Waste not, want not: Wilmington compost center bets on "green' business model

WILMINGTON - Garbage in. Compost out.

That’s the mechanism used by the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, the biggest composting facility on the East Coast, to convert thousands of tons of food, yard and wood waste into rich, dark, valuable compost.

Now in its second year of operation on a 27-acre site across from the Port of Wilmington, the center offers businesses and consumers another way of going green while avoiding the high and growing cost of dumping food and other compostable waste in a landfill.

Supermarkets, hospitals, universities and other big generators of discarded food pay about 30 percent less to dispose of the waste at the center than they would at a landfill, Nelson Widell, co-founder of Peninsula Compost Group LLC, which runs the site, and they do so with the knowledge that the discarded food will emerge as usable compost after just eight weeks.

The center has been drawing waste from a growing number of local businesses since its launch in December 2009. In early May, it announced an investment by Texas-based Waste Management Inc., the largest waste services and recycling company in North America, which is now a minority shareholder in the Wilmington operation.

Widell declined to specify the size of Waste Management’s investment, but sees its stake as a sign that industrial-scale composting is entering the mainstream at a time when consumers are increasingly mindful of the need to conserve natural resources and businesses want to be recognized as responsible stewards of the environment.

“There’s a wave that’s rolling across the U.S.,” he said. “Most companies want to be green and reduce their carbon footprint.”

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DFM News looks at the Community Benefits Agreement the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center signed to get community support for the project.

By diverting their waste streams from landfills to composting facilities, companies can help reduce emissions of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – from unrotted material in landfills, Widell said.

Peninsula Compost Group estimates that the Wilmington facility prevents greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those generated by 8,800 cars in a year, earning tradable carbon credits that help contributing businesses build their green credentials.

“Customers are able to see that they are reducing greenhouse gases and they can prove it,” Widell said.

Premier Food Waste Recycling of Mercer County, NJ hauls about 50 tons of food waste a day to Peninsula from supermarkets, schools, hospitals and businesses. Before signing with the Wilmington facility, most of the material was taken to landfills, said Premier President Frank Fiumefreddo.

Now, all the food waste collected by Premier goes to the composting operation at a cost that’s about 25 percent lower than that of the landfill, Fiumefreddo said.

The lower cost, together with Premier customers’ growing interest in sustainability, has allowed his business to grow by about 35 percent since doing business with Peninsula, and he expects further growth as the word gets out.

“Everybody is looking to go green now,” he said.

Beginning June 1, Premier will be collecting food waste once a week from 500 homes in Princeton Township, NJ, in one of the first residential food recycling programs on the East Coast. The waste will then be trucked to Wilmington for composting.

Companies contributing food waste include Whole Foods, Wawa, Safeway, and Kraft Foods.

Premier contributes to Peninsula’s total intake of about 400 tons of food and other waste a day, up from a daily rate of 20 tons when the center first opened. The waste produces 150-200 tons a day of compost, which is sold to landscapers, nurseries and garden centers for $15-20 a cubic yard.

Mark Bleezarde of Moon Nurseries in Yardley, Pa. said his business now buys all its compost from the Wilmington center. He said the material, which he uses for plantings and blending with pine bark for potting, is high-quality and priced competitively.

“We love the fact that stuff isn’t going to the landfill,” he said.

It all adds up to a viable business model, said Widell, because the composting facility’s lower-than-landfill tipping fee attracts organic waste suppliers, while the cost of creating the compost is kept down by using tarps made from breathable Gore-Tex, rather than costly purpose-built structures, to cover the waste heaps that create the compost.

In mid-May, the green tarps covered 64 “windrows” of not-yet-compost, each measuring 186 feet long by 14 feet wide, and easily visible from Interstate 495. Each row contains about 600 tons of composting material.

Tour of the composting process: Learn how yard and food waste become compost in only 8 weeks

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The tarps allow the rotting mixture to breathe and maintain the right temperature while shielding it from rain which would, if it came in contact with the waste, create runoff and violate environmental regulations.

Crucially, the coverings prevent the escape of odors which are an unpleasant by-product of rotting food but are contained while the microbes within the windrows do their work.

The process begins with truckloads of food, yard and wood waste that are dumped in a “tipping” shed at one end of the site. A massive front-end loader digs into piles of each kind of waste, mixing them to create a blend of carbon, nitrogen and moisture to activate the composting process.

The machine then tips the dripping mass containing everything from grass clippings to orange peels and wood fragments into a shredder which homogenizes all the parts into similar sizes. The mixture is then pushed on to a conveyor belt where some of the plant’s 14 workers weed out plastic bags and other residual waste that cannot be composted.

The result of this initial stage of the process is a dark blended material that is picked up by another front-end loader and dumped in a windrow where it will eventually be covered by a Gore-Tex tarp.

The moisture and temperature of each windrow is monitored by computers in a nearby control room. The computers gather the data from three-foot-long probes placed in the heaps.

Keeping the air clean: Learn how odor is controlled at the facility

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To kill pathogens such as salmonella – which may come from meat waste -- each row must by law reach a temperature of at least 131°F for three consecutive days. The heat will also kill any weed seeds present, eliminating the risk that gardeners buying the compost would be importing unwanted seeds into their gardens.

The raw material for the compost also includes spoiled fruit from ships arriving at the Port of Wilmington, a major U.S. entry point for imported produce. During a recent visit to the Wilmington center, cardboard boxes full of bananas were stacked on pallets ready to be mixed into the compost mass. The boxes themselves are welcome because they will contribute carbon to the composting, however the plastic bags that wrap the bananas will have to be taken out, either by hand or by a machine at the end of the process.

The bananas and other discarded food from, for example, the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market are among the “low-hanging fruit” that the center has been able to pick so far, Widell said. He’s hoping for bigger contributions in future from supermarkets, hospitals, restaurants, and individual residences.

“Residential food waste is the next big thing,” Widell said, citing a San Francisco law requiring all homes and businesses to separate food waste from other trash, and to send it for composting.

After about 18 months in operation, the $20 million Wilmington Organic Recycling Center is close to breaking even, Widell said. It is owned by Peninsula Compost Group LLC, founded by Widell and his partner Charles Gifford; Alma Properties, a division of Port Contractors of New Castle; EDiS Company of Wilmington, and now Waste Management Inc.

For Waste Management Inc., investment in the Wilmington center is part of its effort to ramp up the environment friendly element of its business, said Tom Houska, the company’s senior district manager in Delaware.

“We are no longer just a landfill company,” Houska said. “We want to help customers become green.”

He estimated that between five and 10 percent of the refuse collected by Waste Management locally is now being diverted to the compost facility, and the company aims to increase that to 30 percent. Waste Management pays $40-$50 a ton to use the Wilmington recycling facility, compared with $72-$80 for a local landfill, Houska said.

Another contributor is AMA Resource LLC, a Wilmington recycling company that supplies 300 to 400 tons a month of food and wood waste from sources such as construction and demolition sites, said Senior Vice President Samuel Lybrand.

The waste, which includes discarded food from the local food bank Philabundance, was sent to landfills before AMA began supplying the composting facility in spring 2010, Lybrand said.

AMA and other waste suppliers see the arrangement as a win-win, said Peninsula’s composting quality assurance manager Waylon Pleasanton.

“They all the love the fact that they are participating in this program and saving money at the same time,” he said.