Miami-Dade has been slow to catch up with other states and other Florida communities in embracing large-scale composting. While landfills have continued to fill up, there hasn’t been a clear path in the county code for community composters to legally operate.
That just changed. Last week, county commissioners passed new legislation making it easier and cheaper for community composters to turn food scraps and other organic waste into what’s known to gardeners as “black gold.”
“We’re going to run out of landfill space in the next couple of years,” said Commissioner Eileen Higgins, who championed the legislation. “So I’m imagining this can divert in the next two to three years 30,000 tons from the landfill that would be producing methane instead of producing soil that can be used by our agricultural industry.”
Methane is among the worst so-called “green house” gases driving climate change. It’s created when food scraps, yard clippings and other organic material break down in landfills, and it can be more than two dozen times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
It’s always been fine for homeowners to pursue backyard composting. But until now, Miami-Dade didn’t have the legal framework to issue permits for large-scale composting, which many supporters see as a big step toward the county’s goal to reduce the volume of waste going to incinerators and landfills. At one point, officials had to return $200,000 in federal funding that would have helped spread compost in local parks.
Composting had long been lumped into the same regulatory category as massive industrial waste operations. That meant composting operations efforts had to navigate complex permitting requirements designed for much larger facilities — even though the end product is designed to be used in farming and gardening.
“We took some best practices for community composting permitting from other parts of the country, from other parts of Florida, and came up with a much more sensible permit that is to scale for what they’re doing,” Higgins said.
Before the new rules, companies like Compost for Life and Fertile Earth Worm Farm had to operate under legal loopholes just to stay in business. Compost for Life, for example, had to spread compost across several nearby farms to stay within legal limits, which meant they couldn’t accept as much food waste as they wanted. Lanette Sobel from Fertile Earth Worm Farm, which operated under a state exemption for farmers, said she wasn’t allowed to sell the compost on its own, so they had to bundle it with a plant or tree to make a sale - then that even became a problem. Now farmers and gardeners can purchase the compost in good faith.
The new permitting process could encourage wider composting efforts, Higgins said. Although some communities, like Pinecrest Village, already got started before getting the green light. The village has collected 151,000 pounds of food waste – roughly the weight of 20 Land Rovers – since March at drop-off sites. The resulting soil will be used in the Everglades for the Miccosukee Tribe’s community garden.
Shannon del Prado, a Pinecrest council member who spearheaded the initiative, hoped the county move would encourage other municipalities to take part.
“We’ve had no problems. I think a lot of people are afraid, oh, we’re going to have rats, or it’s going to bring rodents,” she said. “And we just haven’t experienced any of that.”
There are some guidelines in place to protect neighbors of the businesses, Higgins said. There are certain height requirements for piles and odors. She didn’t expect that to be a problem because during her site visits, she described it as “Like you’re in the vegetable section of the grocery store. Good, in other words.”
To address concerns about groundwater contamination, the county will require businesses that compost meat, which have the chance of containing pragmatic things like antibiotics that could possibly leech into the aquifer, to have a groundwater monitoring system in place.
“We want to comply and do everything we can because we’re not in it just to make money and we’re in it to protect the environment,” Sobel said. “So if anything we were doing could be detrimental to the environment, we’d obviously want to know.”
Another holdup was that the county needed to deliver a certain amount of trash to the landfills to meet their contract obligations. But it became clear that there was so much trash to go around that it wouldn’t compete with the existing contract.
Francisco Torres, the founder of Compost for Life, which collects 120,000 pounds of food scraps weekly, believes composting operations like can become a bigger, greener part of the solution to the county’s waste woes.
“This gives us a true opportunity, and not only for me as a business, but as a community coming together, rising to the occasion of facing the waste crisis that we have as a county,” he said.
Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation and MSC Cruises.
This story was originally published by the Miami Herald and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
