Lawyer Bill Wachtel owns an unusual side business: collecting all the horse manure at the Belmont, Saratoga and Aqueduct raceways and trucking it to Pennsylvania to be sold to composters. As he likes to say, he’s the only person who goes to the racetrack and wins on every horse.
But now, with expanding city regulations and rising social consciousness promising to create a robust stream of separated organic waste, the former BillyBey Ferry owner sees a way to improve the margins on his winnings. Instead of sending manure in 70 tractor trailers to Pennsylvania every week, he hopes to build a facility to combine it with organic waste and make compost right at Belmont Park, next door to the transfer station where his company, Equicycle, collects the droppings.
He still needs environmental permits and the go-ahead from the New York Racing Association, the state agency that oversees Belmont. But the proposal is, well, pretty ripe.
A worldwide campaign to reduce food waste—which emits methane and becomes a major contributor to global warming once it winds up in landfills—has been gaining momentum. Meanwhile, the city will take another step toward its zero-waste goals when it expands the commercial organic-waste recycling program it began enforcing a year ago.
More than 1,700 businesses will be covered by the rules within the next year, in addition to the nearly 300 taking part in the program now. Environmentalists and food-waste activists welcome the expansion, but some quarters of the food, restaurant and waste-hauling industries fear it will bring chaos, disruption and higher costs.
Wachtel sees his project as an antidote to at least some of these potential ills.
“It’s a superfecta,” he said of the composter, which would mix manure and food waste beneath odor-trapping Gore-Tex tarps. It could be up and running by December, handle 50,000 to 100,000 tons of organic waste annually and allow him to sell the compost at favorable rates to landscapers in the boroughs and across Long Island.
“It would be a win for the city, the state and the environment,” Wachtel said, “and for my family’s business.”
The facility’s proximity to the city would also address haulers’ complaints that many of the disposal sites suggested by the Department of Sanitation’s commercial organics plan are far away—up to 100 miles by truck. Composting advocates, while acknowledging the difficulties of the transition, say projects like Wachtel’s are an example of why the city must push ahead.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” said Christina Grace, chief executive of Brooklyn-based Foodprint Group, which works with food businesses to reduce waste and manage organics recycling. “There are lots of organizations that are trying to build new infrastructure. But if they can’t get a steady stream [of waste material], they can’t get financing.”
Wachtel’s plan is a sign of the investment and innovation that the regulations can spur. However, his project still has to be built. And industry concerns go well beyond whether his composting facility—large though it may be—will come to fruition.
Chief among them is whether there is enough processing capacity at nearby locations to create a competitive market. If that happens and composters and anaerobic digesters became a more attractive choice than landfills, waste generators and haulers could comply with the regulations without significant new costs or long, gas-guzzling drives.
“I have at least monthly meetings with different companies trying to get into this space,” said Thomas Toscano, president of Mr. T Carting, a family-owned waste hauler in Queens that has long worked with composters. “The trouble is, a lot of them are not on line yet. My fear is that if the city rolls this out too quickly, it can do more damage than good.”
To read the full story, visit http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180129/FEATURES/180129918/fighting-over-the-spoils-entrepreneurs-see-a-business-opportunity-in-organic-waste.