The Many Benefits of Composting

February 4, 2020

U.S. PIRG and Frontier Group collaborate on a report detailing best practices for municipal compost programs.

According to a report delivered earlier this year, “Only 326 towns and cities out of more than 19,000 nationwide offer curbside food waste collection.” And even that small number represents an increase of 65 percent in the past five years! In my hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, I’m fortunate in that our local transfer station—Windham Solid Waste Management District—offers weekly curbside pickup of compost, “diverting approximately 104,000 pounds of compostable materials per month from landfills.”

Why compost, you might ask? The aforementioned report, authored by U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group, outlines both the benefits of composting as well as the degradation of our global environment when organic material is landfilled or incinerated.

First the bad news. Using the example of a simple apple core, “in the natural world, nutrients are continually cycled, replenishing soil and sustaining continual food growth,” the report states. “Today in America, we have replaced that cycle with a dead-end street that essentially pulls nu­trients from the soil and dumps them into landfills or burns them in trash incinerators.” Landfilling organics results in the production of methane, “a green­house gas around 56 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.” Landfilling or incinerating organics contributes to the degradation of topsoil, the loss of which “is a serious threat to our society’s ability to grow enough food in the future.” And replacing beneficial compost with chemical fertilizers has negative impacts on public health and the environment.

“In 2014, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) found that the U.S. has the potential to create 21 million additional tons of compost per year, which could cover up to 5.25 million acres of farmland,” the report continues. “This would be more than enough to cover all of the vegetable farms in the United States.”

So how do we get from a point where more than two-thirds of food waste and yard trimmings are landfilled or incinerated, to a society in which composting is commonplace? To make composting programs successful, the report advises, cities and towns should:

• Make them convenient. Offer curbside organic waste pickup along with trash and recycling.
• Make them affordable. Make composting programs less expensive than trash disposal through programs such as Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART), which charge residents and businesses less if they throw out less trash.  
• Institute a commercial composting requirement. Require large commercial organic waste producers, such as grocery stores, to divert waste from landfills and incinerators to composting facilities.
• Support local markets. Local municipalities should buy back locally produced compost for use in public projects or distribute it to residents, community gardens or other local projects to create a steady market for composting facilities.

Municipalities should also:

• Require commercial producers of organic waste to divert it to composting facilities.
• Require government projects to use compost.
• Incentivize backyard and community composting.

To achieve such an ambitious vision at the local level, federal and state help will be needed in the form of grants and loans, as well as the funding by agencies like USDA. Noting that current USDA funding to help community composting—which includes Implementing Rural Community Composting in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, a project managed by NERC—is set to expire in 2023, the report urges Congress to “increase USDA funding to develop projects in more states over a longer period.”

Back here in Brattleboro, our curbside program, while still voluntary, has adopted some of the best practices outlined in the report. Our Pay as You Throw program incentivizes the removal of organics and recyclables from the waste stream. Further encouragement is delivered by scheduling trash pickups for every other week, while organics and recyclables are picked up weekly. But by next year, Vermont’s Universal Recycling law will require that all food scraps be diverted from landfills. The practice has certainly been successful in Brattleboro, and we’re eager to see more communities sharing in the benefits.

“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure -- especially when that trash can be turned into compost,” said Faye Park, president of U.S. PIRG Education Fund. “By reusing food waste and yard waste, we reduce our garbage and the negative impact it has on the earth and our health.”

By Robert Kropp, NERC Office Manager & Bookkeeper.