Turning Trash into Organic Gold

Take banana peels, melon rinds and brown lettuce leaves. Plan on eating them? Didn’t think so. You’ll throw them in the trash. Okay, at least most of us would, but kitchen staff at three County cafeterias are now recycling that food waste for compost, that rich, dark substance full of nutrients that gardens love.    

The County Operations Center (COC) cafeteria joined the County’s food waste recycling program in September. Polinsky Children’s Center and the County Administration Center cafeterias began taking part after the County Board of Supervisors approved the composting program last March.

Consider that the CAC serves an estimated 150 meals each day and the COC about 300 meals a day during a regular work week. Polinsky serves breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, about 400 meals a day. Altogether, the kitchen scraps add up to an astounding 1.5 tons of food waste each month that is being recycled into rich organic soil. Put it another way, the County is diverting more than 18 tons of food waste from the landfill every year.

Sounds like a lot of banana peels but the kitchen food scraps – not customer leftovers – also include other items. “Lettuce trimmings, vegetable peels, coffee grounds and even coffee filters,” said Laura Freitas of General Services. “It all goes toward reducing our carbon footprint.”   

The kitchen food prep waste goes to the City of San Diego’s Food Recycling Program at the Miramar Landfill where it’s ‘cooked’, aerated, watered and screened before the scraps turn into the organic gold of landscaping, compost. 

The substance is so rich; gardeners sometimes call it black gold because the material can improve the health of the soil, save water, control erosion and weeds plus reduce the use of fertilizer. 

So the cast-offs from plants that came from the earth go back to the earth and the cycle starts all over again with just a little help from us. Seems fair and almost as if nature intended it that way . . .