How composting in DC can help reduce food waste in landfills, especially during the holidays

The holidays are here, which means an annual increase in food waste between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day as more people dine out at restaurants and gather for dinner parties.

Most often, one person’s trash is all of humankind’s problem, with 1.3 billion tons of food wasted annually accounting for somewhere between 6% and 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste was a country, it would be behind only the United States and China as one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Like many jurisdictions across the country, DC has been trying to reduce the amount of food waste languishing in landfills. One of the ways to do this is through composting, or the process of recycling organic materials into nutrient-rich soil additives. Here’s a primer on the district’s efforts to compost.

Composting in DC

The DC Department of Public Works (DPW) created the Office of Waste Diversion in 2015. The office is tasked with diverting 80% of the city’s waste by 2030.

In April 2017, DPW launched the Food Waste Drop-Off program. The agency hired Compost Cab, a local organization that collects residential compost as well as commercial compost from hotels, restaurants, schools, entertainment venues and office buildings, to help design and operate the city-wide composting program, and established a drop-off location in all eight wards. Today, there are 10 participating locations where DC residents can drop off food scraps in each ward every weekend year-round, except in Ward 8, where the Ward 8 farmers market is closed for the winter.

If DC residents can’t make it to a weekend farmers market, they can also drop off food scraps to one of the 50 Community Compost Cooperatives around the city run by DC Parks and Recreation (DPR), or sign up for a home composting workshop where attendees can receive a voucher to help cut costs of home composting bins.

What you can and can’t compost

Fruits and vegetables without stickers, crushed eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags without staples, nutshells, breads, grains, cereals, rice, pasta, and household plants can all be composted, according to DPW.

“If you ate it, if it was once alive, you can compost it,” said Jeremy Brosowsky, founder and CEO of Agricity, which operates Compost Cab. The only exceptions to that rule in DC are meat, bones and dairy, including milk, cheese, and yogurt, which Compost Cab doesn’t collect to help prevent rodents and unsavory odors within residences.

Plastic bags, wraps, films, foam polystyrene (to-go containers), and any plastic or metal recyclables are not compostable.

Where do all your food scraps go, anyway?

After food scraps are collected at city farmers markets, they are taken to Fort Totten transfer station where Compost Cab has the ability to stage collection cans. All of the collected material is taken from there to the Prince George’s County facility in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Other private compost companies also take DC’s food scraps to be processed at the Balls Ford Composting Facility in Manassas, Virginia.

Compost Cab then brings the processed compost back to the city and distributes it to various local farms and urban gardens, such as Wangari Gardens and Washington Youth Garden, among others.

“If you take an apple core and throw it in the garbage, it is headed to a landfill where it is going to turn into methane,” Brosowsky explained. “Methane is about 22 to 30 times more noxious than carbon dioxide for the climate. So all composting is better than all landfill, it’s really that simple.”

Brosowsky said composting is a recipe, and like everyone’s mom’s spaghetti sauce, everyone thinks they have the best recipe. Composting is a natural process that’s accelerated for the purpose of creating a high quality soil. It combines oxygen, water, “browns,” aka carbon, and “greens,” aka nitrogen. The recipe is mixed together and let sit before it breaks down to a soil additive.

“We’re basically just harnessing nature’s way of recycling and doing it on as large a scale as we can,” Brosowsky said. “Taking care of our soils is a fundamental way to attack climate change.”

During the peak of the season, Compost Cab is at 15 farmers markets, collecting scraps in Alexandria, Virginia in addition to DC. “Across those 15 markets,” Brosowsky said, “we’ll see somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 people drop between 10 and 11 tons of food scraps in 36 hours over the course of a weekend.”

But for every person who drops off scraps at the market, Brosowsky estimates there are upwards of 100 people who don’t compost their food scraps at all.

Expanding composting in the coming years

Blake Adams, manager of the Zero Waste DC program, said DC residents have continuously called for DPW to expand the Food Waste Drop-off program. The DC Compost Feasibility Study published in April 2017 suggested the most cost-effective solution was to create a facility to process organic waste within the city limits, a proposal that hasn’t happened yet. Adams said DPW is actively seeking solutions to respond to this call for composting expansion by DC residents, such as the weekly curbside compost pick-up program Arlington launched in September.

Adams said curbside collection is certainly the goal, but DPW doesn’t have a timetable for introducing a third compost bin to accompany recycling and refuse bins for households, instead focusing its immediate efforts on commercial food waste.

“Although residential composting is a massive opportunity for the city to increase its waste diversion rate, commercial food waste is by far the bigger of the two waste streams by an order of magnitude and is likely why we are focused on the larger opportunity in the near term,” Adams said. “2022 will most certainly be an inflection point for composting adoption in DC.”

Brosowsky said composting is the tip of the spear on behavioral change, and more municipalities each year with the political will are making composting a fundamental piece of their system.

In the meantime, residents can learn more about ways to properly dispose of food and yard waste at the Zero Waste DC website.