With time to try something new, more DC-area households sent food scraps off to compost

Regional composting companies saw a tremendous surge in new residential customers composting their food waste in 2020. Because the pandemic freed up some Washingtonians’ time and resources to try new things, more people decided to delve into composting from home, leaders of the companies say.

“COVID did this weird thing where it kind of separated all of us, yet people were still looking for ways to be connected,” explained Nick Shaw, co-founder of Fairfax County-based Apex Organix. “And people became very focused on, ‘What can I do to make things a little bit better?’”

Shaw’s company has seen consistent growth throughout the pandemic with residential customers, as commercial accounts were paused or canceled. Composting, he believes, offered a way “for people to feel not only connected to the earth, or the environment, but also to their community.”

People could see a compost truck trundling down the street and stopping at their neighbors’ homes. “And then the neighbors see it, and the neighbors will talk,” and soon there are more customers on that block, Shaw explained over the phone as he drove around a neighborhood picking up food scrap bins on a recent, rainy afternoon.

At Key Compost — based in Frederick, Maryland — founder Phil Westcott has also seen “an upward trajectory” since the beginning of 2020 in both commercial and residential accounts, as well as the amount of food waste collected and compost generated, “despite a temporary decline” initially and a quieter than usual springtime sign-up period in 2020.

“I don’t think that it’s easily attributable to one characteristic or behavioral change,” explained Westcott. “I think that it’s very much a perfect storm of many, many, many different reasons kind of coming together.”

He believes that, before the pandemic, many residents were taking compost to collection points at work, farmers markets and grocery stores. While they intrinsically valued composting, their public drop-off spots came with heightened risk with the spread of COVID-19, he noted. 

Another local compost hauler, Rockville-based Compost Crew, collected close to 2,500 tons of food waste in 2020 within its service territory, which stretches from Baltimore to Reston, Virginia — a considerable increase over the roughly 1,900 to 2,000 tons it hauled in 2019, according to Ben Parry, the company’s chief executive officer. 

Gains came despite “dozens and dozens” of suspended or canceled business accounts. Compost Crew’s overall customer base grew by 50%, Parry said, and the amount of hauled food scraps increased about 20% over the same period. The number of DC residents served by Compost Crew increased 72% from 2019 to 2020.

Parry believes that while there was already “basic increasing awareness” of composting, seeing involved neighbors spurred further interest.

“There’s no doubt that folks around this area are well aware of the environmental issues that we’re facing, and people want to take action,” Parry explained. “Signing up for curbside collection of your food scraps is [an] extremely easy and low-cost way to take action, and as more people sign up, they see our trucks out on the road and they see our bins at the end of peoples’ driveways, and so it builds on itself.”

Fritz Gottschalk, owner of Veteran Compost DC, has also seen new residential clients since the pandemic started, as commercial customers cut off service.

“Our spike in residential [customers] has been mostly COVID-related because folks are sitting at home more,” he said, noting that they’re cooking more and generating more food waste. But, he added, DC was already a “very environmentally enlightened” area, where people were already more likely to try composting.

Still, although composting companies believe that the pandemic also encouraged no-contact compost collection via private contractors, that’s not the only growth area for residential composting.

“In 2020, we saw a 32% increase over 2019 of people bringing their food waste to the farmers markets,” DC Department of Public Works interim director Christine Davis said of her agency’s food waste drop-off program. “We attribute a lot of that to people being at home and those who weren’t necessarily using the markets to bring their food waste” before the pandemic began.

That rise came despite the city’s temporary shutdown of markets while COVID-safe protocols for shoppers were being established, thus shuttering compost collection activity for several weeks.

Davis chalks up the increase not just to people being home watching food scraps accumulate, but to the newfound time that residents had on their hands to get around to home projects.

“Because of the pandemic and everyone being confined at home with [their] families, [composting is] something that I believe a lot of people who’d been toying with the idea but hadn’t had the time to actually implement it decided to implement,” Davis explained. She also thinks having drop-off locations at farmers markets across the city helped.

Elizabeth Vargas, a Ward 2 condo owner, is one such resident who has picked up the habit of dropping off her food waste at the farmers market. Growing up, Vargas watched her mother compost everything she could.

Once Vargas went to college, however, she didn’t think it was feasible to compost. And before she bought her condo in 2018, she lived in Arlington, where she also didn’t find composting easy to do.

But during the early months of the pandemic, Vargas went to live with her mother and rekindled the old habit, a behavior she said was simple to carry on once she did some research and realized she could just drop off her scraps at the weekly Dupont Circle farmers market.

“We’d passed it, but I wasn’t coming consistently to the farmers market — only when I needed something or when I had time,” Vargas explained. Now, “I think we’ve been here every Sunday for five or six months now” to drop off food scraps and do some shopping.

DPW’s food scraps drop-off program started in 2017 with one location in each of the city’s eight wards, subsequently expanding to another two farmers markets. While the District had intended to begin a pilot for curbside food and yard waste collection in 2020, the pandemic postponed those plans, according to Blake Adams, manager of DPW’s Office of Waste Diversion.

Nevertheless, “DPW is actively working to identify potential partnerships with regional organics processing facilities to support organics collection initiatives,” he added.

Last November, the agency added its 10th drop-off location at the year-round Palisades Farmers Market in Ward 3 due to increased demand, according to Adams.

However, the increase in food waste collection hasn’t meant a general reduction in waste collected in the city, Davis explained, because of an overall solid waste uptick throughout the pandemic.

With some Washingtonians sheltering in their homes for months on end, waste normally generated at businesses or public spaces was shifted to residences, Adams said.

The city doesn’t have an exact accounting of how much additional waste was generated or shifted to different locations. “I don’t think we’re gonna have an ability to quantify exactly how much because we’ve kind of missed the opportunity in ’21 to do sort of a major waste sort,” Adams explained.

The District does collect information on the total tonnage that compost companies haul away from addresses in the city, but Adams says that 2020 figures will not be available until early next year because the pandemic has delayed completion of the 2019 report.

“I know that we can definitively state that we collected more materials [in 2020], but that doesn’t necessarily equate to more food waste,” Davis explained. “I believe it increased but did so commensurately with the other ways that we process and deal with [waste].”

The District’s first (and most recent) solid waste diversion annual report covers 2018. That year, roughly 20,375 tons of solid waste were sent to composting facilities — or about 2.44% of the city’s entire waste stream that year.

Going forward, both Davis and local compost company owners foresee continued momentum for composting beyond the pandemic, and that those who began a composting routine during COVID will stick to it. That’s because of an awareness and interest — not just from individuals but from local and state governments, too — about the role composting could and should play in society, explained Shaw of Apex Organix.

“We get everyone from your dedicated backyard composters to people who will literally walk up, generally at farmers markets, and they’ll sort of wave a hand over our setup and go, ‘I feel like I should be doing this, I don’t really know why, but you should talk to me because I’m interested,’” said Shaw.