Food-waste composting: recycling's next frontier

By Bob Young
Seattle Times staff reporter

	HARLEY SOLTES / THE SEATTLE TIMES At Cedar Grove Composting, residential food waste, like this apple, mixes with regular yard waste like tree branches and cones. The resulting product is dried, aged and sold to a variety of customers.
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Food scraped off your plate at Seattle restaurants next year could go into recycling bins — and later come back to your table, in a roundabout way, in a bottle of wine.

Seattle needs to move to this new frontier to achieve its recycling goals, says Mayor Greg Nickels, who has proposed that the city launch a food-waste-recycling program by 2005.

"We are looking to put the pieces in place in the coming year. It might happen towards the second half of 2004," said Hans Van Dusen, Seattle's solid-waste contract manager.

Such a program could allow Seattleites, in a way, to consume the same carrot or salmon twice. That's what happens in San Francisco, where food waste travels a 150-mile loop from restaurant to composting facility to vineyard and back. "We're closing the nutrient loop and keeping food from just wasting in a landfill," said Jack Macy, who runs San Francisco's food-recycling program.

Food recycling is gaining popularity. Kirkland started a residential food-recycling program this month. Last month, Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn announced plans to move in the same direction.

Food waste accounts for roughly one-third of Seattle's garbage. It's the one major recyclable material Seattle isn't reusing to boost its recycling rate, which stands at 38 percent. The city's goal is a 60 percent recycling rate by 2010.

The City Council last week approved the first phase of Nickels' recycling initiative — new rules requiring Seattleites to recycle paper, bottles and cans in 2005. But that alone won't get the Emerald City to its green goals.

Van Dusen is hammering out the details of collection, hauling and customer-service systems that would make food recycling feasible in Seattle.

Why bother?

Scant opposition has emerged to Seattle's beefed-up recycling plan. No one protested or publicly lobbied against the mandatory recycling rules, which the City Council approved without any debate. The Washington Restaurant Association said its local members are not against the concept of food recycling.

The closest thing to a critic might be Eric Montague, an analyst at the Washington Policy Center, a Seattle think tank that advocates lower taxes and fewer regulations.

Montague's chief question is "why bother?"

Unlike most King County cities, which rely on the nearly full Cedar Hills Landfill, Seattle sends its trash to an Eastern Oregon landfill. Seattle officials admit the city is at no risk of exhausting its landfill space for decades. So why pursue a 60 percent recycling goal, Montague asks.

And, he added, what are the practical benefits of using a carrot twice?

"I have a suspicion it may use less resources to just throw it out. Let's do a thorough analysis of all impacts in deciding whether we can do it," he said.

Proponents say food recycling enriches soil with organic nutrients and helps retain water. That, in turn, reduces reliance on chemical fertilizers, which can run into streams and harm wildlife.

Keeping food out of landfills also reduces emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas. And, food composting may cut down on air pollution that's created when tons of waste are hauled hundreds of miles to landfills.

But it won't be cheap. Recycling food will cost the city more than recycling materials such as paper. The new mandatory paper-recycling plan is projected to save the city $2 million in 2007, because it will divert tons of waste from the landfill.

Recycling food waste, "strictly speaking, is not cost-effective," said Tim Croll, community-services director for Seattle Public Utilities. The bottom line is that recycling food waste may cost more than putting it in landfills — as much as $2.8 million a year, according to city estimates.

The tab could be less after the city draws up actual contracts, Van Dusen said. The plan, as pioneered by San Francisco, calls for food-waste-collection rates that are 20 to 25 percent lower than garbage rates, in order to create an incentive for food recycling.

Program costs "would be covered partly by the food-waste rate, and partly by increased garbage rates," notes the mayor's recycling proposal. Garbage rates would increase less than 1 percent, Van Dusen predicted.

The compost process

Here's how Seattle's food-recycling program might work:

Currently, Seattleites are throwing out more than 200 million pounds of food and compostable paper a year, with roughly 70 percent coming from the commercial sector and 30 percent from households.

The idea is to focus on the commercial side first; Seattle has no impending plans to recycle residential food waste. Restaurant kitchens, hotels, institutions and grocery stores would have two containers: one for garbage, and another for compostable matter.

Containers would be lidded and leak-proof. All kinds of food scraps, including meat and food-soiled paper, would go into recycling containers and be picked up as frequently as trash.

Food waste would be trucked to Cedar Grove Composting in Maple Valley. The company would grind it up and put it in big piles mixed with yard waste. The piles would be covered by giant Gore-Tex membranes, said Cedar Grove Vice President Jerry Bartlett.

The covers protect the piles from rain and help heat them enough to kill pathogens. Computers monitor temperature and control air flow, Bartlett said.

The compost would then be dried, screened, aged and sold in bags, perhaps to farms and vineyards as well as to residential gardeners.

Now used for Kirkland's yard and food waste, the new technology produces compost without the odor problems that plagued the company in the late 1990s, Bartlett said. Cedar Grove Composting paid a $50,000 fine to Puget Sound Clean Air Agency in 1997, and the company and its insurers paid neighbors $8.6 million in 1999 to settle a odor-related lawsuit.

"They are doing tremendously better," said Steve Van Slyke, engineering supervisor at the air agency. "After the lawsuit, their commitment to environmental management became serious."

Complaints about the company totaled 3,220 in 1997, according to agency records. Last year, the number of complaints dropped to 222. This year, complaints have dropped further — to an average of 16 per month between July and November 2003.

"For the most part, everyone acknowledges there have been substantial improvements. Everything seems to be up to snuff, as far as we can tell," said attorney Al Malanca, who represented about 4,000 Cedar Grove neighbors in the 1999 suit.

Jeff Thomas, one of the original plaintiffs, said the smell is much improved. His fiancée, Corrine Connerley, said she still notices an odor from the plant some nights and on hot summer days.

Not everyone is convinced the problems are over, however. Roger Lemon, who lived directly across the street from the plant until moving to Covington last year, said many of the problems remain.

"I just got so disgusted I sold out over there," he said

Van Slyke noted that the composting facility is very close to King County's Cedar Hills landfill and historically there has been finger-pointing over which facility caused rotten smells. "I think they can handle food waste. I don't think it will be a problem with the Gore technology," Van Slyke said.

Restaurants are willing

The biggest challenge to successful composting, said Bartlett, is teaching consumers to keep non-organic materials out of the food-waste stream.

"We learned from San Francisco that educating restaurants and homeowners is very important," added Bartlett. "When they didn't do that, they ended up with highly contaminated waste that didn't produce very good (compost)."

Local restaurants are interested in the idea, said a spokeswoman for the Washington Restaurant Association. "We're very open to talking about how to do it efficiently and cost-effectively," said Barbara Smith. "It could reduce costs to our members. If you can get things out of the waste stream it's obviously an incentive to business."

Details of the city's impending proposal will be crucial, Smith said. "Frequency of pickup, space demands, training — they're all of great concern to us. Cost-benefit analysis is something we'd have to look at."

Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com. Staff reporter Nick Perry contributed to this report.

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