Portland considering city-wide food composting

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The Portland City Council on Wednesday will consider launching a city-wide residential food composting service.

Portland is nearing a city-wide composting plan that could cut the flow of garbage by 30 percent.

After a year-long pilot involving 2,000 households, the Portland City Council on Wednesday will mull adding residential food composting to its growing list of alternatives to traditional disposal. The discussion is slated for 9:30 a.m. in the council chambers of city hall, 1221 S.W. Fourth Ave.

If approved, the city will inaugurate food composting on Monday, Oct. 31.

Food composting promises to upend the way garbage companies operate in Portland, but will not affect rates for most customers.

Garbage companies will supply Portland’s approximately 145,000 households with a two-gallon, beige-colored pail to collect food scraps in the kitchen. Scraps will be mixed with garden waste in the green recycling bins the city distributed a few years ago.

The pails cost less than $4. Portland garbage haulers will order them from a Canadian vendor once the program gets the council’s expected blessing.

Residents are asked to dump their food scraps in with their yard waste. The green yard waste bins will be collected weekly instead of the current every-other-week rotation. That’s good news for gardeners who crave extra pickups.

In exchange, garbage will be collected every other week instead of the weekly service most customers currently use. It should not change for customers who have only monthly garbage collection.

Bruce Walker, solid waste and recycling program manager for the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, said the hope is that customers won’t need weekly garbage pick up once they mix food waste with yard waste. The program will accept meat, bread, dairy and other food scraps that can’t be composted in a backyard pile.

The program could in theory divert as much as 30 percent of the garbage now headed to landfills. That’s unlikely, though, because it depends on every household participating at the maximum level.

During the pilot, the city found that about half the food that could have been put in garbage was being put into the compost. At that level, the city expects to send 80,000 tons of material a year to two treatment centers, including the controversial Recology Inc. processing site in Portland’s North Plains and the other operated by Allied Waste Services in Benton County.

Composted material will be marketed as soil amendments. The nursery and agricultural industries are expected to be major customers.