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Across the street from the Traverse Area District Library, on one side of an empty parking lot, is the Earth Flow automatic composter. It's a 20-foot-long shipping container, with doors that open on either end. A pile of wood chips sits outside.
“It's really small and it processes material extremely fast, and it's fully contained, so nothing blows away,” said Sarna Salzman, the executive director of the nonprofit SEEDS Ecology and Education Centers. “And so that allows you to really accept a lot of different kinds of product into it.”
On one end, an automatic lever lifts bins and tips them into the container, dumping all kinds of food waste, from watermelon rinds to corn husks.
Inside, a large auger moves from front to back and side to side, aerating the scraps and mixing in wood chips from the city’s parks division.
“The glory of this is that you get to do larger amounts of food scraps and waste diversion and less shoveling with human power,” said Megan Alexander, the owner and operator of Carter’s Compost, which the city hired to bring organic waste to the composter.
The composter, which the city officially opened last week, is the centerpiece of its pilot project to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s part of the city’s overarching goals to consider climate impacts in its operations.
People won’t be able to drop off scraps whenever they want. Instead, they’ll have to sign up with Carter’s, which has different subscription tiers, like a weekly pickup for $24 a month. Alexander said they’re still working to educate the public, too. For instance, the composter can take BPI-certified compostable materials, but it can’t handle bags that are labeled as compostable.
“When we're talking about education, there's such a thing as contaminating compost,” she said, clambering into the composter to grab someone’s left-behind aluminum can.
Digging into a regional effort
Traverse City has long collected and composted yard clippings, like leaves, abiding by the statewide ban on throwing that in landfills.
In 2022, the city received a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to expand composting and reduce food waste. The composting project cost a total of $323,428 — a $255,396 grant through the American Rescue Plan Act and a city match of $68,032.
The goal is to provide more organic waste pickup for residents and businesses. And it’s a change from other operations. Carter’s, for instance, normally works on a smaller scale than this.
SEEDS will help run the composter, which can process up to 60 tons of food waste a year. It will take the finished product to Historic Barns Park, where it will be part of the compost petting zoo and will be used in the gardens there.
Salzman said this is part of a larger push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from landfills, not only locally, but across the state; Michigan is aiming to drastically cut down on food waste in landfills in the coming years, and is requiring counties to consider organic waste as they update their materials management plans.
This won't take care of all of Traverse City’s composting needs. Instead, it's meant as a testing ground.
“It's part of a bigger conversation that the city is having, and that, frankly, the whole 10-county region and the state is having,” Salzman said. “How do we get the material, organic material, that would otherwise turn back into soil in the right conditions, out of the landfill.”
For the past several years, SEEDS has led a coalition of 10 northern Michigan counties to figure out how to reduce organic waste in local landfills by over a third by 2030.
“Our partnership has started a movement that we're calling Soil Lovers Unite, because we're really in it to regenerate Michigan soils,” Salzman said. “The way to do that is to retain the value in the stuff that's grown by our soil.”
