City has no space for food waste

Popular composting program puts city in a bind for space

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Jun 18, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (4 Reader comments)

Server Erin Altz sits by the compost bins where food is set out for composting at Ruth's Chris Steak House – an idea she initiated.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

There’s good and bad news about the city of Portland’s four-year-old food composting program for local restaurants and businesses.

The good news is that it’s become so popular — with about 470 businesses volunteering to participate, generating more than 17,000 tons per year — that there is demand for a new compost site to come on line in the Portland area immediately, program managers say.

The bad news is that after four years of searching for a compost site much closer to home than the one currently being used — 170 miles north, near Seattle — officials with the city, Metro and other agencies have come up empty.

Meanwhile, officials with area restaurants and businesses increasingly want to compost their food waste rather than see it tossed in a landfill.

“We’re doing the right thing,” said Chris Jaworksi, general manager of downtown’s Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which signed on in January and has seen a large drop in its garbage load and bill.

The food waste is being first sent to the Metro Central Transfer Station in Northwest Portland, to be inspected and then hauled north to a compost facility in Maple Valley, Wash. But that continual transport leaves a big carbon footprint, and is not a good long-term solution, officials say.

City and Metro officials are looking for suitable parcels of land nearby for a compost facility, as well as talking with various private companies to see if they might soon be able to accept the amount and types of food waste the city needs to compost.

“We’re trying to see how we can grow the food waste collection beyond where it is now,” said Matt Korot, recycling manager for Metro. “We’re very limited at Metro Central. The system can’t grow based on that facility.”

After a Portland-area compost site comes on line, the hope is to require all large food-waste generators (generating at least 1,300 pounds of food waste per week) — including restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, hospital and university kitchens, food processors and wholesale food distributors — to participate.

Then, possibly within a year, the city would offer curbside composting for residents, who’d set their food waste —produce, meat, dairy, bread, coffee grinds and food-soiled products like napkins and pizza boxes — out with their yard debris in their roll carts, according to Bruce Walker, recycling manager for the city.

That effort would likely start as a pilot program in a few neighborhoods, he said.

Eventually, Walker said, the city would require businesses and restaurants to participate. He expects it could happen within a couple of years, as long as there is the capacity at the facility and the businesses have the support they need.

Industrial land is scarce

But first, a local site must be found.

Walker said he’s been talking with the Port of Portland and the Portland Development Commission to see if any of their properties throughout the region might fit the bill.

West Hayden Island, a port property, is not on the table, he said. Neither is any property in the Northwest industrial area, or a site on Northeast Marine Drive that had been considered in 2005.

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