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Austin Resource Recovery Wheels Out Pilot Compost Program

City of Austin

The brown bin and the blue bin have company: The green bin, for compost.

Austin Resource Recovery customers are familiar with the trash bin (the brown one) and the recycling bin (the blue container). But nearly 8,000 customers are now giving the 96-gallon green bin a tryout, in a pilot program to determine the feasibility of a citywide composting program.

In case you’ve been living under a rock – albeit one nowhere near a compost pile –  composting is the process of turning food scraps and organic, biodegradable refuse into a nutrient-rich soil appropriate for gardening and landscaping.

The Austin-American Statesman writes that program participants, at no cost, are having their scraps hauled off by the city and delivered to a local compost maker, Organics by Gosh. The launch comes on the heels of council action designating 2013 as the Year of Food Waste Prevention and Food Recovery, not to mention the city;s long-stated goal of making Austin a “zero-waste” city by 2040.

The pilot is scheduled to last a year. “Depending on how the pilot areas perform,” the city says, “additional households could be added, with the goal of providing curbside organics collection to every Austin Resource Recovery curbside customer by 2016.”

You can learn more at the city’s website.  

Wells has been a part of KUT News since 2012, when he was hired as the station's first online reporter. He's currently the social media host and producer for Texas Standard, KUT's flagship news program. In between those gigs, he served as online editor for KUT, covering news in Austin, Central Texas and beyond.
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