SOCIAL AND ECONOMICAL BENEFITS OF MID-SCALE ON-SITE COMPOSTING
FOR RESIDENTIAL, INSTITUTIONAL AND COMMERCIAL SECTORS. Ms Cecilia
Ek, Susteco AB, Sockerbruket 25, 414 51 Gothenburg, Sweden
By composting food waste on site it is possible to raise the awareness about the amount
of food waste produced at residential, institutional and commercial areas. The source separation
of food waste and the possibility of composting on-site also leads in the long term to minimizing
the production of food. By composting food waste on-site in a mid-scale composter the user
takes full ownership of the food waste.
Composting on-site is the new way of dealing with waste in our ‘modern’ society, the
food waste is not just put in bags/bins and sent off somewhere, ‘out of sight out of mind’. It
needs to be implemented in our social habits. This is easy when knowing what to do and what to
focus on. People will readily adapt to the small change of feeding a composter instead of a bin
and will naturally feel involved in the production of compost. When introducing a mid-scale
composter in a housing area there are also social benefits, meeting your neighbor at the
composter will for instance result in a more secure neighborhood. And there is also the fact that
we produce fertilizer together to be used for greening our neighborhood. In a school the midscale composter is easily used as an educational tool to demonstrate the composting process. It
also helps visualize the amount of food waste thrown away and teaches the children to
understand that food waste can be used as a fertilizer when seeing new vegetables grow.
When composting food waste on site the economical and environmental benefits are
huge. One of the most difficult waste streams to transport separated is food waste. By
composting on site the other waste streams can be collected much less often. Since there is no
need of collecting source separated food waste 2-3 times a week and transporting it to a large
treatment plant, the green house gas emissions for transporting the food waste drops
dramatically. The quality of the other waste streams will be higher since there is less
contamination from the food waste in them. The quality of the compost produced by a mid-scale
composter is normally very high.
Showing numerous examples of on-site composting implementations and practical
installation requirements of mid-scale composting sites will be addressed with examples from
residential, institutional (e.g. schools and prisons) and commercial profiles of urban sites and
remote areas. Presenting analytical composting research from London Imperial College for
prisons local composting gives an independent analysis of composting process control basics in a
mid-scale on-site composting facility.