For many students, the bright red and green compost bins in campus dining halls might simply be part of a mundane, meal-time ritual. It’s easy to sort one’s scraps and napkins into separate bins, or the same bin for the less conscientious, and not really know what happens after the scraps are taken away. However, according to Julie Muir, an employee of Peninsula Sanitary Service, Inc. (PSSI), the University’s recycling and waste management company, students’ understanding of the composting process is central to getting composting initiatives to take flight.
The compost journey starts in large dumpsters at campus loading docks, where the compost is picked up every few days. The waste is then transported offsite to the Newby Island Sanitary Landfill. There, organic waste is ground up and stored in open fields in windrows, or rows 100 feet long and eight feet tall, in which the food decomposes for 180 days. Any impurities in the decomposed product will surface as white particles that can be removed before the finished compost is sold, Muir said.
“The facility has a zero-contamination policy that gives them the ability to reject any load they don’t like,” Muir added. “So we try our best to keep our loads as clean as possible.”
Muir described how current composting practices are much greener than previous methods in which compostable material was simply sent to landfills.
“The food waste degrades but leads to methane production that goes into the air,” Muir said. “In a composting facility, we do this an anaerobic way that creates some carbon dioxide, but no methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In addition, we are making something new out of the waste and it goes back into the earth.”
Despite the noble ends composting facilities help achieve, composting is still a business, and Stanford’s participation isn’t free. Although composting is less expensive for the University, which pays $45 per ton of trash, composting still typically costs between $30 and $38 a ton. The finished decomposed product is then sold by PSSI, and Stanford typically orders some compost from the company to use in landscaping, mulching and community gardens.
The smell of compost dumpsters in one consideration that complicates the incorporation of composting into residential life.
Surprisingly enough, these “dumpsters rarely smell when exposed to air,” Muir said, adding that the dumpsters only smell when they are exposed to anaerobic bacteria.
However, the most significant obstacle with the current system, Muir said, is that students are not fully informed about which materials are truly compostable.
“We need some improvement on the customer side in knowing what should go where,” she said.
Aditya Singh ’13, head dining ambassador, agrees that education about composting is critical to the success of the process. He has been reaching out with other coordinators “in making compost bins more user-friendly and making people more aware of landfills and the environmental impact,” he said.
Recent changes to clarify the composting process are pictures of trash or compostable material posted on the distinct red and green bins to further help direct students.
“If you have a list [of text], people wouldn’t stop by to read it,” Singh said.
One initiative Muir is currently undertaking is to help inform cafes and eateries on campus about which composting options are available to them and how they can more effectively collect waste on both sides of the counter.
The Green Living Council has also been active in efforts to expand composting through projects such as Composting Awareness Week. According to Graham Provost ’13, a member of the Green Living Council, the student group is also trying to bring composting to student residences because much waste in dorms is actually compostable food.
“This quarter we have a number of projects where students are putting compost bins in their residences,” Provost said.
Muir spoke to the potential of the campus to become even more efficient.
“From Stanford’s perspective, 30 percent of what we throw into the landfill is compostable,” she said. “We could take this 30 percent now and turn it into compost if we could get it out of the garbage stream.”
Just as the Stanford campus has room to grow in its composting journey, the state of California has its own battle to face in taking responsibility for waste. According to Muir, California currently has more composting facilities than any other state. However, the state still lacks enough facilities to manage the amount of composting produced within state borders.
Like her vision for sustainability at Stanford, Muir is hopeful that the state’s composting capacity can be expanded to match demand in the near future.
“We expect to see a huge growth in composting facilities,” Muir said.