Two City Councilmembers are pushing legislation that would create composting and electronics waste drop-off sites to compensate for recycling reductions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the Community Organics and Recycling Empowerment (CORE) Act, the city would place three drop-off sites for organics and community recycling centers for hazardous or e-waste in each community district by June 2021. The 177 centers would be open 20 hours a week, at minimum.

On May 11, U.S.

Organics recyclers are facing tense times as measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 begin to impact community composting efforts. With many of these small-scale companies depending on universities and restaurants for a majority of their collection volumes, mass closings across the U.S. have left collection services in a tight spot.

Read more at Waste Today

Right now, curbside composting of residential food waste is available in the cities of Bend, Redmond and Sisters—but not the wider county. But in the (somewhat) near future, those living in the wider county could see curbside composting come to them. The Deschutes County Solid Waste Advisory Committee has been working on a Solid Waste Management Plan for the past year and is expected to present a final draft of the plan to the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners in May.

With companies looking to reduce waste promising all packaging to be recyclable or compostable in the coming years, Oregon Composters have united in their efforts to keep Oregon's composting programs "food only". Click here to read why.

After a decade of trying, one of Oregon's leading compost facilities is calling it quits on compostable packaging — and until more clarity comes to the market, it might not be the last.

Jack Hoeck, vice president of Rexius, shared the news at this year's U.S. Composting Council Conference in Phoenix. Initially, he said, Rexius had expected compostable packaging would help capture more food scraps, and that any resulting contamination could be managed effectively. 

States and local agencies have enacted or are considering food waste disposal bans or mandates. Two key questions that need to be answered prior to taking this step are:

How much food waste are we talking about?
Is there adequate processing capacity at our state’s or region’s composting and anaerobic digestion facilities?

Having this data helps calculate a realistic assessment of how a ban or mandate can be adopted and implemented successfully.

Getting people to recycle is a challenge. Getting them to recycle as much as they can and to do it correctly can feel impossible. After all, different materials and housing environments present enormous barriers when encouraging recycling. 

That notion is particularly clear when trying to recover food scraps from multi-family buildings. Is success in that realm even possible? The answer is yes – but an understanding of the human factor in changing deep-seated attitudes and behaviors is a requisite for success.

In a mass of discarded food, Los Angeles County sanitation planners see far more than a waste-disposal problem—they see a resource. A bucket loader digs into the mass and hoists a load of glop into a grinder. Seconds later, the chewed-up food waste pours into a bin, its first step toward the anaerobic digesters that will blend it with household sewage and use it to brew biogas, manufactured methane suitable for use in running a county wastewater plant.

The City of Seattle has posted a Request for Proposals (RFP) for future Organics Processing Services to process yard debris, food scraps, food-soiled paper, compostable food packaging, and compostable bags received through the City’s transfer stations and through the City’s solid waste collection contracts. The selected vendor(s) will begin organics processing services starting in 2020 or 2022.