Durham expanding curbside composting program to 500 households

Composting involves allowing food scrapes to decompose, creating nutrient-rich soil, but in Durham's program, they remove the waste for you. The nutrient-rich soil is then sold or given away at city-sponsored events.

Durham resident Melissa Southern was already composting in her backyard when she heard about the pilot program.

"We were taking out less waste every week and putting fewer trash bags in our waste bin right away," Southern said.

She jumped at the chance to take her environmentally sustainable practices to the next level.

"When you put food waste into landfills, it generates methane and composting reduces methane emissions," Southern said.

"It pains me to see leftovers and food waste go into the trash. By composting, I’m getting every penny I can out of my purchase at the grocery store."

Wayne Fenton, the assistant director of Durham's solid waste department, said the average per person weekly collection from the bins is about five pounds and the weekly average of bins put on the curb is nine pounds.

Composting keeps food waste out of the landfill — in Durham food waste accounts for 18% of material in the landfill.

It also creates nutrient-rich soil.

"We are at about four-and-a-half tons that have been diverted," Fenton said. "You’re keeping it out of the landfill, and you’re getting a value added product at the end of it."

Fenton said Durham’s program is one of the easiest ways to participate.

"We were advised by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality that to the best of their knowledge, we’re the first curbside collection in North Carolina," Fenton said.

The City of Durham’s Innovation Projects Manager Lyndsay Gavin said the curbside composting program is about more than a new way to take out the trash. The program is done in partnership with Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight.

"It’s been very intentionally designed to make it easy for people to participate and easy to understand," Gavin explained.

"The city side is figuring out logistics between collection, and routing, and those things through the small scale pilot, but there’s also a research side to this, which is kind of looking at, what are the best behavioral interventions that can get people to participate, want to compost, and to compost correctly."

In the next couple of weeks, the program will expand from 80 to 500 households.

Fenton said they’ll continue to gather data through the second phase of the program.

"We need to have a pretty good idea as a city of what to expect quantity wise, what are the resources we’re going to need – staff, vehicles, so and and so forth," Fenton said.

Southern hopes it could become free or low cost, so that more residents could participate.

"As the program expands i would like to see equity be part of it, that it’s open to neighborhoods of different incomes, different backgrounds," Southern said. "I would love for this to be a free program or a very low cost program so that we can get more folks around the city participating."