Recently King County has been looking to increase the supply of and demand in households for composting. Their primary reason is to get rid of all organic material in landfills and ensure that composting facilities are being used to their maximum potential. In 2018, around one-third of all material that was sent to the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill near Maple Valley was organics that could have been composted. A report from the Cascadia Consulting Group was commissioned by King County that explores ways to increase the supply and demand of composting and organic recycling. The report stated that composting demand usually matches what is available, but in order to recycle more material, producers would need incentives to produce more products.

The report above also stated that private processing facilities around Snohomish and King County were permitted to annually produce 553,000 tons of compost. In 2018, the facilities only received around 470,000 to be processed and reused. This means that the counties were only at an 85 percent capacity. Another problem found in this report was an abundance of plastic pollution in the collection streams, which in turn degrades the quality of the final product.

This report also noted that the three main issues that King County should be considering with composting is firstly including and expanding more local compost markets. Second, they would want to reduce contamination in collection streams, and finally, expand all organic material processing. These all will collectively improve the quality of the compost, lessen the amount of volume landfills experience, and help the environment.

A solution that was established further was recycling to capture methane gas. Compost when mixed with wood chips can be placed over old sections of landfill, which will then degrade the gasses coming from the waste below. In King County, the Cedar Hills landfill currently contracts with a company focused on bioenergy to produce and capture methane gas, which will later be processed and sold on the market.

Another elaborated solution was in agricultural marketing. Agricultural markets could possibly provide a place to expand demand for composting. In Washington State, just under five percent of total compost ends up at farms. Eighty-one percent of farmers had not previously used any compost made from yard trimmings or food scraps. However, with the use of compost from King County, they would be able to use less fertilizer that leads to ocean acidification (an ongoing decrease in the pH of earth’s oceans, being caused by an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere) The report found that the cost of transporting compost to Eastern Washington made it less competitive than using the compost on King County farmlands.

In order to increase demand for composting local markets, the county could begin to support by providing transportation and market costs, plus equipment, delivery, and reducing contamination for the composting facilities. The county could also pay special attention to farmers from immigrant or refugee communities. These farmers could be implemented into a pilot program on county-owned farmland. This solution has already commenced.

However one of the biggest parts of improving the amount we are composting in King County is how the people respond to these changes. Senior Alex Takeuchi says. “I think composting is important because it helps the environment, and reduces the amount of things we are throwing away.” When someone composts their organic waste instead of throwing it in the garbage can, they are reducing the amount of solid waste that ends up in landfills. This is important for several reasons.

First, instead of wasting food that you do not finish, the food is broken down into rich nutritious soil that can be used again. Instead of decomposing slowly in a landfill where it will do nothing but sit there until the rest of the garbage decomposes, which would likely take over hundreds of thousands of years, the soil that is produced from composting is so rich in nutrients that many start to compost on their own, just to make their at-home gardens thrive. Sophomore Alara Walcott says, “At home, my mom uses our compost to help the plants growing outside in our backyard.”

Secondly, by reducing the amount of waste we as a community put into landfills, the more we will be able to reduce the overwhelming amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. Landfills are simply designed to store trash forever, not to break down the material. It was not intended the organic material in landfills will eventually begin to decompose; though this will be much slower and have little to no impact on fertilizing because it is in an area without plant growth. Unfortunately it is not the biggest problem that decomposing material in landfills causes. All things over time will decay. However, when trash decays, it releases a dangerous amount of flammable gasses like sulfur, ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide. In fact, landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions. Methane and carbon dioxide are especially damaging to the environment and can lead to acidic rain, ocean acidification, biological magnification, nitrogen enrichment, and most relevantly, climate change and global warming.

Composting is also not a new thing. In fact, it has been around since around 1200 B.C. when the Greeks invented it. Also, many of the students have been learning about the importance of composting since elementary school. Freshman Josiah Bradshaw, states “It is strange to me that some people have not been composting their stuff, because it feels so normalized.” Farmers and regular people have been composting for centuries because it is an effective way to reduce waste.

If the people in King County decide to take responsibility and prevent plastic pollution in collection streams, actively use organic materials, or even composting at home for their gardens, the ecological footprint from the county will decrease immensely. Though the government is somewhat responsible for how we as a community affect our environment, we as a people can choose to lessen the semi-permanent effects of landfills and the permanent effects of climate change. The question really is not why should we care about composting and lessening the effects of climate change. The real question is why not?