Bozeman, Montana, launches compost pickup program

City partners with curbside compost company Happy Trash Can to operate the Bozeman Convenience Site processing facility.

Organic food scraps turned into compost

Marina Lohrbach | stock.adobe.com

The city of Bozeman, Montana, has launched a new composting program in coordination with Happy Trash Can, a Bozeman-based composting pickup business, Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports.  

Happy Trash Can is operating the Bozeman Convenience Site processing facility, which accepts grass clippings, decomposing leaves and organics.

City crews collect organic material curbside from customers and deliver it to the processing site, where an aeration system is used to create compost. Under the city’s program, the city retains some of the composted matter for city use, and Happy Trash Can distributes the rest to customers including local farms, gardeners and landscapers.

A federal grant helped to fund the program, which has been running for about two months, says Nick Ross, the city’s director of transportation and engineering. Customers can sign up for weekly pickup for a cost of $10 a month, which provides a kitchen pail for food scraps and a curbside tote. About 1,100 people have signed up for the program so far.

The city has 13,000 waste pickup customers, about half of whom are recycling customers. Ross says the goal is to have the same number of composting and recycling customers. The program is expected to divert 2,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the landfill each year.

“It’s one of those things that we don’t necessarily think about all that often, but you only have so much space in the landfill to fit all of your trash, and so the more that we can divert ... like organics products into compost and recyclables, the less space that we need in the landfill,” Ross says. “It also is a service that produces something else for the community too. And so we get a good compost product that we can use in our parks and fields.”