Composting organic wastes diverts materials from landfills, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and enriches soils – all favorable outcomes for the city of Durango’s sustainability goals. But composting isn’t exactly mainstream.
Not yet, anyway.
In 2021, a city request for proposals for a public-private composting partnership included the goal of citywide mandated composting within three years, said Marty Pool, sustainability manager for the city. That has not yet come to pass.
In fact, not much progress has been made toward the goal at all, he said. But the city hasn’t given up on its mission.
Durango City Council approved the formation of a resident and stakeholder focus group Tuesday tasked with identifying the best approach to making composting a citywide service.
Pool said in an interview the focus group will be similar to another focus group discussed to evaluate the usefulness of stormwater fees to fund the city’s long-standing stormwater maintenance needs.
Additionally, City Manager José Madrigal was directed to research organic waste management programs in other towns and cities and to conduct pilot programs as case studies for the city’s consideration.
There are multiple ways of implementing citywide composting. Some may be easier than others, depending on the municipality, its residents, and their attitude and understanding of composting – hence the focus group’s task, Pool said.
In a presentation to City Council in December, Pool summarized two approaches to citywide composting. The first is mandatory fees. The second is an organics ban.
Both options have their pros and cons.
A mandatory fee is not well precedented in other Colorado communities, although it would entail a service similar to Durango’s recycling program, he said. Fees would help fund the service, which could be rolled out citywide just like trash and recycling services. But with any new service comes new administrative responsibilities, such as accounting for residents who use alternative disposal methods like home composting or compost donations to farms and ranches.
An organics ban would simply prohibit residents from throwing organic, compostable wastes into the garbage. But enforcement of such a ban is not so simple, he said.
On one hand, Pool said, an organics ban would allow residents to dispose of organic waste through third parties on the open market, which has been implemented in other communities. In Durango, residents can subscribe to Table to Farm Compost’s curbside collection service, which came about from a public-private partnership between the city and Table to Farm. Residents and businesses can subscribe to the program for $28 per month for weekly service or $18 per month for biweekly service.
On the other hand, enforcing a ban would be difficult, and the risk of contamination – organic wastes ending up in the trash and ultimately the landfill – is greater, and the ban could prove unpopular with residents, Pool said. On top of that, with open market services comes unregulated costs to users.
Pool said city garbage trucks already have cameras to monitor waste collected. But cameras can’t see the contents of trash bags. Even current violations, such as dumping electronics, which is illegal in Colorado, are hard to catch. Many residents may not even know throwing away electronics is illegal.
Waste audits are one way to enforce an organics ban. But a waste audit requires sorting through all the trash from a truck on a given route to determine the percentage of contaminants getting through collections, often at the expense of hiring a company to do it, he said.
Pool added that waste audits are also personal and invasive to one’s privacy, and that makes him wary of such an approach to enforcing an organics ban.
Pool said on Tuesday there are several pilot programs that could be investigated:
- A “Pay as you Throw” program allowing residents and businesses to change the frequency and size of their compost bins and pay different amounts for collections.
- Low-income rebates for compost services could be modeled after the city’s utility rebates for trash, recycling and water utilities.
- Commercial restaurant and food service programs could be expanded.
- Direct compost drop-off sites could be placed around the city to make composting more convenient.
“There are thousands of commercial businesses (such as restaurants) that could be composting, yet only a few work with Table to Farm right now,” said Table to Farm co-owner Monique DiGiorgio. “Working with businesses is really important … because people are on tight budgets right now. This would also help divert that waste.”
Fort Lewis College environmental science student Mike McComb, along with students Jayda Arguelles and Gavin Brooks, wrote a paper analyzing Seattle’s successful composting program for their final assignment in FLC professor Kaitlin Mattos’ Sustainability by Design course.
McComb presented his and his colleagues’ findings to City Council on Tuesday.
In an interview, he said their paper makes suggestions for how Durango can follow Seattle’s lead. It concluded the city could advance composting efforts by achieving communitywide support for Table to Farm.
“Durango needs to implement a campaign to show the importance of composting and how putting organic waste into the trash is actually hurting our environment,” the paper said.
The paper said food waste is the largest category of methane-emitting material found in landfills across the United States. Durango can stress to residents the convenience and accessibility of composting – composting at home reduces the amount of trash created, meaning fewer trash bags and less effort taking out the trash.
Incentives such as reduced waste collection fees for compost bin owners can be offered. And, business partnerships with Table to Farm would open the opportunity for more educational programs offered to the community, the paper said.
As with many behavior-adoption scales or timelines, there are early adopters of new technologies and practices, early majority and late majority adopters, and laggards, Pool said.
He placed Durango’s community in the “early adopters” phase of composting, wherein residents most interested in composting – about 20% of Durango households – have taken it up already.
But between early adopters and majority adopters lies a “chasm” that must be overcome.
“You usually see that early adopters phase kind of plateau or stagnate, and that’s what is known as the chasm,” Pool said. “In behavior or technology adoption, things can stall in the early adopters phase. And so it is a societal challenge to move things over what’s called the chasm from early adopters into majority (adopters).”
Basically, the city has reached a point where incentives and/or mandates need to be enacted to get the rest of the community on board with composting.
How is the city to achieve that push across the chasm? That’s what the proposed focus group will be tasked with figuring out, he said.
Pool said sustainability is about reframing how societies interface with the natural environment – accessing and using finite resources and managing pollution.
Why organic waste matters in sustainability
Durango Sustainability Manager Marty Pool said organic wastes breakdown anaerobically in landfills, creating methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
For an idea of how potent methane is, he suggested visiting the landfill at Fort Lewis College.
“You can smell the methane coming off the landfill. It’s not pleasant,” he said.
Categories of food waste include food waste, food-related paper waste (paper towels, napkins and compostable containers), biosolids, leaves and other yard waste.
Pool said organic wastes contain extremely valuable nutrients. Those nutrients are lost when organic wastes are dumped into landfills, requiring the use of synthetically produced fertilizers in their place.
And landfills simply take up space and have limited life spans, he added.
Organic wastes left to rot in landfills are a significant contributor to greenhouse gases. When put to good use, they contribute to agriculture and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers that rely on finite resources such as phosphorus, he said.
“We put nutrients into the soil and then those nutrients go into the food,” Pool said. “If we take those nutrients and then waste them by locking them up in a landfill, that’s a huge lost opportunity for what we could be putting back into our agricultural system.”
He said the thing about composting is it can be done at a hyperlocal level, more so than recycling. Aluminum, for example, might be collected and sorted locally, but it’s eventually shipped to factories and processed elsewhere.
Not necessarily so with composting.
One can buy produce from a local farmer or farmers market, consume it and compost the unused leftovers. He said that compost can be redistributed to the local farms.
“Whether it’s food waste or leaves or other things that we’re generating, but then using right back in our own farms and supporting our local agriculture, I think is … unique to composting,” he said.