By ANNELI FOGT
Editor
A year-long pilot program organized by Zero Waste Vashon and King County aimed at determining the feasibility of an on-island composting operation is underway, and Zero Waste Vashon officials are urging the community to get behind the effort.
Vashon does not currently have any kind of green waste or composting services, meaning most islanders pile up yard waste in their yards or burn it, which has a negative effect on the environment. Meanwhile, food waste is disposed of along with all other garbage. The new program that started Monday has the potential to not only create a composting system on-island and end the need for burning yard waste and wasting food, but eventually eliminate altogether the expensive process of hauling waste off-island.
“That’s a vision we hold, to keep organics here,” Jim McRae, a Zero Waste Vashon member with more than 12 years of experience in solid waste management, told The Beachcomber. “We hold a vision to do it all locally and make it self-sufficient.”
He and Zero Waste Vashon President Gib Dammann dream of a day when Vashon will have its own compost center and lab, complete with technology to gather the methane gas and groundwater created through the composting process.
“This needs to be in our future,” Dammann said last Thursday. “It’s surprising how (few) models there are out there for a project like this. We want to see the community complete the process and return the nutrients back to the soil.”
Dammann continued to say that compost increases the benefits of the soil and is something that humans have been doing for decades, but have recently fallen away from.
“It’s what our ancestors did and it worked for them, and somehow we got away from that,” Dammann said. “We’re the perfect place to do community pilots and then scale those pilots for larger communities.”
For now, during the pilot program, the organic waste will be transported to Cedar Grove Composting, Inc. in Maple Valley, and county officials will track the quantities and types of waste in an effort to, one day, handle the entire process on-island.
“The county will see how much ‘clean green’ shows up, and we’ll evaluate that data and encourage the community to feed it,” Dammann said. “We want to complement what composting is already being done and see if we have the volume that we would need to deliver quality compost.”
A major catalyst behind the on-island, self-sufficient composting model is the price incurred by King County to haul waste off-island. McRae said that King County spends roughly $72,000 per year hauling Vashon’s waste to processing centers off the island.
King County spokesman Doug Williams said that the cost of transporting Vashon’s waste is “one of the reasons” behind the pilot program. He said Vashon makes up 1 percent of the county’s total waste, but the cost to transport that waste is “certainly more” than the cost of transportating waste from other communitites.
“We don’t know how much savings we will see, so we want to determine some of those costs and savings,” Williams said.
The Organics Collection Pilot Program is the result of a partnership between Zero Waste Vashon and the King County Solid Waste Division that began more than one year ago. Zero Waste Vashon members told The Beachcomber in May that they had been working closely with the county to make it happen, and the program had been in the works for “the better part of a year.”
Zero Waste Vashon member Rex Stratton said that the organization has been working “diligently” with the county and will now work with it to study the quantity and makeup of the waste brought in over the course of the year.
“We’re working very closely (with the county) doing a study to see if we can justify getting an anaerobic digester on the island,” Stratton said. “We’re an expensive place when it comes to transportation costs, so it’d be great if we could get it to where it’s not being transported off-island, being processed and then shipped back.”
Island residents and businesses are encouraged to separate their yard and food waste from garbage and take it to a designated area at the Vashon Recycling and Transfer Station (VRTS), where it can be disposed of for a reduced fee. The fee for organic waste is a minimum of $12 per load up to 320 pounds, or $75 per ton. Garbage fees are a minimum of $22 per load, or $129.40 per ton.
Yard waste includes leaves, grass clippings, weeds, brush and branches that are less than 8 feet long and no more than 4 inches in diameter. No soil, sod, rocks or plastic bags will be accepted with yard waste. Food waste includes fruit and vegetable scraps, egg shells, bread, pasta, other grains, coffee grounds, paper coffee filters, tea bags, dairy products (cheeses, yogurt), meat, fish, poultry, bones and table scraps. Food waste can be collected in compostable bag liners sold at island hardware and grocery stores.
Stratton said that he thinks the yard waste system will work well, but is unsure about the success of the food waste because of the amount of time that usually passes between islanders’ visits to the transfer station.
“Most people go to the transfer station every month or six months to drop off their recyclables,” he said. “No one is going to want to save their food scraps for that long, and no one is going to pay $12 to take their small bag of food scraps. We want to try and maybe get centralized pick-up locations where multiple people can bring their waste on one day.”
County officials said that an estimated 78 percent of what is disposed at King County’s Cedar Hills Regional Landfill could be reused, recycled or composted, and a similar estimate is assumed for the garbage transported from Vashon.
The pilot program is the most recent in a string of changes to the transfer station. Two compactors were installed this summer to reduce trips from Vashon to a Seattle recycling facility. Zero Waste Vashon’s Dammann said that the compactors have drastically reduced the number of waste transports, and he and McRae are hoping that the community will rally behind this cause for the good of all.
“We really want people to embrace this,” McRae said. “These are all experiments based on research we have, and it would be nice to see if people can work through this to see the possibilities.”
