A carrot-and-stick approach to composting legislation

“Before you enforce a ban, you really need a plan,” U.S. Composting Council Executive Director Frank Franciosi says.

While state legislatures might be willing to ban landfill disposal of food waste and yard trimmings, those plans are sometimes limited by a lack of large-scale composting facilities, he says.

“Infrastructure is needed,” Franciosi explains. “So, an infrastructure assessment should be done before these bans are enacted. … You need to do a complete assessment of where the food scraps are being generated and then [determine] where the facilities are located, what’s the current capacity and what’s the future need for capacity and then what’s the cost to add to the capacity? A lot of states have not done that.”

If the U.S. House of Representatives passes the Recycling and Composting Accountability Act—which would establish data collection and reporting requirements for recycling and composting programs—Franciosi says that could provide the data needed to drive regulations and intelligent investment in composting infrastructure.

“It’s really important to know what all your volumes are,” he says. “You’ve got to know where you are before you know where you’re going go.”

While the Recycling and Composting Accountability Act would help assess the need for organics recycling infrastructure, Franciosi says it might not include money to build composting facilities.

The Composting Council has been encouraging large companies to invest in infrastructure, but Franciosi says the best way to spur this investment is to garner support from the federal government.  

“There’s only so much the states can do,” he says. “The states regulate the permitting part of composting, and they also regulate the product. The federal government is the one that can make a big difference through grants and low-interest loans.”

When crafting legislation, he says state representatives should consider a “carrot-and-stick” approach as California has done.

“In California, Senate Bill 1383 mandates that you have to keep organics out of the landfill, but also in that language are incentives for farmers to subsidize the purchasing of the product.”

State of organics bans

Yard waste disposal bans are becoming commonplace in many regions of the U.S. Twenty-one states have enacted such bans, including Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Nebraska, which have exemptions in areas served by landfills with gas collection systems. Other states with yard waste bans are Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Vermont, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. 

As for food waste bans, California’s organics diversion regulations took effect at the beginning of this year. The state’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Law, or S.B. 1383, takes an individualized approach by placing responsibility on local municipalities to design and manage organics collection and recycling programs. 

Several states in the Northeast and Northwest—Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, California, Oregon and Washington—have created food scrap collection mandates or other legislation to divert food from landfills, as well. 

In many areas—particularly the Northeast—tipping fees are a major driver of food waste and organics diversion, Franciosi says.

“The draw on the bans have been in states where the tipping fees are high,” he explains. “Forty percent of the stream, weightwise, is compostable organics—food scrap. So, it makes sense to divert that to a compost facility.” 

An analysis published earlier this year by the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Environmental Research & Education Foundation indicates that landfill fees average $69.64 per ton in the Northeast, which is more than $10 greater than the national average.

Complicating the situation further is the fact that landfill space is running low in the Northeast, a factor that is fueling the export of waste to southern and western states with lower landfill fees. Although this approach has been used by large companies such as Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based WIN Waste Innovations, Franciosi says significant transportation costs must be managed.  

Franciosi says organics bans also are becoming more common outside New England and the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s starting to catch on in other states, but a lot of that is driven by the tipping fees,” he says. “Anywhere where you have a dense population, landfills are being built further out of town, so transportation costs go up. People are still going to eat; you're going to generate food scrap; you're going to generate yard waste. So, because of the weight of these materials, it makes sense to try to keep as local as possible.” 

 Keeping composting local doesn’t necessarily mean a major composting facility should be within 25 miles of a town (though it wouldn’t hurt), Franciosi says. Backyard composting and small-scale community composting programs also can have a cumulative effect on the big picture and could help knit together gaps created by a dearth of larger facilities.

“It all depends on the distance from the source generating [organic materials] and then the distance for whoever’s going to buy the product. But people garden; people landscape; where you have food scraps and yard waste, you also have yards and gardens and landscapers that can use the product.”

While many end markets likely lie in the agricultural and landscaping industries, there are urban applications for compost, as well.

“Compost is used in a lot of green infrastructure and project management in all the major metropolitan areas in green roofs, bioswales, anywhere where you have stormwater and can catch the first 1 inch of the rain event and filter it,” Franciosi says.  

In older cities with combined sewers, he says compost can act as a sponge and soak up excess stormwater during major rains, reducing the burden on wastewater infrastructure. 

The challenge of education

In addition to creating an economic and legislative environment conducive to commercial and residential composting, Franciosi says education is another key to viability. 

In some areas, younger generations are more engaged with sustainability practices, health and composting, he adds.

“In Raleigh, North Carolina, there are certain neighborhoods that have young people with young families, and they subscribe to a service that comes and picks [compostable materials] up,” Franciosi says. “They want to do the right thing. But those people also are probably the same people who buy organic produce and organic chicken. It’s a lifestyle, and I think they want to teach their kids the right thing.”

However, that group is a small subset of the larger population, and any state or municipality embarking on an organics ban needs to include a public education campaign before launching a formal program.

“You have to really educate the consumer before you do something like this because you’ve got people putting in items, such as Styrofoam coolers, plastic packaging materials and others, that cannot be composted,” he says.

Franciosi says Minneapolis did a particularly good job rolling out its program. According to the city’s website, food and yard waste are collected separately. The site also includes easy-to-find lists of what residents can and cannot compost.

Minneapolis area residents choose between a group of drop-off sites surrounding the city and a curbside collection service.

Teaching residents to minimize contamination of food waste also is important, Franciosi adds. While providing lists of accepted materials can help, getting a clean stream can be quite challenging because of subtle differences in materials.

“Pizza boxes will break down,” he says. “Cardboard will; wax cardboard will; plastic-coated cardboard will not. If you scratch the cardboard and you can feel the wax coming off it, that’ll break down. Microbes will eat that. If you scratch it and nothing comes off, that’s plastic-coated. The average homeowner doesn’t know these things.”

In addition to training consumers, operators of yard waste composting facilities often need training to manage food waste. That’s one of the areas where the U.S. Composting Council can help, Franciosi says.

“We’re here to help private individuals that want to be in this industry and raise the bar, as well as people who want to market the product through our foundation’s operator training program and the USCC’s operator certification and the Seal of Testing Assurance Program compost product testing program,” he adds.

Municipalities or yard waste facility operators can go the council’s Target Organics web page for more information.

The author is the managing editor of Waste Today magazine and can be reached via email at bgaetjens@gie.net.