily in a multi-state area encompassing New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. It also takes in 650 tons per day of yard waste and clean wood. In the first nine months of 2010, the facility generated about 30,000 tons of compost using aerated windrows.
     “We built this [current Wilmington] facility under the premise of ‘if you build it they will come,’” Widell says. “We’re discovering that there’s a fairly large pent up demand for this service.”
     “It’s the green thing,” Duren adds. “It’s the right thing to do.”