North Hartland
At the same time, about 100 tons of organic matter — food scraps from schools, transfer stations, restaurants and hospitals as well as silage, manure and other farming materials — sat, seemingly motionless, in the breeze, held sturdy by its own momentous weight.
Yet these piles of raw composting material, organized neatly in series of mounds known as windrows, were far from idle. They teemed with hundreds of billions of tiny microorganisms, hungrily devouring the matter and breaking it down into rich soil that, in a year or so, may be sold back to farmers, gardeners and landscapers.
Lisa Ransom, co-founder of Grow Compost, a small Waterbury, Vt.-based company leasing the land from GUVSWMD, considers the compost site itself an active farm.
“This is our herd,” said Ransom, who also helps maintain the company’s original composting facility, located in Moretown, Vt., with her husband, Scott Ransom. “It’s our herd of microbes, millions of them per tablespoon.”
Grow Compost has been operating the facility since September on approximately 3.3 acres, the first fully established component of what GUVSWMD hopes will become a “sustainability park” on the 172 acres of land it owns between the Connecticut River and Interstate 91.
The land, 40 acres of which was permitted to serve as a landfill site several years ago, has yet to attract a developer committed to constructing one, according to GUVSWMD Director Tom Kennedy.
The district, which includes 10 Upper Valley towns in Windsor and Orange counties, generates about 9,500 tons of municipal solid waste per year, according to its website, most of which is transported to the Lebanon Solid Waste & Recycling Facility, about a mile northeast across the Connecticut River from GUVSWMD’s North Hartland property.
Vermont has just one municipal landfill facility, in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry.
“We still have that Act 250 permit, and we’ve had probably a half dozen individual organizations come and look at the land,” Kennedy said. “There hasn’t been anyone step forward who’s willing to develop a landfill. It would cost a company probably $3 million to $5 million to develop one, and they would partner into a lease agreement (with GUVSWMD) for it, much like what Grow Compost is doing now.”
GUVSWMD personnel also have expressed interest in inviting a solar power company to take root on the land, which also would require significant investments to develop transmission lines and a substation.
“Right now, the infrastructure is not there to support a major solar project,” Kennedy said. “We’re hopeful that one day an entity like Green Mountain Power will invest in what would be needed to provide solar power to residential customers. At this point, we’ve been talking about ideas for a smaller solar project to develop on site for our own usage. As we develop the site, we understand there will be a need for electricity and we would love to be able to generate that with our own solar power.”
In the meantime, Kennedy said GUVSWMD is thrilled that Grow Compost has taken up residence on the land. Having operated its Moretown location for about 10 years, the company hauls solid waste materials from businesses, schools, resorts and transfer stations — “Any facility that generates food waste,” Ransom said — and cultivates it into soil over the course of about a year.
The soil is certified organic by the Vermont chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, which sent a representative to the North Hartland facility on Wednesday for testing and to interview Ransom about the company’s practices.
“The model Grow Compost has is right in line with what GUVSWMD wants to accomplish,” Kennedy said. “They do things like educational workshops for the public and for their clients, and we try to do a lot of public outreach, too. Their end product is clean, organic soil, and the fact they have the haulers to go pick up all of this material is a major advantage.”
Grow Compost retrieves organic waste material from 48 school districts in Vermont and New Hampshire, including public schools in Hanover, Randolph, Chelsea, Bethel, Tunbridge and Woodstock, according to Ransom.
Along with various restaurants and ski resorts such as Killington, Stowe, Sugarbush and Okemo, it also collects food scraps from transfer stations in Barnard, Bethel, Chelsea, Randolph, Tunbridge and Weathersfield, among others.
Under Vermont’s 2012 Universal Recycling Law, or Act 148, as of last year all transfer stations in the state must accept food scraps from customers. Beginning in 2020, food scraps will be banned from landfills entirely, and haulers offering curbside trash pickup also must offer collection of food scraps.
Ransom expects a major uptick in opportunities for Grow Compost to haul organic materials once that ban goes into effect, especially to gather food waste from small businesses.
“I’m not sure the residential element is going to have that large of an impact, because I think a lot of Vermonters will compost in their backyards, do things like feed their chickens their food scraps or bring them to the dump with the rest of their trash,” Ransom said. “The big uptick after the full ban is going to come because every small diner, every small deli and convenience store is going to have to get rid of their coffee grinds, old deli meats and bread, that kind of thing. We anticipate a large uptick, and I think that was one of the reasons (GUVSWMD) believed in us so strongly.”
Food waste in landfills is a major contributor to the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Lebanon-based Upper Valley Compost Company, which for 15 months had hauled away food scraps from households, recently shut down because of financial and logistical challenges. At the same time, the Lebanon Solid Waste & Recycling Facility announced it plans to begin accepting food scraps from the public in the near future.
Ransom said curbside household food scrap pickup has been “on the radar” at Grow Compost, but she would expect her company to experience similar financial challenges to the ones Upper Valley Compost Company faced.
Retrieving waste in rural areas can sometimes mean a trip of about 10 miles for a 5-gallon bucket of food scraps, and it tends not to be cost effective.
“It’s a hard economic model, and the difficulty is figuring out how to make it work,” Ransom said. “That’s why we’ve seen some of these other companies (shut down). Until we come up with the best economically viable way to do it, the best way for (households) to compost their food scraps is through the transfer station model.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.