The Macalester-Groveland Community Council is partnering with Eureka Recycling, our nonprofit partner in zero-waste, to conduct a residential composting project in a section of 1100 households in Macalester-Groveland. This is part of a larger project to look at the different issues and benefits of several possible ways we can choose to handle our food waste. Eureka Recycling works closely with Community Councils and the City of Saint Paul to identify and implement waste reduction initiatives to meet the goal of becoming a waste-free city by 2020. To this end, we are working with them to develop a long-term composting plan for Saint Paul aimed at getting every bit of compostable material out of our trash.

While this is not yet the citywide rollout of a permanent program for collecting materials at the curb for composting, this project will generate much-needed information to design a citywide composting program that has the highest benefits for our environment while considering costs and how the people who will use the program prefer to compost.

This project examines multiple aspects of handling food waste:
•    Stop Wasting Food: Using cooking, shopping, and food storage tips to not make so much food waste in the first place (which saves us money too);
•    Backyard Composting: Composting in backyards and with worms so we can use it on our gardens to grow food and flowers;
•    Composting Collection: Collecting materials in different ways, including by bike, truck and drop-off, because we don’t all have the means to compost at home;
•    Making Dirt: Processing materials in different ways, including windrows and anaerobic digestions, to turn it into soil in large amounts away from home once it is collected; and
•    Uses for the Finished Compost: Using the material that comes out of those different processes in different ways, including growing food, construction projects, landscaping and more.

*See the full project description for more information. 

1. What’s happened so far?

This project began in the spring by taking a close look at how to increase backyard composting in the neighborhood. The Macalester-Groveland Community Council organized a team of volunteers to visit the homes of their interested neighbors to bring them equipment and help them start composting in their backyards. These volunteer continue to help people start backyard composting at home! Call the community council to volunteer or find out more about backyard composting.

2. What’s happening now?

For a limited three-month period, from June 18 to September 17, Eureka Recycling is collecting food scraps (and more) through different collection methods. Three areas (200 households each) in the Macalester-Groveland project area will help test different collection methods: some via a drop-off site on Macalester College’s campus, some by a bicycle pulling a trailer, and some in a separate compartment on their regular recycling truck.

In addition to learning about the impacts of these different transportation methods for composting, we will help Eureka learn how collection interacts with backyard composting. For example, how much can we compost at home before we collect materials? How does this impact the design and costs of a curbside composting collection program?  Call Eureka Recycling’s zero-waste hotline with questions: (651) 222-SORT (7678)

3. What’s coming next?

Preventing Food From Being Wasted (Beginning July 2010): Working with the NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise and behavioral psychologist Dr. Christie Manning of Macalester College, this project addresses food waste at the source. With help from a group of neighbors in the Macalester-Groveland project area, we will investigate the information and motivation people need to prevent food from being wasted in order to reduce the amount of material that needs to be composted in the first place.

Making Dirt (Ongoing): This project will also look closely at what happens to the materials we collect for composting. The potential methods to turn these materials into dirt are many but the available methods are few (particularly in Minnesota). There are currently many obstacles to developing more local processing capacity, including the fact that no one knows which is the best way to do it.

4. How will the results be used?

Recommendation to the City of Saint Paul: While this is not yet the citywide rollout of a permanent program for collecting materials at the curb for composting, this project will generate much-needed information to make Saint Paul’s composting program sustainable, cost-effective, and designed for the highest environmental benefit. Eureka Recycling will use the information, feedback, and data from this project to make a recommendation for the City of Saint Paul’s composting program. If you would like to be involved in taking recommendations to the City of Saint Paul, please let the community council know you we can keep you informed and you can get involved when the time is right!

Removing barriers for composting: In the Twin Cities there are some pilots and programs currently in operation (including residential, commercial, and school programs), but overall, composting is new territory, and the composting infrastructure in the Twin Cities is in its infancy. Although some learning from our 20 years of recycling experience can be applied to composting, there are many unique (and undiscovered) characteristics about composting that this project will help to illuminate. This project will fill in some important gaps of knowledge for composting in Minnesota and around the county. This work will help to shed light on the barriers that currently exist to making composting more available and help us get to work removing them. Again, there will be several ways in which people with experience composting will be able to help advocate for better composting support from the state, county and city level. Let us know if you’re interested.