Last week at work, I had a great surprise during lunch. When I finished my lunch, I started to throw out my orange peal and found a new trash can. But this one wasn’t going straight to the landfill. We have recycling bins at work, but this latest effort is an industrial composting program. These green bins are lined with compostable trash bags, made from PLA(Polylactic Acid derived from corn) and are able to handle any type of organic material. For your home compost, it is not a good idea to compost meat, paper, or leftovers, but with industrial composting these are all fair game.
My favorite part of this program is that my work has replaced all of the trash bags in the bathrooms with compostable bags and there are signs denoting these bags for only paper. This means that all of the wasted paper from people drying their hands is now composted instead of trashed. I don’t know about your work, but at mine we tend to fill the can in each bathroom every day.
This has been a super easy switch for my coworkers and I, so why don’t more companies try out composting. My first thought was cost, but it turns out that composting is significantly cheaper than throwing in the landfill. So what it comes down to is ease of setting up these sorts of programs. Many cities have composting programs, but they are not well advertised, sometime they cost money to take part in, and often take a little more effort than paying the garbage man. That is not how this has to be, and it is clear that things are changing… slowly.
It is one thing for the National Renewable Energy Lab (where I work) to start a program like this, but I believe with a little effort we can have all sort of businesses around the country start similar programs. So, next time you have an office meeting or talk to your boss, try suggesting a program like this for your office.
More information on Industrial Composting Programs
Many of these are specialized for certain cities, but the general information is very helpful for anyone interested in composting and you can always try searching for your city and compost.
-EPA’s Guide to Large Scale Composting
