Editor’s Note: Diverted: Tracing the path of recycling in Whatcom County is a multipart series that follows waste from curbside to commodity market. Find previous stories here.
In 2025, single-family households in Bellingham will be required to use the FoodPlus food and yard waste collection service, a move that will eventually be mandatory in all larger Washington cities due to recent state legislation.
With organic matter making up a third of the waste stream, the action should help the city cut down on landfilled material and meet its climate action goals.
FoodPlus for (almost) all
Since 2005, local hauler Sanitary Service Company has offered FoodPlus to customers in Whatcom County as a voluntary add-on. The every-other-week service collects food scraps, food-soiled paper, yard debris and approved compostable packaging. In Bellingham, around 8,000 residential customers have opted in, leaving another 12,000 single-family accounts that will begin receiving service in 2025.
Similar to its rollout of single-stream recycling in 2024, SSC will drop off FoodPlus bins neighborhood by neighborhood, with the goal of full adoption by the end of May. FoodPlus is still voluntary for residents in complexes of five or more units.
Food and yard waste make up 30% of the residential waste stream, meaning it’s a significant component of landfill volume and a major opportunity for diversion. Also, trucking waste to a landfill in Oregon or Eastern Washington is more expensive and less environmentally friendly than sending it to a processor in Whatcom or Skagit County.
Bellingham, which passed its resolution requiring organics collection in February 2023, is getting a head start on new organics management state laws that are supposed to help Washington achieve its 2030 goal of reducing organic material in landfills by 75% in 2030. By 2027, larger city and county governments must make year-round organics collection available to all single-family residential customers, and by 2030, all single-family customers must participate in organics collection.
Even after state law goes into effect, organics collection will not be required in the other cities of Whatcom County because none meet the population threshold of 25,000 residents.
‘A learning curve’
Bellingham residents have become accustomed to curbside recycling service since it was introduced citywide in 1989, but for many, using the yellow-lidded FoodPlus toters will be a new experience.
“There’s going to be a learning curve,” Bellingham’s sanitation and solid waste manager Sean O’Neill told the city council at a November meeting. “We’re talking about 12,000-plus new customers that have not used FoodPlus in the past.”
That’s why nonprofit Sustainable Connections is doing a lot of outreach as the service comes online, with fliers, tabling at events, contests (participants could win a countertop compost pail) and waste sorting guides translated into seven languages. Educational material will accompany the new toters dropped off by SSC.
While a common mental image of a compost pile may include moldering coffee grounds and oozing, rotten fruit, in reality the preponderance of organic matter that goes to composting facilities is yard waste, according to an organics characterization study released by the state Department of Ecology in 2024. The study found that nearly 90% was grass clippings, vegetation and clean wood — in other words, high-value, easily processed material.
Contrary to the belief that organic matter will simply break down naturally in landfills, food and yard waste decompose much more slowly in the anaerobic environment of a modern, capped landfill, while producing the greenhouse gas methane in the process. Wasted food is responsible for over half of all landfill methane emissions.
“I think that getting food out of the waste stream as a climate change solution is huge,” said Brandi Hutton, the manager of Sustainable Connections’ Toward Zero Waste program. “I love it. It’s wonderful. We all interact with food, so it gives us power in our day-to-day lives in our own homes.”
Curbside customers have concerns
The cost of FoodPlus is $13.69 per month. Some residents are upset that the city has mandated another waste collection fee and another bulky waste bin. (Rather than a stand-alone fee, recycling is included in the cost of curbside trash collection.)
Sustainable Connections notes on its website that households that are concerned about their SSC bill could save more than the cost of FoodPlus by reducing the frequency of trash service if food waste collection results in their household generating less garbage — for instance, in Bellingham, switching trash pick-up from weekly to every other week means $25.71 less per month (not including taxes and fees).
Unlike trash, which is subject to a city, county and state tax, there is no tax on compost collection.
SSC also offers a discounted senior rate for Bellingham customers who meet low-income requirements or are on permanent disability.
“Managing our waste correctly is just good economics,” Hutton said. “What people sometimes don’t understand is that it costs our community less to compost than to send it to the landfill. It doesn’t have to be trucked nearly as far, which saves fuel and reduces emissions. It creates local jobs, and then it’s a product that comes back to our community through landscaping and gardening. It creates this great circular economy for our local community versus sending things to a landfill.”
Bellingham does not currently allow exemptions for residents who have at-home compost systems. The Department of Ecology is expected to release guidance to local governments on how to offer exemptions, but not until the end of 2026, at which point the city has said it will “consider the best approach for adopting those guidelines.”
However, Hutton pointed out, FoodPlus pickup includes items like meat, shellfish, dairy, commercially compostable to-go containers, citrus, coffee grounds and eggshells that either shouldn’t go into home compost at all or should be added only sparingly.
“I would encourage home composters to continue to compost, because it’s amazing to have a nice product for your garden,” she said. “However, home composting is limited in scope as to what materials you can put in a backyard system. There’s just a lot more that you can put in your compost toter.”
There are strategies to combat another concern, stinky FoodPlus toters. Technically, a household still throws out the same waste — it just goes into different receptacles — but if the odor is egregious, it’s possible to avoid gross buildup by lining your FoodPlus toter with cardboard or newspaper (Cascadia Daily News paper stock works the best), using compostable bags for food waste, and paying to have toters cleaned occasionally by SSC or a local service like Kulture Kleaning.
But if you wouldn’t want an item to eventually end up in your own garden, don’t put it in the FoodPlus bin. When in doubt, throw it out, emphasized Green Earth Technology owner Stephanie Harvey. Green Earth, a composting facility off Hannegan Road south of Lynden, is the end destination for much of the yard waste and nearly all food waste collected in the county.
“There are a lot of materials that are labeled ‘compostable’ but are not appropriate for composting in the GORE system,” Harvey added, referring to the system used at the Green Earth facility. “Consider if what is going into the organics can is beneficial to making quality compost. Residents new to organics diversion can start simple with food and yard waste before getting into other kinds of compostable items.”
Some frequent contaminants include cartons and cups that appear to be made entirely of paper but that actually have an invisible insulating layer of plastic inside. Green Earth Technology’s website has a guide for single-use products they can accept, but it only includes products “certified compostable” by the Compost Manufacturing Alliance.
Pet waste is absolutely not allowed in FoodPlus totes, even when wrapped in supposedly green biodegradable dog poop bags, mixed with natural cage bedding or coated in “eco-friendly” kitty litter.
Commercial composters keep organics local
All those food scraps, tree branches and greasy pizza boxes collected in organic waste programs stay within Whatcom County — haulers SSC and Nooksack Valley Disposal, as well as the Recycling & Disposal Services transfer station and many other commercial and residential customers, take their organics to Green Earth Technology. Some local dairy farmers also dispose of their dairy solids there.
Green Earth, founded in 2002, uses a simple commercial composting system — a semi-permeable fabric cover on its waste heaps — to process 30,000 tons of yard and food waste per year. After processing, which includes pathogen-killing heat, the compost is screened for size and tested to meet U.S. Composting Council and state standards. Compost provides slow nutrient release into soils and works as a water filter.
The facility has the capacity to accept an additional 10-15,000 tons annually and is permitted to further expand its infrastructure when necessary, to accommodate the increased waste expected from mandatory organics collection.
GET produces composts to be used for soil amendments, mixes and mulches, and sells to landscapers, gardeners and to local governments, which are required by state law to prioritize buying local compost products for public works projects. GET’s compost costs $32 per yard or $10 for 1.5-cubic-foot bags.
In Skagit County, hauler WM offers an add-on service of food and yard waste collection for customers west of State Route 9 for $10.90 per month. That waste goes to Skagit Soils, a partner company of Lautenbach Recycling, in Mount Vernon. Skagit Soils has expanded its aerated static pile system in anticipation of the state’s organic waste mandate, which will apply to residents of Mount Vernon and two urban growth areas in the county.
Kulshan Carbon Trust of Bellingham has partnered with Skagit Soils on a biochar pilot project in which clean wood from the Lautenbach Recycling construction and demolition recycling facility next door is burned in kilns then mixed with compost — the carbon-rich mixture is supposed to boost soil health and increase water retention while also sequestering carbon. More than 10 farms across the Puget Sound region applied biochar-enhanced compost, and preliminary soil samples indicated the compost supported “optimal growing conditions,” according to Kulshan Carbon Trust.
The multi-family question
The organics management laws at the city and state level leave out multi-family residences of five or more units — or nearly half the homes in Bellingham. Hutton hopes to see multi-family inclusion in future legislation.
“This is a pretty green community, so it can feel like you’re being left out if you live somewhere that you don’t have control over where you put your waste and how you manage it,” she said. “It’s putting the control back in the hands of people and letting them participate if they want.”
Sustainable Connections has run several multi-family compost pilot programs at a variety of Bellingham sites, from owner-occupied townhomes to low-income housing.
The pilot program included consistent, repeated messaging and in-person education. Sustainable Connections staff monitored sorting habits at the sites and reported a noticeable increase in food waste separation after the program. Hutton said there seemed to be a lot of buy-in from residents.
“I also think it’s an equity piece,” she added. “People in underserved communities tend to suffer more at the hands of environmental degradation. We should give them the power and education to do something for themselves and the community.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
