Compost Infrastructure Challenges Circular Economy

When we picked the name Target Organics to describe our member-led effort to provide guidance to municipalities that need composting programs, we had some sense of the escalating demand for compost and ecosystem services.

But that demand has snowballed and become an avalanche. A current scan of state bill summaries in Legiscan shows more than 100 bills in statehouses today that involve composting or compostable products - compared to just a handful that used to be introduced annually just five years ago! And with the election of President Joe Biden, we expect infrastructure bills and agencies like USDA and EPA to include compost and regenerative agriculture in efforts to increase healthy soil and mitigate climate change.

The current explosion of state bills was accelerated by the collapse of the traditional recycling industry under pressure of the China Sword, the policy that increasingly rejected contamination that came with a push in the U.S. to single-stream recycling in the past decade. Additionally, the necessity of pandemic-related single-use products last year increased consumers' awareness and desire to reduce, recycle, and compost materials that are being landfilled and burned.

What’s Target Organics Got To Do With It?

This tsunami of interest presents a structural challenge that the Target Organics program is turning into an opportunity. While industry studies (and we are undertaking our own in the next few months - so stay tuned) show that less than 10% of the compost facilities in the U.S. have expanded to food waste, we hope to grow that number to fill in the “compost deserts” - areas with no compost programs - in the next five years with campaigns and tools for municipalities.

Our Target Organics Hub will be released in its “beta” form in Q2 with a curated collection of tools for cities and counties to plan and organize their programs. Through the hard work and dedication of two member-led committees - The Target Organics Hub and Roadmap committees - these resources are taking shape and will provide activists, elected officials and those in the industry with all the best work of the organics industry in one place.

The Hub will include our new Model Zoning Template, which is nearly completed; a Zoning Brief (see the article below), compost use information, and information about a decision path municipalities and others can take in designing new facilities.

USCC began working on this project in 2018 on the logic that counties and cities are the controllers of waste flow due to their responsibility for waste management.

To verify what the compost industry had already learned from the USCC’s member organizations about impediments to growing oases in compost deserts, the Target Organics program leaders surveyed municipalities and found these obstacles:

• Zoning: Land use categories specific to composting are far and few between in U.S. counties and cities, forcing operators of compost facilities to either work with city officials to create zoning amendments from scratch (sometimes requiring lengthy and contentious public hearings) or coming in to communities having to work with the costly and complicated rules for solid waste facilities, which compost facilities are not.
• Financing:
  • Public-private partnerships: Municipal recycling and public works managers in the survey said they do not have mechanisms or public support for new taxes or fees for financing new facilities, but their elected officials are amenable to private sector management alongside public sector ownership of facilities.
  • Lack of grants and loans for equipment: This is a frequently cited obstacle for private sector entrepreneurs. States, such as Tennessee, that have used tipping fee surcharges and other creative funding mechanisms and created grant funds for composting equipment have seen more composting facilities move forward.
• Permitting: The US Composting Council is currently updating a 2012 Model Rule Template the industry created for use by states that are updating their solid waste rules to include compost facilities. Where that has not happened, entrepreneurs have found it more difficult to navigate state solid waste rules or outdated compost facility frameworks that do not account for the way facilities now operate.
• Markets for Compost: The compost industry is constantly striving to build awareness in consumers and elected officials that diversion is not the only reason to begin organics recycling programs. When the beneficial use for carbon sequestration, soil health, stormwater and drought management and increasing the nutritional value of the plants that make up the food system are accounted for, composting is an irresistible, closed loop circular economy solution that needs recognition.

Visit the Target Organics page to learn about the committees and their work.