As Howard County expands its “Feed the Green Bin” food scrap program to cover at least 42,000 households by Nov. 7, it will have made the government composting program available to upwards of 60 percent of county residences, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said.
“We (were) going around and talking to different folks in the community and this was a priority to them,” Ball said. “So that’s why I wanted to have this expansion of the county’s free composting services.”
The current expansion of the program is taking place in communities including Kings Contrivance, Cherry Tree Park, and Emerson.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback–people saying it’s reduced a lot of waste at home,” said Alan Wilcom, assistant administrator for Howard County’s Bureau of Environmental Services.
Wilcom said that residents like that they can co-mingle their food scraps with yard waste. The material is composted at a facility at the Alpha Ridge Landfill in Marriottsville, and is later offered as mulch, compost, or topsoil.
Organic waste is brought to a 35,000-square foot, 57-foot tall, receiving building and then sorted to be put into composting bunkers. Then nature, time, and a little attention by employees turns it into compost.
It is then sold back to both commercial buyers and residents. The program has taken thousands of tons of material out of the landfill stream, brought money back into the environmental services budget through direct sales, and offered a new source of landscaping resources to the community.
Ball said almost half of the households eligible for the food waste collection program are now actively participating.
“I think that’s an exciting number to start with and to continue to build upon,” he said. “This aligns with our commitment for a greener future, diverting 3,000 tons of food scraps since its inception and about 400 tons in 2022 alone. Our goal is to be countywide. We’re trying to not only ensure that there’s this expansion, but that the eligible households actually actively participate.”
Households can choose either 12-, 35-, or 65-gallon bins from the county to collect their food and organic waste. Wilcom said residents can even place greasy cardboard pizza boxes and paper towels in the green bins, although to a lesser degree. Workers don’t want to be dealing with green bins full of paper products, he emphasized.
The plan is to make the whole county eligible for the program and plans are underway to see that happen, perhaps within a few years.
“We’re just waiting for composting capacity at the landfill to be increased and then we can add more areas to the program,” Wilcom said. “We have to double the number of bunkers we have to cover the whole county. It’s in our capital budget program. Hopefully that will occur in the next two years.”
