Returned to the Earth

Central Oregon’s first food recycling program is set to roll out early next month, giving restaurants and other businesses an opportunity to convert scraps and uneaten meals into compost.

The program, announced by Deschutes Recycling President Brad Bailey at Wednesday’s Bend City Council meeting, will initially be restricted to the commercial customers of Bend Garbage & Recycling, Cascade Disposal and High Country Disposal.

Bailey said he expects it will take the garbage services some time to determine how well the program is working before they consider expanding it to residential customers.

Bailey said separating garbage from food scraps will require some additional effort by businesses that choose to sign up for the program, but that the expense of hauling away food scraps will likely be offset by a lower garbage bill.

“The biggest thing is (making sure) what goes in the cart isn’t still in wrappers or plastic, or doesn’t have foil,” he said. “It’s keeping that stream clean, and keeping trash out of the food waste.”

Deschutes Recycling has been conducting a pilot program recycling the food waste from St. Charles Bend since June, collecting approximately 21⁄2 tons of food scraps each month — including meat and dairy products not usually added to a backyard compost heap — and composting it at Knott Landfill. The compost from St. Charles and other participating businesses will eventually be for sale. It should be considerably richer than the landfill’s yard debris compost, Bailey said, as much of the local yard debris consists of pine needles and other woody materials that contain few nutrients.

Bailey said the process of composting the food waste varies slightly from how yard debris is composted at the landfill.

While the yard debris is simply ground up and spread out in long rows on the ground, the food waste blend is placed in a large container, and periodically injected with air to add oxygen to the decomposition process.

A small amount of yard debris compost is placed on top of the food waste blend, which helps keep odors down and introduces the microorganisms needed to break it down. After about 45 days, any germs or bacteria that had been in the food waste will have been killed, Bailey said, and the food waste compost can be mixed with the yard debris compost.

About 25 to 30 percent of a typical household’s garbage output is made up of food waste that could theoretically be composted, Bailey said.

Mike Riley from the Environmental Center in Bend worked closely with Deschutes Recycling in developing the program, and said food waste recycling is the next logical step in the effort to reduce the amount of waste buried at the landfill.

Communities that have expanded food waste recycling to residential customers have been able to push the proportion of their waste that doesn’t end up in a landfill to around 60 percent, Riley said, as compared to around 40 percent in Deschutes County.

Such communities often alter their garbage collection patterns, sometimes collecting food waste every week while picking up garbage every other week.

“Eventually it gets to sort of flipping the old model, where garbage was every week, and everything else was sort of an afterthought and was picked up more infrequently,” Riley said. “The goal is, ideally, an empty garbage can.”

Mark Peterson, the director of hospitality at St. Charles Bend, said hospital employees have had few problems with the program once they learned to separate food waste from garbage and to keep the food waste containers as clean as possible.

“I look at the landfill as a community resource, and we want to preserve it as long as possible before we need to get new land, and fill it up with stuff that could have been avoided,” Peterson said.
Peterson said he’s excited to see the program expanding, and is already working on a plan to bring back some of the finished product for a community garden at the hospital.

Scott Hammers can be reached at 541-383-0387 or at shammers@bendbulletin.com.