Want to recycle? Get organic

A huge amount of waste we generate could be 'digested.' Yarmouth’s got a plan.

We truck and train 85,000 tons of garbage out of Cape and Islands towns every year – and that doesn’t count private haulers, that’s from public “transfer stations.” Here’s the big surprise:

Organics account for 36 percent of that total: 30,600 tons. 61.2 million pounds.

Of that 30,600 tons, 25 percent basically comes from kitchens, 15 million pounds described as wasted food, skins and peels, coffee grounds, bones and other organics.

Again, that includes only a fraction of what’s picked up privately from restaurants, hotels, you name it. So you know the portion must be far, far bigger.

The rest is culled from yards and clearings, 45 tons of leaves and pine needles raked up, chips and scraps scooped up, trees and bushes chopped up.

The overwhelming amount of this could be turned into compost. People lucky enough to have backyards could put more greens, orange peels, eggshells, grass, pretty much anything other than meat into a black aerated container, even a hole in the ground, and let the worms have their way with it – then use the loam to grow bigger tomatoes.

Communities could do the same at big scale given a broad swath of land and broad resolve, as well as engaging a recycling company like Black Earth Compost (which is doing this already).

Then there’s “anaerobic digestion,” higher-tech machinery that takes organics and uses bacteria in an airless environment to chomp away and create both compost and energy – for example methane (natural gas). The potential and capacity for this is huge, but there’s no place on Cape Cod where it’s done.

The Town of Yarmouth wants to change that.

Yarmouth has an ulterior motive for installing an anaerobic digester (or two):

The town has the only facility on Cape Cod that processes “sludge” pumped directly out of septic tanks. Five towns have treatment plants that handle pipe discharge that includes everything flowing from toilets to shower drains, kitchen sinks to road runoff, but not concentrated Title V systems and leaching pits. That’s Yarmouth’s specialty.

“As of now, we’re creating on the order of 20 to 40 tons of bio-solids a week,” says Jeff Colby, Yarmouth’s DPW director, and it comes from pumpers all over. Those solids have to be trucked to one of the few places that will take it, a landfill in upstate New York – at $207 a ton.

If that could go into an anaerobic digester, gassed into energy and baked into fertilizer (if free of contaminants), that would be a wonderful financial win-win – and much reduce the Yeti carbon footprint of trucking and disposal.

Yarmouth won a federal grant to build a pilot digester to handle sludge, about $800,000 from the US Department of Energy. If it works (and they should begin to know in a year or so, depending on when Yarmouth can get the thing built), the town will scale up, qualify for millions more Fed money in phase two for food waste as well, and invite every Cape town to join in.

This “digester” out West makes natural gas — using manure from 12,000 dairy cows

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Seven or eight years ago, Bourne considered getting into the digester business and Yarmouth didn’t want to compete; one would be enough. But plans never materialized so Yarmouth “picked up the ball.” The town is centrally located with a railhead sending lots of garbage via train to a big incinerator in Rochester, so those logistics might help.

If Yarmouth’s pilot succeeds, the next step would be a second digester. Here’s why:

One would be solely for “clean” waste, meaning food out of kitchens, leaves and brush out of yards. That would create energy as well as “class A” compost that could be put to work improving soils.

The second digester would continue handling sludge from treatment plants and septic systems that might well contain some contaminants and chemicals, maybe including infamous “forever” PFAS chemicals. Any of its compost would need to be processed yet again and proven clean to be used.

Filters and heat can do that, says Colby, but the expense might be too much. If so, remaining solids couldn’t be used for fertilizer and would still have to get trucked to a remote landfill. One good thing is that digestion reduces volume by a third to a half, saving trucking and dumping fees. And then there is the energy savings to factor in.

Big digesters wouldn’t create the prettiest scene on Cape Cod but from an environmental perspective it might become one of the most impactful. So tip the hat to Yarmouth for being willing to pivot from the NIMBY (not in my backyard) perspective, and face this fact:

Getting organics out of the waste stream should be a natural no-brainer, with huge benefits, but that’s way easier said than done.

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