Compostable waste arrives in small containers from around the Metro Atlanta area to the Compost Now Feedstock Hub and is consolidated into larger containers before the waste is transported to the compost farm. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
After dinner, Juli Fleming scrapes leftover rotisserie chicken and veggies into a small, white bin. She puts the bin on the floor next to her white and light-wood kitchen counters.
“It’s so easy,” Fleming said.
Fleming is composting. She’s a participant in a pilot program in Avondale Estates looking into making composting a municipal service, like trash and recycling pick up.
Avondale Estates resident Juli Fleming consolidates compostable food waste as she cleans up after dinner.(Matthew Pearson/WABE)
She said her compost bin, which isn’t even a foot tall or more than a couple inches wide, lasts her household a whole week.
And, she said, it doesn’t even smell. No smell, no flies — she said she insists to everyone she knows it’s much easier and less gross than they might think.
At the end of the week, she puts it out on the curb with her trash and recycling and it’s whisked away. Her compost bin isn’t picked up by DeKalb’s municipal waste team, though, but rather local company CompostNow.
Marcus Albert dumps a bin of compost collected along the curbside pickup route in Avondale Estates, Georgia. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
The trucks haul all the neighborhood compost to a facility in East Point.
“At this facility, the material has to get sorted through for contamination,” said David Paull, chief impact officer at CompostNow.
He said workers sort out plastic and anything else that can’t break down before the compost is placed into a compactor. Then, big trucks haul away the ready-to-compost food scraps to CompostNow’s central facility in Douglas County.
Paull said there’s benefits to composting at a massive scale in comparison to at-home or backyard composting, aside from diverting millions of pounds of food from the landfill.
“We are doing a full circular program around food scraps,” he notes.
The finished compost from Avondale Estates is going right back into the ground in DeKalb County, distributed to local farmers of color, DeKalb Libraries landscaping with edible plants and other local programs.
He said compost is turning what used to be landfill trash into something valuable for the community.
“It creates good paying jobs from it. It creates healthier soil for the communities that you live in. It creates cleaner water and cleaner air,” Paull said.
Marcus Albert shows the contents of one of the curbside compost bins. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
According to county commissioner Ted Terry, the money for this residential pilot program is part of a federal grant DeKalb County applied for.
“The big objective of the grant is to figure out cost, feasibility and to get this as part of our normal sanitation services.”
Terry said Avondale Estates participated in a different program recycling plastic film, in which residents sorted out thin plastic film — like plastic grocery bags — in a dry, clean container for recycling.
He said it made the city a good candidate for another waste-stream pilot since they already had familiarity with sorting out waste and making that habit happen at home.
Terry said the compost program also fits into the county’s sustainability goals, because decomposing food in landfills emits lots of methane. And as a climate-warming gas, methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
According to data released by the Environmental Defense Fund, Georgia has the fourth-highest landfill methane emissions in the country.
And on top of that—
“If you live near the landfill in DeKalb County, it smells,” Terry said.
He said it’s a big environmental justice issue: those landfills are located next to majority Black south DeKalb neighborhoods.
A small white container with a compostable green liner sits on the floor of Juli Fleming’s kitchen. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Back in her kitchen in Avondale Estates, Fleming said the Avondale pilot program is a big step up for her. She used to keep worms in a bin in her carport for composting, but there were limitations.
“You can’t put meat, you can’t put bones. They can’t eat citrus,” Fleming said.
But now that her compost is going to a giant composting program, she can do all this and more. On top of that — she said it makes a big dent in how much waste she’s sending to the landfill.
Fleming said that her family has to take out the garbage less often, and she feels better about her environmental impact. To her, composting has been a relief.
Avondale Estates says there’s still slots open to participate in the program which will run for a year and a half. And Fleming said that she is nudging her neighbors to join.
“If I can be part of an answer now and reduce it by half, which I’ve pretty much done, if we all did that, it would be so much better,” Fleming said.
