Photo by Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio
The Container Corral drop-off location.
It’s always green in Dublin. And thanks to a new composting initiative, the city just got greener.
More than 42 million tons – or 68 percent – of food waste ends up in landfills in a year, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates from 2020. How much of that is composted? Only 4 percent.
Hundreds of Dublin residents are helping to combat this environmental problem by putting their leftover banana peels and coffee grounds to good use through the Dublin Compost program.
Through support from the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio’s Community Waste Reduction Grant, the City of Dublin’s Service Center offers a free compost disposal site. There, residents can drop off food scraps, yard waste and other compostable materials.
GoZERO Services, a food waste courier service, collects the full carts and replaces them with clean ones every Sunday night. From there, the compost travels to a facility in Dayton where it’s sorted and processed into usable compost.
When the program began in August of last year, residents jumped at the opportunity for a convenient way to compost. The city offered a complimentary composting bucket to the first 500 registrants. Those spots quickly filled up.
Kim VanHuffel, an adult faith formation director and Dublin resident, registered for the program as soon as she received the initial email from the city promoting the program and free compost bins. Composting was something VanHuffel always thought about trying, but she saw the task of creating and managing her own compost bin as daunting. The ease of the new program attracted her.
“I’ve always been green and think that we should do whatever we can to help the planet,” VanHuffel says. “I’m Catholic, and it’s part of the Catholic social teaching that we’re supposed to care for creation so I teach that to my students, and I thought I should really be acting on it.”
The city’s main goal with composting and other green initiatives such as street sweeping and recycling is to divert material away from the landfill. This year, Dublin passed its goal of diverting 50 percent of materials with sights on reaching 55 percent by the end of this year.
With less waste rotting away in landfills, methane emissions decrease. That composted waste can then be used to enrich soil and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.
Besides the obvious ecological benefits, the city has monetary motives for keeping leftover food out of landfills. Food waste is heavy because it holds a lot of moisture. A heavier garbage load causes a hefty trash bill. Now, because of the compost program, about 1,900 pounds of waste a week are diverted from the landfill, according to City of Dublin Operations Administrator Michael Darling.
Though the program is still new, Dublin residents have already embraced it. Darling attributes the program’s success to the engaged residents of Dublin.
“We have a really active community that’s educated and environmentally focused, so they latched onto the composting,” he says. “There wasn’t a whole lot that we had to do.”
Ellie Roberto is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
