Starting next week, multifamily housing complexes will be required to offer compost services to residents.
The rule applies to apartments, condos, dorms and nursing homes with five units or more. When you add that up, it’s where about half of Austin’s population resides.
The requirement was set in motion last year by the Austin City Council as a next step toward its ambitious goal of diverting 90% of waste from landfills. (Last year, the city diverted 63.42%.)
And if enough people cooperate, composting could make a pretty big dent in that goal: A 2015 study found that 37% of the stuff people throw away in Austin is compostable.
When organic materials are sent to a landfill instead of a composting facility, it doesn’t turn into the same good, earth-friendly mush.
“It doesn’t break down like you might imagine,” Jason McCombs, a division manager with Austin Resource Recovery, said. “A lot of times it just sits there and almost mummifies and turns into methane gas, which can harm the environment.”
Anything that can be broken down into a nontoxic material can be composted: food scraps, egg shells, meat bones, pizza boxes, even the hair on your hairbrush.
“Our general rule is if it grows it goes,” McCombs said.
Austin will be the first Texas city to require multifamily housing complexes to provide compost service.
This all sounds great, right?
Well, there's a caveat.
If you’re looking forward to sorting through your food scraps next week, you might have to wait a little longer. While the requirement technically goes into effect Tuesday, many apartments will be slow to adopt the change, if at all.
ARR did send out mailers and emails about the new requirement, but when KUT called over a dozen apartment complexes to ask if they were ready to offer compost services by the deadline, some said they have plans in motion, but most hadn’t heard of the new requirement.
McCombs said he’ll follow up with any housing complex that doesn’t comply with the new requirement by February to give them a nudge.
If complexes don’t start offering compost by October of next year, they could face a Class C misdemeanor, though McCombs said the city doesn’t intend to issue fines.
He hopes ARR will see compliance similar to when the city introduced changes to the recycling requirements in 2020.
“The thing we're trying to communicate here is that [organic material] is a big chunk of what is going in the trash can right now, and there’s a higher and better use for that material,” McCombs said. “We can compost it and turn it into a material that can nurture our greenspaces here in Austin.”
Editor's note: This story was updated to include that Austin Resource Recovery has reached out to multifamily complexes about the new requirement.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story said McCombs hopes to see compliance similar to when the city first introduced a recycling requirement, rather than after changes to the requirement in 2020.
