Lawrence.com

Josh Millstein burrows into a large pile of dirt in downtown Lawrence. He removes a piece of plastic and inspects the mound's innards: roly-polys, a rotting orange, brown sludge. Yep, everything looks right.

Millstein's compost is a driving force of his business. A co-owner of The Casbah Market, he marinates a mixture of fruit rinds, stems, rotten food and corn plastic in his beloved knoll. The end-product will enrich the soil of Millstein's downtown "farm," where he grows fruits and veggies 200 feet from his shop.

"We go through so much stuff," he says. "It would be a shame to throw away extras rather than reuse them."

The Casbah Market is one of many area businesses that benefits from nutrients supplied by rotten food and half-eaten meals. Stores have begun keeping their own decomposing dirt heaps, donating food by-products to the city compost and even growing crops with their recycled matter. Even KU is considering a compost pile to help control waste from KU Dining Services. Environmentalists say that compost significantly reduces the amount of organic matter in landfills, but businesses have realized that they can also turn a profit from the process.

For The Casbah Market, compost paired with a garden makes sense: the food is fresh and sold "dirt cheap" because it lacks transportation costs, Millstein says. He hasn't had to order leafy greens for the market in almost a month-instead, he's grown them all himself.

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Casbah compost

Another compost-happy downtown business is Free State Brewing Company, which owner Chuck Magerl says has been composting leftovers, paper scraps, hops and cardboard for more than 10 years. The restaurant will compost its millionth pound of material sometime this summer, he says.

Magerl sees a clear environmental reward in composting, which provides "a return to the soil," he says. While some of the compost goes into Free State's tomato garden, most of it winds up at the city compost facility and, ultimately, as fertilizer in flower beds around town.

Magerl doesn't see many financial benefits from the process, but that doesn't bug him. "Some of the greatest things in life are not monetary. There's other values," he says. "I certainly think composting falls into that category."

He also takes witness to the food cycle from start to finish: raw foods enter the doors of Free State. Food is ordered, cooked, and sometimes goes uneaten. Scraps go into a giant grinder that spits out penny-sized pieces of food and paper waste. Then, Magerl personally transports a couple of containers' worth of material to the city compost heap.

Months later, compost from the city heap will help gardens like Free State's grow fruits and veggies. The city gives away free compost twice a year from its compost facility, an operation that breaks down six acres' worth of decomposed matter.

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City compost

Kathy Richardson, Waste Reduction and Recycling operations supervisor, says that Lawrence collected 17,000 tons of compost-worthy waste last year alone. The waste sits on the concrete pad of the city compost facility for months before it's ready for use in flowerbeds and gardens (instead of life in a landfill).

"If the goal is to divert waste from the landfill without spending too much money, compost is the way to go," she says.

Lawrence currently only accepts grass clippings, leaves and woody debris from the public for its compost pile. By diverting yard waste, the city saves a gob of room in the landfill. During a mid-'90s citywide trash audit, city officials discovered that yard waste composed 30 percent of trash thrown away by residents.

No matter the size of the heap, composts create lots of energy through decomposing matter and help save money for businesses and organizations, says Simran Sethi, environmental journalist and professional-in-residence at the KU School of Journalism.

Sethi says that when organic materials find their way into the waste stream, they don't want to break down. Food leftovers like banana peels tend to "mummify" in a landfill and stick around for 25 years or more, she says.

"Nature doesn't waste anything," she says. "This is an idea that if you're going to use a substance, rather than throwing it away, it's going to be fuel for another process."

Since it takes extra "people power" and gasoline to transport mass amounts of organic material to the landfill, Sethi says businesses and organizations could save money by giving away compost or reusing it for their own benefit. That's why one KU graduate student is proposing that the university begins a compost project of its own.

Steph Mott, an architecture graduate student working with the KU Center for Sustainability, has proposed that the University invest in an Earth Tub-basically, a three-cubic-yard compost bin-to help control waste from KU Dining Services.

"We just want to start with teaching kitchen staff what can go in the bucket and what can't," she says.

Each Earth Tub costs about $10,000. Even though that seems like a big chunk of change, Mott says it's a modest pilot project compared to the city's large compost equipment (which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars). A six-acre concrete compost pad, grinders, compost turners-such equipment wouldn't make sense for a hyperlocal compost experiment, she says.

Less waste from dining facilities, a fertilizer that revitalizes soil and the chance for simple biology experiments are a few of the benefits that Mott sees from the project. But the project is still in its funding stages and likely won't come to fruition for months.

While businesses and organizations are spearheading larger compost projects, personal compost piles help maintain healthy bits of land. One's own compost heap makes for more fertile soil and fewer organic materials wasting time in landfills.

Or, as Henry David Thoreau put it, "To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain." »