Some cities and other governmental entities in Texas are trying food composting. Here's a look:
AUSTIN. In December 2012, Austin launched a pilot program that today provides 14,000 households with weekly curbside collection of food scraps, food-soiled paper and yard trimmings. The city contracts with a vendor that processes the compost and owns the material. The Austin City Council recently approved an expansion that will take the program citywide by 2020, picking up from 195,000 households. Through aggressive public education, Austin has maintained a contamination rate of less than 5 percent, said Emlea Chanslor, a city spokeswoman.
In October Austin started a commercial composting program for large facilities with food permits, such as hotels and entities with large commercial kitchens. The city encourages entities to first see if they can find places to donate the food before sending it out to compost.
Austin is among a growing number of U.S. communities that offer curbside collection. The U.S. Composting Council estimated in a 2014 report that about 200 U.S. communities offered curbside collection of food scraps, representing 2.74 million households in 19 states.
AZLE SCHOOLS. Five years ago, Azle schools tried a cafeteria composting program in which students from participating campuses sorted out compostable items from trash. A Crowley company picked up the compostable items. The program ended after about a year, when the company informed the school district it would no longer pick up the items, said Todd Smith, the district’s director of operations. More recently, the school district has had conversations with Mayer Materials about a composting program, but that fell through because the Azle schools wanted to include milk and juice cartons, which contained too much wax.
UT ARLINGTON. In 2005, UTA launched a composting program that today composts 32.4 tons annually of food waste from on-campus dining services, off-campus coffee shops and hospitals, and yard waste collected by grounds crews. The university uses the compost on campus grounds and its community garden. As the program grew, the City of Arlington provided a start-up grant to purchase a Bobcat and rotary compost unit and to extend water and electricity to the university’s composting lot. “We have a part-time employee who works on collecting the waste and taking it to the compost site on campus,” said Meghna Tare, the university’s director of sustainability.
photos of sustainability at University of Texas at Arlington:
