Composting efforts spread slowly but steadily

Grassroots groups and state funding have propelled the change

By Mike Lynch

On a late Friday afternoon in March about a half-dozen North Country School students are broken into groups in a rustic building with a 20-foot long by four-foot-wide rotating drum composter near the back wall. 

Some students hustle to chop up food scraps, scooping them up into buckets and then depositing them into the unit. A few feet away another student is gathering thumbnail-sized wood pellets. They are making a mixture to toss into the machine. 

After the organic material has cycled through the machine, it empties onto the floor in a wheelbarrow-sized mound. From there, it is moved to a nearby bay, where it will sit for a few months before being sprinkled atop gardens where the students grow their own food. 

Located in Lake Placid, a big focus of the North Country School boarding school is hands-on and placed-based education.

Composting has been part of the program for decades as part of the holistic approach to farming. 

A study by the school in 2023 shows it generated more than 100 pounds of food scraps per day, including a high of 422 pounds on Aug. 4 that year.

“We not only are diverting waste from a landfill, we’re then using it to grow more food, which is amazing,” educational farm manager Kim Smart said. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 25% of municipal landfills consist of food waste. That means the food is decomposing through a process that doesn’t include oxygen, thus creating the powerful greenhouse gas methane that contributes to global warming. The EPA estimates that municipal landfills are the third largest source of human-related methane in the U.S. and  58% of methane emissions from landfills are derived from food waste. 

While composting has been a part of life at North Country School for decades, it’s also now gaining momentum in pockets throughout the Adirondacks, thanks in part to the Compost for Good initiative. 

In 2018, now retired North Country School facilities manager John Culpepper joined with his daughter Katie, and Jennifer Perry to co-found the initiative under ADKAction. The program is now affiliated with the Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA). Their goal: to inspire community-scale efforts and offer support for those who do it. 

Their work has helped farms, such as Reber Rock and Ben Wever in the Champlain Valley and the Whitten Farm in St. Lawrence County, to improve their composting methods. They also developed a liaison program in partnership with Clarkson University to educate the public about the benefits of composting. 

Awareness of the issue has also grown in northern New York because the state Department of Environmental Conservation has created funding programs for local governments to recycle food scraps and manage their organic waste. 

And a New York state law enacted in 2022 also requires businesses and institutions that generate an average of two tons of wasted food per week to donate all extra edible food, and they must recycle food scraps if they are within 25 miles of an organics recycler such as a composting facility.

As a result, Perry has seen more interest from groups to reduce their food waste and contribute to composting efforts.  

“In the past three to four months, we have been hearing from other people almost incessantly,” said Perry, who is employed through ANCA as the organics recycling coordinator and also runs a composting company, River Valley Regeneratives, with her partner, Jon Norman.  

A handful of Adirondack towns, counties and schools are beginning to accept food scraps or exploring the idea: 

• The towns of Chesterfield, Keene, and St. Armand have food scrap collection sites at their transfer stations. Several towns, including Jay, are pursuing pilots. 
• Warren County is establishing a pilot to take food scraps at its transfer sites and create compost after receiving a $99,000 grant from the DEC’s Climate Smart Communities program in December. Clinton County received a two-year $200,000 grant last year to reduce food waste and is developing programing, including increasing drop-off sites and educating the public about food waste.  
• Schools in Saranac Lake, Tupper Lake, Lake Placid, and Saranac have programs. In Keene, the district has had on-site composting for many years. Paul Smith’s College and North Country Community College both contract with collectors to have their scraps picked up.

Blue Line Compost helped raise awareness around recycling food scraps in the Tri-Lakes area, but the business that started about five years ago shut down this spring.

Blue Line co-owner Carter Rowley said the recognition of the issue has increased somewhat in recent years, but that hasn’t always resulted in consumers, such as businesses, participating. Blue Line relied on customers paying them to take away excess food and then selling the finished product of compost. 

“We were really hoping that (participation) would escalate faster and that the general awareness and need for this service would have grown more in this time,” he said. “It really hasn’t changed that much.”

That lack of participation made it hard for Blue Line to make a profit, he said. 

Innovating systems

 Another way composting has spread is through the development of a unit made by Culpepper. In 2015, Culpepper designed the in-vessel drum composter that the North Country School students still use with the help of a $35,000 grant from New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) that ANCA helped him obtain. The goal was to design a low cost, in-vessel drum composter for medium to large communities.  

“I designed this to be used in educational settings,” said Culpepper, who is mostly a volunteer for Compost for Good. “I designed it so that you had to load it with a five-gallon or eight-gallon bucket, so that children, students and campers could be involved.”

The same model can now be found at the Shipman Youth Center in Lake Placid, Hermon DeKalb Central School in St. Lawrence County, and the Wild Center in Tupper Lake. 

In 2024, the Wild Center processed 17,739 pounds of organic matter, taking not only food scraps from their visitors but from the local school district as well.  

Culpepper’s design has led to organizations building them in New Jersey, California, Mexico, Netherlands and Scotland.  

“They’re popping up all over the world,” Culpepper  said. “And they’re popping up because the design is open source, and so my only ask is that if people modify this design, they tell me what’s working and what’s not working.” 

He then passes that info along to other users. 

Always coming up with new ideas, Culpepper has also developed a neighborhood-scale unit that can be utilized by several households, a farm or a business. These systems consist of plastic culverts that are stood vertically so the openings are at the top and bottom. They are four feet tall and four feet wide, are covered with a plywood, and aerated with an auger.

Camp Dudley in Westport has a system that includes about eight of these versions and they processed about 25,000 pounds of food scraps last summer, he said. 

Farms catching on

Farms are a natural fit for composting because they generate a lot of organic waste. In recent years, some have not only begun refining their compost efforts but are also now taking food waste from the public. 

In Owls Head, the Cook Family Farm has a drop off site on the edge of its property.

“Our year round population is 400-something in Owls Head. There’s just not that many of us up here,” said Laura Cook, who worked as a liaison for Compost for Good last year. “But it’s something that we offer to the community for free because it’s something that we care about, and we want it to be an option.”

Cook said they take the scraps and add it to the organic piles made from materials on their farms, such as hay and butchered animal parts. They then apply the soil enhancer to their vegetable fields.

She has noticed that out-of-town visitors frequently come by with scraps. Food waste is banned from landfills in some areas, including the states of Vermont and California.  

“What we find is that a lot of people from the metropolitan areas that come up here for the summer are really familiar with community composting because it’s something that’s been offered in their city for decades, and so they’re very quick to embrace our system.” 

Little Farmhouse Flowers in Jay, where Katie Culpepper works as a farmer and compost manager, has a food drop-off site that they started after purchasing a drum composter for $30,000 several years ago. About half was paid for by a grant through the Pollution Prevention Institute. Creating a food collection site was part of the grant terms.  

Owner Linda D’Arco said prior to owning the machine she was paying $7,000 a year to purchase material made out of state. With the money she saved, she pays staff to make compost at her place, not only keeping waste but money local.

In St. Lawrence County, the Whitten Family Farm has always processed their waste products but has now taken it to a new level. They have constructed a system that pipes the heat from a compost pile into their barn and greenhouse.

The farm’s two biggest paying food scrap customers are Clarkson and SUNY Potsdam, which works nicely into their schedule because they have more free time when the colleges are in session. They started working with the colleges three years ago and collected 118 tons of food scraps their first two years. 

Due to their infrastructure investments, the farm hasn’t made money from their collection efforts or composting yet but they hope to in the future. Cherie Whitten said they are still fine tuning their process and hope to make a high-quality potting soil that will be an income generator. 

“You’re not going to make a lot of money out of it, but it’s a good off season job for a farmer, and farmers are pretty used to not making much money,” she said.