Pesticide and Environmental Update
Recycling
Food Scraps into Gardens
By Don Comis September 4, 2009
Each weekday, food scraps are collected from the
Maryland Food Distribution Authority in Jessup, Md., and from small local
food service and marketing establishments. Materials that do not contain
metal, glass, or plastic are trucked to the Agricultural Research Service
(ARS) Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in
Beltsville, Md.
There, they are mixed with woodchips, leaves and
other organic residuals. Several months later, some of the finished
compost is delivered to the National Mall for use in gardens at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) Jamie L. Whitten Federal Building.
For Patricia Millner, a microbiologist at the ARS
Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory at BARC, this is part
of research on ways to reduce the release of methane from landfills by
diverting food residuals and other organic materials to composting. She
conducts this research with microbiologist Walter Mulbry, who works in the
ARS Environmental Management and Byproduct Utilization Laboratory at BARC.
In 2009, they are supplying compost to the inaugural
“People's Garden,” part of a new program for creating a community
garden at each USDA facility worldwide, as well as for landscaping at the
U.S. Botanic Garden and the U.S. Capitol.
Millner also makes compost available for other
federal “green” projects—such as roof gardens, rain gardens and
other landscaping designs—to retain water and reduce runoff at federal
sites in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
As part of Millner’s efforts to help the federal
government model ways to compost food scraps, she has a Cooperative
Research and Development Agreement with RCM, LLC of Maryland to capture
ammonia in the final compost to boost its nitrogen content for fertilizer
use. She is comparing several types of insulated composting containers for
greenhouse gas emission reduction and other cost-benefit characteristics.
Currently, about half of the carbon and nitrogen in
composting materials is lost to the air, rather than being captured in the
compost.
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