The Environmental Law Institute (ELI), NRDC, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) recently released a Model Municipal Ordinance on Advancing Community Composting (Model), a template ordinance intended to reduce regulatory barriers to and provide opportunities for community composting. This Model is a companion to a separate NRDC/ELI Model Municipal Zoning Ordinance on Community Composting, which reduces zoning barriers by establishing community composting as permissible land use under a municipality’s zoning code. Together, these models can advance community composting, which, in turn, can help municipalities meet their economic development, climate, and waste reduction goals while achieving various other co-benefits.
Over 30 percent of all food in the United States goes uneaten, at enormous financial, environmental, and social cost. The food wasted across the supply chain each year equates to roughly 1.4 percent of U.S. GDP and is responsible for 4 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although the preferred pathway for diverting food waste from disposal in landfills and incinerators is to avoid wasting the food in the first place, there will always be food scraps (e.g., banana peels, corncobs, and coffee grounds) that need to be managed. Accordingly, composting—the controlled, aerobic, biological decomposition of organic material into a valuable soil amendment known as compost—serves as an important complement to other food waste reduction strategies.
Composting offers many environmental, economic, and social benefits. By diverting organic waste from disposal, composting reduces emissions of methane—a powerful GHG. Composting instead of landfilling or incinerating can also decrease disposal costs and ultimately reduce the need for expansion or construction of new landfills and incinerators, which have harmful public health effects and are disproportionately sited in low-income communities and communities of color. Applying compost to soil offers significant benefits, too, including sequestering carbon, preventing erosion, reducing stormwater runoff, and decreasing the need for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation.
Composting can take place across a spectrum of sites, sizes, and operational scales, from backyard composting to community composting to large industrial facilities. This Model focuses on community composting, defined primarily by its local character and size relative to industrial composting—i.e., occupying a smaller operational area, processing substantially less organic material, sourcing organic material locally, typically engaging the community in the composting process, and distributing or using most of the compost locally.
Community composting is designed to meet local needs, serve local interests, and engage the community in a variety of ways; for example, community composting facilities may run educational programs on food systems and sustainability and provide local jobs and job training. Due to its size and local focus, community composting can also reduce costs and emissions related to hauling and distribution. Further, community composting can be a powerful tool to promote equity, including by filling service access gaps in communities where there are no municipally provided organics recycling opportunities and by providing valuable green space that can help reduce urban heat island effects.
Unfortunately, community composters often encounter regulatory barriers at both the municipal and state levels that can hinder their ability to establish and sustain operations. The Model is intended to help municipalities advance community composting by providing clean, “off-the-shelf” legal language to address “unreasonable” regulatory barriers that impose burdens that are unintended, unnecessary, or disproportionate to the expected benefits of applying the requirements.
Specifically, the Model requires a municipality to review, compile, and maintain an inventory of municipal ordinances and regulations that could apply to community composting operations and to determine whether any of them presents an unreasonable barrier. For any municipal ordinance or regulation that is determined to present a barrier, the Model requires the municipality to reduce or eliminate the barrier to the extent practicable.
Specific barriers addressed in the Model include the following areas: nuisance determinations; floodplain management; licensing of haulers and collection of organic material; regulation of the distribution and sale of compost; and procurement of compost and composting services.
Furthermore, the Model directs the municipality to identify any state laws that may present unreasonable barriers, such as solid waste permitting requirements. To the extent practicable, the municipality can then communicate its determinations to the appropriate state entity and, as appropriate, recommend options for ameliorating the unintended adverse effects of the state law or regulation on community composting.
The Model also addresses the ways in which a municipality can provide opportunities for community composting. The Model provides for the municipality to assess and pursue, to the extent practicable, one or more of the following approaches: promoting public awareness and education (e.g., developing education initiatives in municipal schools); offering technical assistance (e.g., contracting with a third party to provide technical assistance); and providing financial assistance (e.g., creating grant opportunities or offering access to municipal land).
The Model also provides for the municipality to track progress towards an annual, measurable goal for increasing community composting operations. For example, these goals could be stated in terms of the number of community composting operations or volume of organic material processed by community composting operations.
The off-the-shelf version of the Model is accompanied by a version with commentaries and a background memorandum, which offer alternative approaches and additional information to help municipalities tailor the Model to their local circumstances. For example, because community composting can take many different forms and operate at varying sizes, its definition in the Model is intentionally flexible; a municipality could choose to include a quantitative threshold, such as throughput volume or site area, to determine what qualifies as a community composting operation.
A slide deck is also provided to help municipal staff or community members share the Model with decisionmakers and other stakeholders. You can find all the resources grouped together here.
The Model is part of an ongoing effort to provide municipalities and advocates with tools to reduce the time and resources associated with taking food waste reduction actions. Other municipal model governance tools published by NRDC and ELI include:
- Model Municipal Zoning Ordinance on Community Composting;
- Model Ordinance Establishing a Pay-As-You-Throw Program for Residential Municipal Solid Waste;
- Model Executive Order on Municipal Leadership on Food Waste Reduction;
- Model Ordinance on Mandatory Reporting for Large Food Waste Generators; and
- Model Compost Procurement Policy.
NRDC also just released an updated toolkit for tackling food waste in cities which includes 13 strategies for U.S. cities to prevent food from being wasted, to increase food donation, and to recycle food scraps. This toolkit highlights tested, impactful strategies that can be tailored to local needs and can help cities launch or further food waste reduction programs for long-term progress and impact.
Additional resources and information can be found at the sites for ELI’s Center for State and Local Governance, ELI’s Food Waste Initiative, NRDC's Food Waste Reduction program, and ILSR’s Composting for Community.