Amid a proposal to begin countywide collection of food scraps and yard trimmings, county consultants say it will not compete with backyard composting.
Frederick County, the city of Frederick and several municipal green teams already have backyard composting programs and compost bins available to residents.
“We wouldn’t want to discourage that. In fact, the more people that backyard compost the less the cost for us running a large-scale program,” said John Daniels, chairman of the Solid Waste Steering Committee.
Frederick County’s solid waste consultant, Geosyntec, presented its proposal to the County Council on Tuesday to begin the separate collection of food and yard waste from single-family homes, schools and downtown Frederick restaurants.
The new program wouldn’t compete with backyard composting and would actually complement it, said Geosyntec consultant Thomas Ramsey.
Utilities and Solid Waste Management Director Kevin Demosky agreed that the county would not want to discourage backyard composting even while rolling out a county program.
Frederick County is required under the Maryland Recycling Act to provide certain metrics to the state about the amount of waste the county sends to landfills, materials it recycles and organics it diverts.
Residents are already diverting extra organics from the waste stream, but the county isn’t getting credit for it because it can’t measure it, Demosky said.
“I find [the] measurement part of solid waste the most frustrating aspect of all, because everybody’s busy wanting to try to quantify something that’s very hard to quantify to begin with and it’s intrusive to get into that type of measurement,” Demosky said.
People who are composting in their backyards are typically taking the easiest and most readily available items in their household and composting them for their own use, Ramsey said.
Some items such as pizza boxes — that are soiled with grease and cannot be recycled like paper — are bulky and hard to compost in backyard bins. With the county’s proposed new collection system, residents could instead dispose of the box in the new collection cart similar to the blue recycling system, Ramsey said.
Part of implementing the countywide compost program will be educating residents about what can and cannot go into the carts.
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