Most people who compost do so in their backyards. It’s simple. You just dump food scraps into a pile outside. As it turns out, it’s not only a popular practice among home gardeners and the eco-conscious but it’s also big business here in North Carolina.
Compost companies have steadily — and quietly — grown in the state for decades, and this year, it’s receiving a big incentive. Their product will now be sold tax-free to farmers, who are already one of the industry's biggest consumers.
There are more than 60 large-scale commercial composting facilities in the state. Those are sites that use heavy machinery to produce tons of compost annually. Billy Dunham, owner of Craven Ag Services, opened his composting site just north of Vanceboro in 2014. He says it's an extension of his current business, pulling grease traps from restaurants and cleaning out septic tanks.
“The solids we'll bring to our compost facility,” he said. "In addition to the septic and grease, we also handle the waste products from Case Farms, which processes chickens," Dunham said.
The smell was funky – to say the least, and Dunham said to be careful where to step. On site, a truck is dumping the latest batch of freshly mixed compost into shoulder-high rows. There, the bacteria convert the waste in a high-energy process that dramatically raises the temperature.
“It just has a lot of energy in the grease that we handle, and it takes a long time fr the bugs to eat it up,” he said.
Dunham produces tons of compost at this site. Each of the mounds are about the size of a single wide trailer — and Dunham says he doesn’t even have to advertise in order to sell it.
“It’s all by word of mouth,” Duham said.
Muriel Williman, an executive at the North Carolina Composting Council, says that’s the case around the state, especially with the price of fertilizer fluctuating over the last three years.
"The price of fertilizer is going up so much that reconsidering compost as a viable alternative has really been helping the industry," Williman said. "What I've been hearing from composters around the state is that they can't make product fast enough. It's really just flying out the door these days."
Kate Sullivan with McGill Compost says her company, too, has a hard time holding onto its product. McGill operates several industrial sites along the Eastern Seaboard. They contract with large companies, like Capital One and Boeing, to get their scraps and sell their compost to a range of customers.
"If it's going to an athletic field or a golf course, we may blend sand with the product, and we may screen the products more finely tuned for those applications as well," Sullivan said. "If it's being used for something like gardening, we might blend it with soil."
The whole process can take as few as 28 days, though it often takes longer. Sullivan says composting as an industry has grown over the years as more people and companies become concerned about their environmental impact.
"When we first started, we basically had to give the product away. It really did not have a lot of value and we and a lot of other composters have worked really hard over the years to educate consumers and basically make compost have a value for them," Sullivan said.
One barrier to growth, however, is finding enough space. Composting facilities take several acres to operate. At Dunham's facility, one area is dedicated to mixing the materials together. Another area for it to cure, and at the front of the site, there are several piles set aside depending on if its been filtered.
Sullivan says McGill's operations, which are higher tech and take place mostly indoors, requires 10-15 acres.
"Unfortunately, we find some of the time that everyone wants a composting facility, just not in their backyard," Sullivan said. "With urban encroachment, it's becoming harder and harder to find a site that's appropriate, functions well and that the community is happy with."
It also takes years to obtain a permit. For Dunham, it took four years to earn his, though his facility handles human waste, which is more tightly regulated.
Meanwhile in Wilmington, Riley Alber is running a smaller scale operation. His business, the Wilmington Compost Company, goes from home to home for a monthly fee to collect its food material. It also gets food scraps from local restaurants.
"As my mom says it was really just myself and a 5-gallon bucket to begin with," Alber, who started his company a decade ago, said. "It's changed over the years, and it's been really exciting to see."
The growth he’s seen comes from extensive consumer education, says Alber.
"We've really seen an uptick in the interest in our community,” Alber said. "And that's paired with the education and outreach efforts over the last five years."
Alber mostly sells to local farmers, which will a big boon this year as compost will now be sold tax free to North Carolina farmers. He says that can save hundreds to thousands of dollars annually for some of his customers.
"With the farming community, any assistance helps.When they can save. It goes a long way," he said.
Rhonda Sherman, a former researcher at NC State who is now retired, says compost is an increasingly popular choice for people around the world. She's led workshops and conferences on backyard composting and vermicomposting — using worms to make compost — for decades as part of the NC State Agricultural Extension. Compared to artificial fertilizers, Sherman says compost makes nutrients more readily available to plants because it recycles organic matter.
“Fertilizers are a good way of getting a set amount of nutrients into the soil, but it doesn't contain organic matter. Compost and vermicompost actually make nutrients available to the plants," she said.
Sherman was part of the North Carolina Composting Council at its inception in the 1990s. She said the early efforts for the council were to educate people about new state laws requiring yard waste and recyclables to be separated out from the garbage.
Though food scraps can still be tossed out with the garbage, the 1993 law keeping yard waste out of landfills had a positive effect on the environment, Sherman says. Organic materials decompose slowly in landfills, taking up valuable space. Food scraps and yard waste also produce methane in landfills.
“As we've been learning about climate change, you hear a lot about carbon dioxide, but you also hear that methane is much more powerful than carbon dioxide,” Sherman said.
With an eye to the future, Alber in Wilmington sees even more growth, reaching out to different sectors.
“Raising their knowledge as landscapers, land developers, and conservationists that we're really not curating dirt, we're curating living soil, — that's really ultimately the goal," he said.
