This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Lindsey Walker stands proudly next to three bins full of food scraps at the Emmet County waste transfer station in Harbor Springs.
Emmet County has a reputation as a gold standard among local recycling and composting programs in Michigan.
“You have landed at the Emmet County drop off center, and we are so much more than a dump,” she said.
The county collects organic waste from restaurants and other businesses, and it also has places where people can drop off scraps and yard waste. That's all mixed together in big compost heaps at the waste station, called windrows.
“Our biggest mission and objective here at Emmet County Recycling is to find opportunities to recover what are very much resources and prevent them from going to landfill,” said Walker, who helps run the program and is co-chair of the Michigan Organics Council.
One goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Food waste accounts for an estimated 58% of methane emissions coming from municipal landfills in the United States, according to a 2023 report from the Environmental Protection Agency. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and Michigan’s dumps — which also receive trash from other states and Canada — are among the country's largest emitters.
Emmet County's program has gotten a lot of attention, especially as Michigan eyes its climate plan‘s fast-approaching deadlines to reduce emissions.
Using 2005 as a baseline, the plan aims for a 52% cut in emissions by 2030 and "economy-wide carbon neutrality" by 2050. Another goal is to cut food waste in half by 2030. (The state has worked with nonprofits on a roadmap for that.)
And a recent overhaul of the state’s waste management laws also requires counties to get on board by creating materials management plans to divert more away from landfills and invest in efforts like recycling and composting.
"We know that there is going to be a tremendous opportunity for each one of our 83 counties in the state of Michigan to really address materials management, and that includes and is absolutely about organics," Walker said.
A widely used list for dealing with food waste ranks actions based on how beneficial they are: waste less, feed people, use scraps to feed animals and for fuel.
Composting is pretty far down on the priority list, but it's still an important part of lowering emissions from tossed food. For instance, a study published last year in the journal Scientific Reports showed that composting food scraps instead of throwing them in landfills can reduce emissions from 38 - 84%.
The groundwork for Emmet County's model was laid decades ago.
In the 1990s, Michigan banned yard debris, like leaves, from landfills, which set the stage for some communities to start composting, or at least diverting that from their dumps. Around that time, Emmet County put in place policies to encourage people to recycle. In the following years, it began collecting yard clippings. And in 2015 it started composting food scraps, and has since processed over 4 million pounds.
It encourages composting and recycling by making it more expensive to throw things away in landfills, calling it a “pay as you throw” system. Composting is subsidized through other operations, and it's also sold by the bag, bucket and truck bed.
“This is something that we can all get behind,” Walker said. “You have to just implement it with a vision and policy and get the buy-in for more diversion opportunities.”
It can do this because its local ordinance requires that almost all waste runs through the transfer station, including compost, trash and recycling (it excludes construction materials).
“Our municipalities and our townships are no longer paying for peoples’ garbage, and that’s the policy that I believe should be implemented statewide, county to county and community to community,” she said.
State officials have taken note: In June, Emmet County was featured in a Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy session on local composting, part of a program to help communities decarbonize.
Walker suggests other places can start by looking at what’s already available, whether that's farm operations, yard waste facilities, or automated composters. She also pointed to funding; this year, the state offered grants to help build out programs, and it also runs the NextCycle Michigan initiative.
Cities and states across the country are figuring out what to do with organic waste, some more aggressively than others. Vermont, for instance, has banned it from being tossed in the trash.
Aaron Hiday, an organics waste expert with the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said Michigan doesn’t have enough infrastructure to meet its ambitious goals for food waste yet. But concrete models show it’s possible for local governments to run organic waste programs.
“Emmet County has proven that,” he said. “It might take some blood, sweat, tears and money, but it can be done.”
What sets such programs apart, he said, is that it’s invested directly in recycling and composting, learning about waste diversion, getting the right equipment, and treating it as a benefit rather than a financial drain.
Hiday said Emmet County’s program is possible partly because it has a small population in a rural area; other places with more people and less space may need to take a different tack, like hiring outside businesses.
And Walker said even Emmet's program has a ways to go: “Though we're recovering about, oh, I don't know, 10, 15% of the food waste from what's going in the municipal solid waste stream, it still is like a drop in the bucket about how much food waste is going to landfill here.”
Emmet is working with nine other counties in northern Michigan to figure out how to expand and improve composting and other efforts across the region; a 2022 report commissioned by the nonprofit SEEDS Ecology and Education Centers showed that the region could divert around 26,000 tons of food and yard waste a year.
Locally, Walker said, people ask about curbside pickup for houses, but the county team is still figuring out what's next; state regulations mean they can’t afford to expand too much. And since there are many different ways to compost, a lot of food scraps can be handled at home.
“We don’t want to be the only composter in Emmet County,” she said. “We want to spread that compost love around so that we are recovering more materials."
