Main Street Businesses: As Durango's Landfill Fills Up, One Business Has a Solution

Table to farm compost is a climate activist business, and it's kind of a play on words, table to farm, because we take food scraps from your table, bring it to our farm here, right in Durango, and make compost out of it.

Our mission is to recycle organics into compost and save the planet.

We take that really seriously because the environmental impact of food rotting in the landfill and methane emissions is pretty huge from a climate standpoint.

So we provide curbside recycling of your food waste.

The food waste is picked up in five gallon buckets.

It's an alternative to landfilling your trash.

In the landfill it breaks down anaerobically without oxygen and anaerobic decomposition produces methane.

Methane over a 20-year period of time is 84 times as potent of a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

When we think about waste diversion and the impact of organics in the landfill, it's not only the methane emissions.

Our local landfill, which is called Bondad, is at 70% capacity.

So there's only 30% left of the landfill, and it costs $2.25 million to build a cell in the landfill.

So at some great expense, we have limited capacity.

We can expand that capacity, but If we were to divert 30 to 40 percent of our organic waste in La Plata County away from the landfill, we would actually expand the life of the landfill by eight years and save 2.25 million dollars.

So there's an economic case to be found as well.

One of the really cool things about compost

is that it's a soil amendment and it's organic, not in the sense that it's certified organic, which is how people think of that word, but it was made from things that were once living.

And

in organic, fertilizer, organic soil amendment that compost is, is really full of microbes and good stuff for your garden.

It has all of these benefits around water, microbes, and overall plant health that a synthetic fertilizer just isn't going to have.

It's really rewarding to have local agricultural producers, you know, when you go to the farmers market and you get your produce, give you feedback that you're making a product that their veggies love.

We're just the right size in Durango that we can capture an extraordinary percentage of our food waste, bring it here and recycle it all and still stay within kind of a pretty reasonable footprint.

So the model of Table to Farm Compost and our community and the values that the community have are really well aligned.