City planners envision a future in the nation’s capital where every household is provided government-issued bins for organic waste alongside recycling and trash bins. A truck would pick up food and yard scraps at the curb once a week and transport them to a composting site inside the city limits.
District officials estimate that with curbside pickup, about 148,000 tons of organic waste could be composted annually — about 60 percent of the food and yard waste generated in the city each year. As a bonus, it would create a nutrient-rich soil additive for growing food and plants.
It’s part of a five-year composting plan that officials say could contribute to an 80 percent reduction in the city’s waste by 2032.
“We have a long way to go before we get there,” said Christopher Shorter, director of the D.C. Department of Public Works. “Ultimately, we are going to be a more environmentally friendly city because many more of our residents will be separating their food waste and reducing landfill, which is the ultimate goal.”
The District still has to secure a site of about 10 to 20 acres that it can transform into a composting center. The site must be suitable to compost both yard debris and food scraps — a potentially pungent combination if nitrogen and carbon levels aren’t properly balanced during the composting process.
Shorter said the city is on track to begin rolling out the plan and delivering bins for organic waste in the next five years.
In 2014, the D.C. Council passed the Sustainable Solid Waste Management Amendment Act, followed by completion of a compost feasibility study earlier this year. The study found a growing demand for composting in the city, but a composting infrastructure that hasn’t kept up.
It costs more to dispose of trash in a landfill than to compost it, so if all goes according to plan, officials say the composting program eventually would pay for itself. The District, which has committed $8 million toward the effort, now pays to dispose of waste at commercial sites in Maryland and Virginia.
The District is hardly the first city to attempt citywide composting. Seattle, San Francisco and Takoma Park, Md.— just across the District line — have implemented curbside programs. New York has a curbside composting program that serves more than 2 million residents; by next year, the city says, all residents will be served either through curbside pickup or neighborhood drop-off sites.
To read the full story, visit https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-wants-to-give-every-resident-a-bin-for-composting-and-offer-curbside-pickup-in-five-years/2017/08/07/ff58086a-7847-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html?utm_term=.aade311533c3.