Compost can make soil healthier, more fertile and more absorbent. When scaled city- or state-wide, it can extend the life of landfills, create jobs, support local agriculture by keeping those nutrients local and make the landscape more resilient to flooding, advocates say.
Charleston is one of the few places in South Carolina where commercial composting is possible. While some embrace the practice, others question if it’s worth the time, money and effort required to make it work.
After offering a composting program in schools since 2012, the Charleston County School District ended it in March. The decision caught students, parents and local volunteers off-guard.
Charleston resident Dominique Godfrey said her children, who attend James Simons Montessori School, didn’t understand why the program stopped suddenly. The district’s decision set a bad example, she said.
“The kids worked really hard and were so proud to divert over 20 tons of food waste from the landfill this year,” Godfrey said at a school board meeting in April. Their effort should be “commended, not canceled,” she said.
Environmental programs like composting are often the first on the chopping block, said Betsy La Force, manager at Green Mountain Technologies, a commercial composting company. Previously, she worked at the Coastal Conservation League and helped the city of Charleston launch its residential composting program.
Though cutting these programs may save money in the near term, it’s short-sighted, she said. Composting programs teach younger generations better ways to manage and dispose of their waste.
“That’s how you grow a healthy community,” she said.
The reason for eliminating the program was financial. It cost $94,500 a year to manage the composting program across 35 schools, and not every school participated, the district’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Borrowy said.
“Composting was one of those programs that we felt wasn’t getting the bang for the buck,” he said.
Recycling, which is free for the district, provides enough environmental education value, he said, adding that the district still could continue composting at a handful of schools.
In the last five years, Charleston schools have diverted a total 372 tons of food scraps from the Bees Ferry landfill, said Meghan McGill, accounting manager at SMART Recycling, which the district contracted to pick up the food scraps.
The program slowed down during the pandemic, but a few schools were starting to pick it up again, she said. Last school year, nine schools started composting again. This year when the program was cut, 13 were participating, she said.
If all 86 of Charleston’s schools actively composted, McGill said the district would save money in landfill fees, which have increased.
Borrowy disagreed that composting saves the district money. When compost bins contained too many non-compostable items like plastic, they were rejected and the contents wound up in the dumpsters anyway, he said.
Volunteers worked with students throughout the school year to teach them how to sort food scraps from trash to prevent the bins from being contaminated.
“It was actually very hard work,” Sullivan’s Island resident Summer Coish said. She and her mother, Sherry Coish, volunteered at Sullivan’s Island Elementary School for months, working with Tyrone Brown, the school’s lead day porter.
The variety of packaging, remembering to remove stickers from fruit and trying to get young students to focus on their trash when they were eager to get to the recess were a few of the hurdles they had to overcome, Coish said.
“You have seconds to interact with each child when they rush to the bins,” she said.
Brown said the experience was hectic at first, but the students got better at it, and it made his job easier too. Before the composting program, he had to take four large trash bags out a day. By composting food scraps, this was reduced to just one a day, he said.
It seemed the kids were just starting to catch on when the district cut the program in the middle of the semester, Coish said. When this happened, the students reverted back to the old habit of throwing everything in the trash, Brown said.
“Now, (we’re) going to have to train them all over again,” he said, adding the benefits of composting are worth the extra effort.
Limited systems
There are four composting sites in South Carolina — in Charleston, Elgin, Lexington and Myrtle Beach.
Residents who live far from one of these composting sites, or where no collection service is available, don’t have any options aside from backyard composting, La Force said. Not everyone has a backyard, the know-how or time, which can discourage even the most interested residents.
Where there is infrastructure, composting needs to be easy for people to participate, La Force said.
Charleston’s Bees Ferry landfill started accepting food waste for compost in 2011. The city of Charleston started offering drop sites for residential food scraps in 2022. Since then, more than 2,500 households have signed up for the program, and the number of drop sites expanded from three to 20 throughout the city and surrounding municipalities.
“It was way more popular than we thought it would be,” said La Force, who helped the city launch the drop site program.
These households have diverted a total of 304 tons of residential food scraps from the landfill — the equivalent of roughly 20 garbage trucks, said Katie McKain, the city’s director of sustainability. The program is on track to meet the goal of composting 200 tons of food waste this year, she said.
The program is a low-cost “great first step” to make composting more accessible to Charleston communities, La Force said. Every spring, the city offers training for residents to learn how to compost and get the necessary bins and bags, McKain said, adding that a recording of this training is available online.
Though interest among Charleston residents is growing, education is a critical missing piece, La Force said. If a restaurant buys compostable cups but doesn’t put them in the compost bin, that’s not doing any good, she said as an example.
“Nothing’s going to be recycled or composted if you’re not putting it in the right place,” La Force said. Even where larger infrastructure exists, like in Charleston, smaller systems need to be in place to make composting programs work. It’s not enough for restaurants to buy compostable products, she said. They need to also have a compost bin and a contract with a hauler.
Where there isn’t existing commercial-scale infrastructure, such as a hauling service and composting site, she envisions community-led systems that don’t rely on the government to provide complex infrastructure, La Force said.
“You can do (composting) on a relatively small footprint,” La Force said. The first example that came to her mind was Austria, a country roughly the size of New Jersey.
While South Carolina has four large composting facilities, Austria has roughly 400 that are smaller and closer to the communities they serve, La Force said.
“Wherever there’s farmland that’s producing food, that’s where there’s a community drop site,” she said. She imagines something similar for South Carolina, especially its spread-out rural communities.
“It’s a compelling example of what’s possible,” she said. “We can do a better job of composting in place, managing waste in place, and not relying on this limited large-scale infrastructure.”
Keeping composting operations smaller and at a community-level can create jobs, keep those nutrients local and support local farmers. Adding compost to local soil also can make it more porous and absorbent, which can make flood-prone landscapes more resilient, she said.
The environmental and economic benefits of composting are significant, La Force said.
Throw a banana peel in the trash can, and it gets sent to the landfill, where food waste takes up valuable space and produces methane gas, which is worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and can be smelly. Throw the peel in the compost bin, and it gets a new life — one that puts nutrients back into soil and helps grow more food.
For Charleston’s growing composting community, it’s a no-brainer: Food scraps are just too valuable to throw in a trash can destined for a landfill, La Force said. But it takes time to learn new behaviors, and the right systems need to be in place to make them stick, she said.