Municipal Composting: From Oak Park to New York City

Environmental studies have shown that food scraps and other household compostables make up from 17 percent to as much as a third to a half of landfilled waste in this country. In the anaerobic conditions of sealed landfills, the slow and inefficient decomposition process leads to the release of methane gas above – a potent greenhouse gas more than 20 times the strength of carbon dioxide – and toxic leachate below. A nasty business, no matter how you slice it. Well, slicing it is exactly what progressive communities are trying to do.

Oak Park, IL, is experimenting with a win-win economic model of curbside collection for food scraps and “soiled paper”, in partnership with Waste Management, its trash disposal vendor. It’s a subscription service, available to residents for $14 a month (added to water bills), a modest fee which roughly equals the saved cost of trash tags currently required for yard waste collection. Waste Management provides receptacles, a small container and bags for kitchen waste, and a larger 96-gallon wheeled bin for yard trimmings, hauls the compostables to a site in Romeoville, and processes them into commercial landscaping products. Zealot of local disposal that I am, my first reaction cynically notes the handsome profit that is Waste Management is likely making (first on the collection fee, and again on the end product). Another coup for the great trash empire. The other problem is that hauling organic wastes any distance is a waste of valuable energy and burns fossil fuels unnecessarily.

But two features of the program keep me in full support. One, the subscription model targets those who, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t compost on their own, but more importantly, those who live in apartment complexes or shared dwellings less conducive to backyard compost operations. The second reason I like the idea is that the list of accepted wastes is impressively expansive and includes meat scraps, bones, and soiled paper (like cheesy pizza boxes), which the rest of us otherwise avid local disposers are forced to throw in the common trash. Oak Park’s pilot program began with a hundred or so families last year, to great acclaim, and next year, it expands to offer services to the community at large. It’s good for the environment – or at least better than the alternative – and it raises awareness generally about the potential resource contained in what most folks throw in the trash.

I always say that when people start composting – whether at home or through a program like this – they will realize how little actual trash they make. In combination with fastidious recycling, household composting reduces the intake volume – and virtually eliminates the stink factor – of the kitchen garbage pail. My own household takes our trash out no more than every third week, and often less. The trash doesn’t stink – it’s mostly granola bar wrappers and other nonrecylable food packaging – so we can afford to let it get fuller, and because it is dyer, the bag stays light and manageable.

For other communities whose contracts with Waste Management or other vendors have them paying by the pound for trash hauling and final disposal, there could be a sizable fiscal benefit as well. The cost of removing the heaviest and stinkiest category of rubbish from curbsides would be offloaded onto motivated subscribers, who have a powerful self-interest in maximizing the payoff of curbside composting, which exempts them from paying by the bag for yard waste pickup during peak seasons. Meanwhile, these households get into the rhythm of conscious disposal, and over time, I believe many of these households will venture into doing the compost themselves, moving us closer to the ideal of local disposal.

With Oak Park’s successful program in mind, I was very excited to read this week that New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has caught the compost bug. As the three-term mayor prepares to leave office at the end of the year, it’s legacy padding season in America’s largest, densest city, and Bloomberg wants a municipal composting/food scrap collection program to be part of his permanent record of activist, pragmatic leadership. Leading contenders in the race to replace Bloomberg are already lining up in support of the ambitious program, which hopes to compost 100,000 pounds of organic wastes per year, amounting to around 10 percent of the city’s domestic food waste. The program will begin as a voluntary initiative, but the city hopes to make it mandatory, even for restaurants (which are currently being targeted), within a few years. Like the Oak Park program, Bloomberg’s effort will include items typically difficult (or unwise, if not illegal) to compost in the backyard bin: meat scraps, bones, dairy, and other oily kitchen garbage. The wastes will be headed for a massive industrial digester that will convert them into biogas for sale. For a thickly populated, high-rise-heavy metropolis like New York to take this on, even at the modest scale of the initial launch, is a major step for municipal waste responsibility and consumption awareness more broadly.

In the meantime, it’s hard not to be impressed by a sentence like the following: “The city spent $336 million last year disposing of residential trash, exporting most of it to landfills in Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.” Bloomberg’s program is estimated to save the city’s budget about $100 million a year. If that doesn’t get the attention of cash-strapped mayors around the country, I don’t know what will.