Heady Times for Compost Pioneers Is it possible to make a living by turning rotting food into usable compost while also helping to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce landfill disposal costs? The Peninsula Compost Company of Wilmington, Del., thinks so. Since 2009 it has been taking in growing quantities of spoiled food from supermarkets, restaurants, schools, and other sources and converting it in a matter of weeks into dark, moist, friable compost for use by landscapers, farmers and private gardeners. And in the last couple of months it began turning an operating profit, according to Nelson Widell, a Peninsula partner. He declined to provide specifics. But Peninsula says it is now the largest commercial composter on the East Coast. Each day it buys about 400 tons of food waste a day from companies and municipalities that are seeking to reduce the rising cost of disposing food waste in landfills. Keeping the garbage out of landfills helps to limit the output of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is generated from dumped food. Everything from spoiled bananas from the nearby Port of Wilmington to out-of-date hoagies from convenience stores is combined with yard waste and scrap wood to create a dark mass that serves as the feedstock for the compost. The mixture even includes $40 million a week in shredded bank notes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Suppliers are attracted by disposal costs that are sharply lower than those for local landfills. A municipal waste hauler in Mercer County, N.J., for example, will pay $120 a ton to dump food and yard waste in a local landfill but only $45 a ton to dispose it at the Wilmington facility, which helps boost volume at the latter even when transportation costs are factored in, Mr. Widell said. Ron Bergamini, chief executive of the Action Environmental Group, a leading commercial waste disposal and recycling company in New York City, said his company trucks about 40 tons a day of food waste to the Wilmington facility to meet recycling demand from some clients, mainly restaurants. Although disposal costs are lower at Wilmington than they would be at a landfill, transportation boosts the overall bill so that it's about equal to that of landfill disposal, he said. Still, clients ask for it as a way of helping the environment and boosting their green credentials, he explained. Contributions are also boosted by corporate and government policies aimed at reducing the volume of waste in landfills. "Companies like Wal-Mart have a very strong incentive to reduce the amount of material that goes into a landfill," Mr. Widell said. Recently he was buoyed by an announcement by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York that the city will soon begin a pilot program for the collection of residential food waste. Each year, the city dumps 1.1 million tons of food waste at a cost of $80 a ton, Mr. Bloomberg said this month in his State of the City address. Mr. Widell hopes that New York's initiative will spur other cities to divert their own food waste streams to operations like the company's Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, which has the capacity to take in another 150 tons of waste a day. Mr. Bergamini said that New York City's plans for residential food-waste recycling have even prompted his company to consider opening a recycling center there that would be similar to the Wilmington facility. Peninsula sees huge potential in food waste from residences as well, Mr. Widell said, noting that his only residential supplier at present is the Township of Princeton in New Jersey. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 33 million tons of food across the nation ends up in landfills or is burned each year. That makes it the largest category of waste going to landfills and incinerators, some 20 pounds per person per month. That amounts to as much as 40 percent of the food that consumers purchase. The food waste that finds its way to the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center is sifted, ground up and separated from non-compostable material like plastic bags before being dumped into dozens of "windrows," 200-foot-long piles of rotting material that is aerated from below, temperature-controlled and shielded from rain and snow by massive Goretex tarps. This process produces compost in about eight weeks, far more quickly than natural processes would allow. Each row produces about 60 tons of compost, for an overall total of some 75,000 tons a year that the company sells to customers like landscapers for about $20 a ton, Mr. Widell said. He said he had also been encouraged by recent regulatory changes in Delaware and Pennsylvania, which both now permit composted food waste to be used in topsoil for projects like slope stabilization. Nonetheless, the company's fortunes will clearly ride on an increase in both demand for the finished product and the supply of raw material.