thrice all american: Composting Food Waste...Coming Soon To Tacoma?

Composting Food Waste...Coming Soon To Tacoma?

· Posted Thursday August 3, 2006 by jamie

Heard via a commercial that Seattle has recently started accepting food waste and food-soiled paper in their yard waste bins. This sounds pretty cool to me, as it always kills to throw a pizza box into the garbage instead of the recycling over just a couple of grease stains. This sounds like a great step in Seattle’s efforts to become zero-waste, and I’d love to see a similar push here in Tacoma.

Now, in some ways we have a great situation here in Tacoma in that both recycling and yard waste collections are free services if you pay for residential garbage service, whereas in Seattle there is a fee for a yard waste container on top of just garbage collection. So I’m certainly not complaining about the service I get right now. But at the same time, this stuff is compostable, right? Why can’t we just throw moldy bread and pizza boxes into our yard waste, keep them out of the landfill?

I contacted Tacoma’s Solid Waste department with just this question. The answer? They are definitely keeping an eye on the Seattle program to monitor its success. In addition, the company to which Tacoma’s waste is delivered (which I think may be Cedar Grove) is running some tests with food waste, and this whole process is being monitored by the health department.

So I guess there’s hope. For now, do you suppose the little wrigglers in my worm bin will eat a pizza box?

Link to Seattle Public Utilities Yard Waste Page
Link to Tacoma Solid Waste Yard Waste Page
Seattle P-I commentary on the new Seattle program

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