Compost conundrum muddies market

Cedar Grove's Everett

The number of compostable dishware products available in the Seattle market has grown 900 percent in less than three years thanks to a new

law requiring restaurants to use only recyclable or compostable single-use items

.

The law, which went into affect July 1, 2010, aims to reduce the more than 6,000 tons of plastic dishware that hits the landfill each year, according to the city.

But the lack of a unified standard for compostable dishware products is creating a rift through the relatively nascent compostable-packaging industry. In the Seattle area, for example, compostable products have to be certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) as well as meet additional requirements set by Cedar Grove Composting, the Northwest’s largest composting facility.

But in San Francisco, which has been collecting food scraps and compostable packaging citywide since 2001 and last year mandated that all properties compost, requires that compostable products be tested and certified by BPI. “Earlier on we had our compost facility run their own tests, but the stuff that met the standard did break down in the process,” says Jack Macy, commercial zero waste coordinator for San Francisco’s Department of Environment.

Susan Thoman, Cedar Groves’ director of corporate and business development, says the BPI tests, which are lab tests, don’t address the specific conditions in Cedar Groves’ facilities. That’s why Cedar Grove takes a product and puts it through its actual composting process to measure what remains at the end.

The Everett, Wash.–based company is not alone. A new survey of 40 facilities nationwide that accept food waste found that 37.5 percent require certification by BPI, while 20 percent indicated that onsite testing was also conducted prior to accepting compostable products or packaging, according to the report released by Sustainable Packaging Coalition called “Compostable Packaging: The Reality on the Ground.”

For a company such as Cedar Grove, which receives all of Seattle’s yard waste and food scraps, as well as food scraps from numerous commercial facilities including the Portland International Airport, its relatively fast throughput results in more than 200,000 yards of compost it sells through retailers such as Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Fred Meyer.

For manufacturers, who already face production cost increases of 18 percent to 37 percent because of the need to shorten production runs, change machinery settings and tweak other variables to meet various standards in different jurisdictions, the switch to compostable technology may not be worth the hassle unless a national standard that uses BPI as its starting point can be developed, according to Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s report.

This is where Adam Hyde, senior consultant at Portland-based Bluetree Strategies, steps in. He is working with StalkMarket, a manufacturer of compostable containers, to establish one standard for all jurisdictions that address both the compostability of a product as well as the “grade” of compost produced at a facility.