Idea for the scrap heap gets traction

When Minnetonka gave Louise Miller the chance to do the next "green" thing, she jumped at it.

Already known as the "Recycling Queen" by kids in the Hopkins School District, where she set up lunchroom recycling for students' food waste, Miller signed up immediately when Minnetonka started home recycling for food scraps and other organics last year.

Now she's sold on the idea. Separating organics may sound like a lot of work, but it isn't, she said. "You have to throw it away anyhow. It's just a different bin."

Organics recycling is beginning to catch on, driven in part by consumers like Miller who want to go green, by small haulers who see it as a niche market, and by a state law that sets a goal for counties to recycle 50 percent of all household garbage headed for landfills.

But in the second year of the Minnetonka program, only about 550 of Minnetonka's 10,000 households have signed up.

Around Hennepin County, organics recycling "is growing, but it's not growing as fast as we would like to see it," said John Jaimez, the county's organics recycling specialist.

In part, growth is slow because budget constraints have prevented the state from providing money to promote organics recycling as it did curbside recycling for paper, glass and plastic, said Ginny Black, organics recycling specialist for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

But organics are the next big target for recycling because kitchen garbage -- including fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, bones, eggshells, coffee grounds, pizza boxes, paper towels and milk containers -- makes up about 20 percent of the waste stream, Black said.

The state has been stuck for eight to 10 years at the 41 percent recycling level -- even though 60 percent of what is thrown away is recyclable -- and organics are "the next big chunk of material" that could help counties meet the state's 50 percent recycling goal, Black said.

Because organics create methane gas when buried in landfills, recycling them to become compost is the single best thing a resident can do to reduce harmful greenhouse gases, except for cutting back on driving, she said.

So far Wayzata, Minnetonka, Loretto, Medina, Edina, Orono, Minneapolis, Chaska, Chanhassen, Watertown, Mayer and Burnsville are among the cities offering organics recycling to some or all residents. St. Paul, St. Bonifacius and Medicine Lake are working on it.

Hennepin -- with seven cities, 11 school districts and four county buildings doing some level of organics recycling -- is now recycling about 100,000 tons of organics a year, but the goal was to have reached 200,000 tons a year by now, Jaimez said.

"It's change. It's something new. It costs more money," he said. Another damper on progress is the fact that not all Minnetonka haulers offer organics recycling. About 4,000 households in Minnetonka would have to switch haulers to get it, he said.

But people who have signed up have found that if they pay the $4.50 a month for weekly organics recycling, they can reduce the cost of their regular trash pickup by $2 a month by reducing the size of their trash bin. And often they can cut it by another $2 a month by going to every-other-week collection, Elstad said.

Minnetonka Mayor Jan Callison said that's what happened in her household. Like Miller, Callison keeps a plastic ice cream pail on her kitchen counter for food waste.

"I love it," she said. "I feel good every time I put something in the organic bin and think it's not going into a landfill."

Minnetonka was nudged into the program by the example of neighboring Wayzata, where four years into organics recycling, an estimated 75 percent of its households participate, according to Wayzata recycling coordinator Sonny Clark.

A weekly $100 prize drawing for residents who set their carts out boosted participation, Clark said.

To keep the program going, Wayzata petitioned Hennepin to reduce its tipping fee for organics. The county charges $49 a ton for trash and agreed to remove the state and county taxes from organics to drop the tipping fee to $15 a ton, Clark said. That provided a financial incentive for the city to keep recycling organics, he said.

Randy's Sanitation, which is the only hauler for Wayzata under contract with the city, decided after seeing how much organics recycling reduced the waste stream in Wayzata that it had a responsibility to offer it in other communities, said operations director Jim Wollfchlager.

"In all the cities where we collect organics, residents are finding they can go to every-other-week trash service and that more than pays for the organics collections," he said.

The value of other recycled products -- paper, cans, bottles and aluminum -- helps Randy's pay for the cost of adding organics service, he said.

Miller said the reduction in her garbage as a result of organics recycling has motivated her to reduce her waste further by buying in bulk to cut packaging.

"It's a game now," she said: "How little can I throw away?"