Tacoma composters take note: Food scraps soon will be accepted in the yard waste bin.
Beginning this spring, city garbage collectors will pick up food waste curbside as part of customers’ regular every-other-week yard waste collection. The debut comes after a six-month pilot project that has so far proved successful.
“This will be a new service,” assistant public works director Mike Slevin said. “The big difference is you’ll be able to put out bread, meat, bones, eggs, pizza, kitchen scraps – all of those kinds of things.”
Early next year, the city will launch a public awareness campaign detailing the do’s and don’ts as well as launch dates for the new food waste recycling program.
City solid waste officials also will distribute gallon-sized pails to customers, who can use them to collect daily kitchen scraps. Customers can dump the pails’ contents into yard waste containers for pickup, Slevin said.
The food waste recycling service was tested as part of a broader pilot program seeking to determine if Tacoma should move to an every-other-week garbage collection from its current weekly service.
“The feedback has been really positive,” Slevin said.
Solid waste officials are still collecting data for a final report, but information collected so far generally shows customers in test areas like twice-per-month pickup, he said. The less frequent pickups have led to increased recycling and lower costs for the city, Slevin added.
The City Council will decide sometime early next year whether to approve biweekly garbage pickup citywide.
“If we don’t see any big changes in the data, our recommendation will be to take it forward,” Slevin said. “It will likely go citywide in January 2013, if we get the go-ahead from council.”
Solid waste officials began testing the new trash collection and food recycling programs in July along two routes in the North and South ends. Set to close its landfill by 2013, Tacoma is contractually obligated to find ways to reduce its waste stream and increase recycling once it begins relying mostly on Pierce County’s landfill.
Should the council approve every-other-week trash collection citywide, the program will take time to implement, as collection routes and schedules will need to be reconfigured, Slevin said.
But food waste recycling is easier to launch; it doesn’t require council approval or changing collection schedules, Slevin said.
“Originally, we wanted to kick it off in January,” he said. “But after getting feedback, we thought April would be better. That’s when people are actually using yard waste containers, so it seemed like the natural time to kick this off.”
While most food waste will be acceptable, city collectors won’t take artificial combustible materials, such as pizza boxes, compostable plates and forks, Slevin noted.
“The composting facility cannot yet handle those types of items,” he said.
City officials hope some of the material composted from Tacoma’s food waste eventually will be returned to the city from the compost factory near Graham, so that the city can sell it, much like TAGRO fertilizer, Slevin said.
Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542
lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
Twitter: @lewiskamb
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