Free Workplace Composting Guide Available

A free guide to help organizations develop workplace composting programs that support sustainability, waste reduction, and zero waste initiatives is now available. The Guide to Workplace Composting is a joint effort by Kimberly-Clark Professional, the US Composting Council (USCC), and Keep America Beautiful.

composting“A Guide To Workplace Composting” provides step-by-step instructions and resources to help office buildings, manufacturing facilities, hotels, hospitals, universities and other workplaces divert organic matter – such as food scraps, used paper towels, coffee grounds and coffee filters – from landfills. Composting is a landfill-free way of using decomposed organic materials to fertilize and condition soil. Compost also can reduce erosion, improve drought tolerance and help reduce the generation of greenhouse gases.

“Composting closes the loop,” said Frank Franciosi, executive director of the USCC. “It increases organic matter in the soil to grow plants, trees and crops. It’s a holistic approach that puts carbon back where it came from.”

Food waste is the single largest component of disposed municipal solid waste and accounts for a significant portion of U.S. methane emissions, and landfills are the third largest source of methane in the United States.

In September 2015, the USDA and EPA announced the country’s first-ever national food waste reduction goal, calling for a 50 percent reduction by 2030. A number of states, including California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, have initiated bans on landfill disposal of food waste from large commercial food waste generators.

A Guide For The Workplace

Kimberly-Clark Professional decided to create a workplace composting guide for customers who wanted to compost its paper towels, but needed help getting started.

“We’re very proud to have partnered with the USCC and Keep America Beautiful to address some of the challenges that workplaces face in creating composting programs,” said Ben Jarrett, North America sustainability leader, Kimberly-Clark Professional. “It’s not hard to do. It just takes some time and planning.”

compostingFor Keep America Beautiful, which has a Recycling@Work initiative to support workplace efforts to reduce waste and improve recycling, the collaboration resulted in “a great resource for those workplaces that are ready to add organics to their recycling programs,” said Brenda Pulley, the organization’s senior vice president for recycling.

“Composting is the natural, next step for implementing a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ strategy to give our garbage another life. We want to make it easy for workplaces to implement an effective program, which is why it’s so important to support them with the right tools and resources,” added Pulley.

Click here to obtain your copy of “A Guide to Workplace Composting.”