Every passenger at DFW Airport generates, on average, one pound of trash. The airport calculated its terminals have annually added about 32,000 tons of solid waste to North Texas landfills. About a quarter of that waste used to be organic — things like food scraps that are not really trash. The airport launched a small pilot program in one terminal A restaurant in 2021.

Turn, a Dallas-based composting company, trained the kitchen and wait staff at Lorena Garcia’s Tapas Y Cocina to put real trash into a regular trash can, but separate their food waste by scraping all of it into a green bucket. That’s all the restaurant staff had to do. Turn employees did all the rest – picking up the buckets daily, emptying them, transporting them to a facility, composting the contents and turning it into fertilizer for local landfills.

Once other kitchens in other restaurants saw how easy it was, the DFW Airport program took off. “We’ve grown exponentially,” said Lisa Roark, Turn program manager. “We are now in 25 different restaurants in three terminals and we are acquiring more every day.” DFW Airport says more than 100 tons of trash have been diverted from local landfills.

To read the full story, visit https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dfw-airport-composting-kept-100-tons-of-waste-out-of-local-landfills/287-3253a4de-9ec0-4533-b10c-bcfa495e9d89.
Author: Teresa Woodard, WFAA 8 ABC
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WFAA 8 ABC

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