Eco-tip: New facility will change composting in Ventura County - VC Star

Eco-tip: New facility will change composting in Ventura County

Eco-tip: New facility will change future of composting in Ventura County

Two weeks ago, Agromin, the organics recycling arm of Harrison Industries, won the maximum possible $10 million award in a competitive grant process from CalRecycle, the state department that oversees California's recycling and waste management programs.

The money will energize a major leap forward for recycling in Ventura County, partially funding development of a commercial-scale composting operation on the Limoneira Farm near Santa Paula.

The project at Limoneira received a conditional use permit from the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in February 2022. But the approved plan for the site, and conditions of the permit, include massive new infrastructure requiring time and money to build.

The new roads, water capture and treatment system and construction of six buildings are predicted to cost Agromin $30 million before new operations can begin. Additional financing may come in the form of loans from the Ventura County Recycling Market Development Zone and from a bank in partnership with backing from the California Pollution Control Financing Authority, as well as additional private partners.

Development of this new compost facility will solve a local problem. Food scraps from most Ventura County homes and businesses participating in organics recycling programs are currently separated from yard clippings and trucked to Kern County for recycling. This long journey, with attendant environmental costs, has been necessary for the environmental benefit of composting food scraps because Ventura County has no local facility permitted to compost the food scraps.

Senate Bill 1383 of 2016 set California mandates for diversion of food recycling programs, and jurisdictions such as Ventura County could not receive exemptions or postponements of deadlines just because local facilities were not ready. Far from being sympathetic to the situations of communities without existing facilities permitted to compost food scraps, advocates of the mandates predicted communities forced to implement food recycling programs would expedite efforts to site and develop new facilities to avoid the cost of exporting materials.

Agromin’s project at Limoneira has been in the planning and permitting stages since 2010. At the time it was proposed, some considered it unlikely to proceed through permitting. Ventura County’s zoning ordinance prohibited commercial composting on agriculturally zoned land, allowing only farm-based composting, with limitations such as requiring all compost and mulch produced to be used on-site.

In February 2022, supervisors lifted this zoning restriction for up to 200 acres, countywide. Agromin’s expansion, which will likely make the Limoneira site ready to accept food scraps within two years, will expand the current 15-acre on-farm operation to a 70-acre, commercial-scale compost facility.

Besides the shortage of opportunities for local composting of food scraps, Ventura County is also short on capacity for processing of other waste considered “organic,” or compostable. Even after Agromin’s new project expands capacity at Limoneira to nearly 300,000 tons per year, the combination of all local organics recycling facilities will likely not be sufficient to handle all the county’s organic discards mandated by the state for recycling.

Partly addressing this need, Agromin expects to open another site, its Mountain View Food Waste Processing Facility, in Oxnard in 2024. This site may mash over 100,000 tons of residential and commercial food waste per year, sending it to other locations to be used as animal feed or made into bioenergy or compost. However, some of this incoming total could come from select commercial loads in adjacent counties. Making animal feed requires carefully selected inputs and residential food scraps are too unpredictable. This facility will add some local capacity, but will also require new composting capacity, due to the need for transfer of material collected there but unsuitable for animal feed.

You can help by properly recycling your organics.

In communities hauled by Harrison and WM, formerly Waste Management, bag residential food scraps so the material can be separated for proper handling. In communities hauled by Athens, place food scraps and 100% fiber-based, food-soiled paper directly into organics carts or use a clear bag.

In all cases, keep organics out of landfills to prevent pollution from methane gas, which is generated as organics rot without oxygen in landfills. Methane has climate-changing potential far greater than the carbon caused by emissions such as truck exhaust.

Both kinds of pollution will be reduced when Agromin develops its new composting facility at Limoneira.

David Goldstein, an environmental resource analyst with the Ventura County Public Works Agency, can be reached at 805-658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org.