Prince George's Pilots Program to Turn Rotting Food into Rich Compost

Prince George's County wants to take your stinky banana peels, fragile egg shells, sticky strawberry hulls and messy coffee grounds and turn them into food for the earth.

In an effort to further increase the county's recycling rate—already a robust 50 percent—Prince George's County launched a food scrap composting pilot program in May of this year. The Department of Environmental Resources held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new food scrap composting program Wednesday morning. 

The program will compost 4,500 tons of food scraps using GORE cover technology, which decreases the odor associated with food composting and also decreases the processing time from 18 weeks to eight weeks. The compost will eventually be packaged and sold regionally in nurseries as a product called Leafgro. 

As part of the pilot program, DER is collecting food scraps from three partners—Whole Foods, the University of Maryland and the town of University Park—representing a corporate partner, an institutional partner and a municipal partner. 

"We're kind of taking them all for a test drive to see what's effective and what the best way to grow the program could be," said DER director Adam Ortiz.

Prince George's County is no stranger to composting. The county already processes 60,000 tons of yard waste compost a year. Food scraps, considered by some the "final frontier" of composting, accounts for 25 percent of waste going into landfills. 

"That's a major impact on the overall recycling rate not only in the county but in the state," said Marilyn Rybek, the section manager for the recycling section of DER.

The pilot program launched in May 2013 and will run from May 2014. So far, Rybek says the county likes what it has seen. 

"What we are looking at is converting the entire site to GORE technology," Rybek said, adding that the site could eventually be used for food scrap composting by the whole county, or even the whole region.

The pilot program cost the county $170,000. That includes the cost for three GORE technology covers, staff time and other equipment and technology, Rybek said. 

The county will assess the food scrap recycling program in December or January and decide weather or not to expand the pilot. Should that happen, the changes would be phased in gradually, Rybek said.