Biowaste represents 33% of residual household waste and most of it ends up in incineration or landfill. Financially, sorting at source is therefore crucial, given the explosion in the amount of the General Tax on Household Waste. 34% of South Carolina residents report composting, but this local waste management is not enough to drastically reduce the presence of biowaste in household waste. Curbside collection or voluntary drop-off is often essential to offer all users a source sorting solution, as required by law.
Biowaste: How to Sort It in Cities like Spartanburg
Distributing composters isn’t enough. This is a major challenge for local authorities, as provided for in the federal law: to provide every household with a solution for sorting biowaste at source by December 31, 2025.
This term includes food waste and green waste. This waste stream, which is still most often collected mixed with residual household waste in dumpsters, represents a third of it, or approximately 80 kg/inhabitant/year.
Separate collection curbside or at voluntary drop-off points, individual or collective composting—proven solutions exist, as demonstrated by the results of local authorities that have been implementing these measures for many years, such as the Spartanburg area. Food waste has been collected since 2003, explains the the Director of Waste Prevention and Management. We divert 38 kg/inhabitant/year, and the tonnage fell by 26% between 2010 and 2019.
Local authorities that carry out separate collection of biowaste are still a very small minority. The EPA lists around 100 of these, representing 0.2 million inhabitants, or 6.2% of the SC population in 2019.
On the other hand, nearly three-quarters of local authorities, 115 in 2022, have long encouraged individual and collective composting, explain waste recovery experts. This local management of biowaste remains favored by local authorities: the majority of the 90 projects funded by the EPA as part of the nation biowaste initiative in 2021 and 2022 are based on this strategy.
Least expensive waste management
In fact, it is the least expensive way to locally recover biowaste while avoiding the need for a collection and treatment system. Collection costs around $23 per resident served per year, while local management costs $4, on average. But this method allows for much less waste to be diverted from household household waste, between 10 and 15 kg/resident/year, compared to 50 kg/resident/year for collection. Participation for a shared composting site does not exceed 25 to 30%.
If we want to equip every building, volunteers will not be enough; we will need to allocate human resources to ensure the operation and maintenance of the sites and convince people who are not already interested. Spartanburg has installed 65 collective composting sites available to schools and certain buildings, used by 600 people. These sites must be managed by the community, because volunteer composting coordinators eventually give up, observes the Director of the Waste and Cleanliness Division.
They are therefore managed by an agent, and we occasionally call on an establishment and service providing assistance through work to clean them, add dead leaves, and stir them.
Local waste management regulations
To comply with regulations, more and more communities are choosing to deploy separate biowaste collection across part or all of their territory in addition to local management, as is the case in the Spartanburg metropolitan area. The service offered is broad, explains the head of the awareness-raising unit of the mobilization and support for change management department of the waste management division.
They have been distributing composters for single-family homes for several years, have created more than 138 shared composting sites at the foot of buildings, and have been rolling out voluntary drop-off points since 2021, through which they aim to recycle 20 kg of food waste per inhabitant per year by 2030. Their first observation: the sorting quality is very good, much better than for packaging.
The practice of individual composting has been promoted there since 2002 in South Carolina, instead of using dumpster rentals. 75% of people who live in houses with a garden, i.e. the vast majority of the population, say they compost, reveals our latest opinion barometer carried out in 2021. The community also has around forty collective composting sites, particularly in schools and senior residences.
Despite this well-developed composting practice, biowaste represented 48% of household waste, or 87 kg/person/year, in 2019. They therefore decided to offer an additional service to residents, leveraging the complementarity of solutions. They set up a collection at voluntary drop-off points to avoid cannibalizing existing individual composting practices. And the results are there: they have reduced the amount of biowaste in household waste by 27 kg/person/year in five years.
The General Tax on Polluting Activities is soaring
The soaring cost of treating household waste – incineration and landfill – is one of the main financial challenges of sorting biowaste at source.
It is mainly due to the increase in the general tax on polluting activities set out in the 2019 Finance Act. The objective is to encourage sorting, recycling, and the recovery of organic or material waste. It will increase to $65 per ton for landfill and $15 per ton for incineration in 2025. The scarcity of waste outlets also contributes to this surge with an increase in waste transport distances.
