ARTICLES OF INTERESTTHE REPORTER - VACAVILLE, CASunday, March 17, 2002 Pay Dirt
Local Program Diverts Waste from Landfills,
Other Cities Watch and Learn
By Amy Gingerich Business Editor  Two miles east of Vacaville, table scraps from some of San Francisco's finest restaurants are ground together with yard waste picked up from houses in Vacaville and Dixon. The material is then stuffed into giant plastic bags.
No, this is not science fiction. It's 21st century composting at Jepson Prairie Organics.
This innovative program started in 1997 and half of San Francisco's households plus 1,100 businesses now participate. Add in all the yard waste being collected from Vacaville and Dixon and suddenly the proportions of what's being recycled escalate. "Composting began as a pilot program and in the last year it's been rolled out very aggressively," said Robert Reed, director of corporate communications for Norcal Waste Systems, Inc. In 1989, garbage companies and cities were mandated by the state to divert 25 percent of their waste away from landfills by 1995 and divert 50 percent by 2000 or face daily penalties of $10,000. Cities immediately got busy developing programs to divert trash away from landfills. One way for Vacaville Sanitary Service to reduce the city's trash was to send yard clippings to be composted. Vacaville Sanitary started composting these clippings in 1995 and Dixon Sanitary Service joined the effort in 1997. But while Vacaville and Dixon were successful in diverting waste away from the landfill on Hay Road, other cities serviced by Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Vacaville Sanitary and Dixon Sanitary, were not having the same success. San Francisco neighborhoods just didn't produce the amount of yard waste that Vacaville and Dixon did, so city officials worked with Norcal subsidiaries in San Francisco to develop other alternatives. Chris Levaggi with Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling said that between 60 percent to 65 percent of the garbage generated in San Francisco comes from the commercial sector with all of the commuters and visitors coming to the city each day. Jack Macy, organics recycling coordinator for the city and county of San Francisco's Department of the Environment, was in the midst of trying different strategies concurrently to reduce that city's waste heading to landfills. The city was encouraging home composting, green gardening, and other ways to reduce waste. Macy said the city and Norcal had determined in 1996 that 19 percent of what was being thrown away in San Francisco was food waste. Another 5 percent was yard waste while 11 percent was paper able to be composted. "The key to a successful 50 percent diversion (for San Francisco) was going to lie in food waste," said Bob Besso, with Sunset Scavenger Co. Norcal's subsidiaries in San Francisco, Sunset Scavenger Co. for residential customers and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling for industrial customers, partnered with the city of San Francisco to roll out the "fantastic three," referring to the three carts - a black cart for true trash, a blue cart for bottles, cans and paper, and a green cart for food scraps, food-soiled paper and yard waste. People were already recycling glass and plastic in recent years, but saving table scraps for composting was something new. "We're estimating about 40 percent participation on a monthly basis in the city, which is pretty good because we're talking about residential food waste and we didn't know how people would react," Besso said. To date, 1,100 commercial accounts in San Francisco have signed on for the program and half of the households in the city also have the option of the three toters. The remaining households will have the option by the end of the year. And the effort is working - although San Francisco had not yet hit that 50 percent threshold by 2000. In San Francisco in 2000, 46 percent of the city's trash had been diverted, compared to 56 percent in Vacaville and 61 percent in Dixon. Jepson Prairie Organics takes in 70,000 tons of material annually to compost - that's 70,000 tons of materials not going to landfills. Some 50,000 cubic yards of finished compost leave Jepson Prairie Organics annually. "Initially Jepson Prairie Organics tried to mix one part of yard waste to one part of food waste," said Greg Pryor, general manager at Jepson Prairie Organics. "Today it's actually two parts of food waste to one part of yard waste," Pryor said. Once the food scraps and green waste arrive at Jepson Prairie Organics, they are ground together to create a cocktail perfect for decomposition. The mixture is then fed into an Ag-Bag aerated pod designed to handle up to 225 tons of ground food and green waste. "Filling each pod takes one hour and 25 minutes," Pryor said. Each of these pods has two 4-inch slotted pipes inserted to aerate the mixture to help with the decomposition. At any one time, Jepson Prairie Organics has 60 to 65 of these pods on the ground. The material remains in the Ag-Bag pod for 60 days and is then opened and placed in windrows, which are 200-feet long by 14-feet wide by 5-feet high piles of the composted material. It cures for another 30 days h ere and the material is then placed on a giant trommel screen. Anything smaller than three-eighths of an inch can pass through. Because Jepson Prairie Organics uses so much yard waste in its composting, the finished product has much higher levels of nitrogen than typical soil. "Compost from Jepson Prairie Organics has about 1.85 percent nitrogen while most soil has 1.25 percent nitrogen," Pryor said. "It's so rich that it's best to mix it with other soils. We found that it doesn't make sense to grow produce exclusively in this mix. It's just too rich. It's too powerful," Reed said. Pryor said producing the compost costs Jepson Prairie Organics about $15 to $20 per ton. "It's hit or miss. A lot of our profitability depends on the markets," Pryor said. "There's an awful lot of compost for sale." Ultimately the soil produced through composting is sold commercially by Jepson Prairie Organics or given to local residents willing to pick it up at certain times of the year. Some organic farms purchase the compost to use in their gardening - ultimately growing fruits and vegetables that will end up back in San Francisco. Jepson Prairie Organics also sells its compost to soil blenders, who will use it to make potting, top or other types of soil. Nigel Walker, co-owner of Eatwell Farms north of Dixon, has been diligently using the compost as a source of nitrogen for his 65-acre organic farm. Walker said compost is spread on the fields at Eatwell Farms after each crop is harvested. "One of the reasons I like to buy local is that I'm an organic farmer and I like to buy locally. It doesn't make sense for me to be trucking compost across the state," Walker said. San Francisco businesses and residents are getting into the composting effort, too. "Some restaurants now recycle up to 85 percent of what they had been throwing out. In fact," Levaggi said, "some restaurateurs now ask, what's trash?" Levaggi said the effort has been well received among owner-operated restaurants, especially after the disposal company allayed fears about food odors by offering to pick up the containers daily. "Our goal is to get all the large hotels in San Francisco on board by the end of the year," Levaggi said. But the idea of composting food waste is spreading beyond the Bay Area. Seattle is now targeting its food waste as a way to divert more from the landfill and looking to Jepson Prairie Organics for the specifics on how to accomplish its goals. Oakland, too, is getting on board and city officials have asked Norcal to collect food scraps at 50 restaurants and markets in the city even though Norcal companies do not handle Oakland's garbage. And the concept is spreading nationally as well with Macy, Besso, Levaggi, and Pryor detailing specifics of the program earlier this month at a conference in San Francisco hosted by BioCycle Journal of Composting & Organics Recycling. Jepson Prairie Organics
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