From kitchen trash to garden treasure

A new law quietly went into effect on January 1, 2022. The New York state food donation and food scraps recycling law requires businesses and institutions generating an annual average of two tons of wasted food a week to donate what's edible and recycle the rest if they're within 25 miles of a composting facility, or other scraps processing facility.
Heather Gilbert was more than ready. Her company, Finger Lakes Compost on Pre-Emption Road in Rock Stream has been turning kitchen waste into healthy garden soil for more than two years. Her process is basic and ancient, leavened with experience, education and passion.
Gilbert trained as a nurse, and while she was in school, she also worked as an executive in retail. But after she had children, thoughts about the world the next generation will inherit began to haunt her. Already involved in gardening and home composting, she wanted to expand the practice to compost the trash of people who'd rather throw it away. Keeping it out of the waste stream and returning organic material to the soil is clearly a win/win.
Walking to the composting area behind Gilbert's house, accompanied by her two lively dogs, it's hard to know where the composting happens until Gilbert stops. There are small hills, some snow-covered, a few gently steaming. A thermometer stuck into the current active pile registers nearly 150 degrees, indicating the material is "working." The food scraps have been layered with wood chips, watered, then mixed regularly with the help of a tractor. Surprisingly, even a sensitive nose right next to the pile detects only a faintly earthy, perhaps slightly fruity smell. The mass sinks as the material digests and decomposes, going from its original 80 cubic yards of waste material to about a third of its original size when it's finished.
Among refuse items eligible for composting are all food scraps, including meat, bones and dairy, coffee grounds, filters and tea bags, paper products, compostable packaging and compostable tableware, hair, yard waste, sawdust, feathers and flowers. If it's organic, it will break down. It's collected in five-gallon green lidded bins or 20- and 44-gallon purple ones. Each time Gilbert collects a bin, she replaces it with a clean one. Five days a week she's out in her truck collecting on a route that takes her through Schuyler, Yates and Chemung counties. Her clients include private individuals, restaurants, hotels, the Del Lago casino and a few towns. There are collection bins through Montour Falls and at the recycling center in Reynoldsville. Once she gets it to her facility, she dumps and picks through the refuse, separating meat products into a separate composting pile. She washes every bin. It's a lot of work, but "When you do something you love, your work isn't so bad," she says. "I'm a one-woman circus."
And she had to jump through a lot of hoops to get here. She got certified after taking a 40-hour accredited composting course at Cornell University, given by the U.S. Composting Council. She is regularly inspected by the Department of Environmental Conservation, another agency tests her finished compost for the presence of weed seeds and contaminants before she sells it, and she has to keep records, reporting "What I haul and take in, and then what I dish out," she says. Her scrap clients get a discount on finished compost, and she can tell each of them how much waste they've diverted from the landfill.
This is an especially good thing for the region because the Ontario County landfill in Geneva will close in 2028 and Seneca Meadows in Seneca Falls is expected to close in 2025. Gilbert's commitment to sustainability goes beyond her business. She cites non-bio-degradable packaging as one of the biggest contributors to our massive trash problem. It's an issue, she says, needing to be stopped at the front end. "It's hard to stop it in the waste stream," she notes.
She worried that she'd started a business shortly before lockdowns began but soon found the world's circumstances favored her endeavor. "The pandemic blew me up," she says. "Everyone was cooking at home, generating lots of scraps."
And while she'd like to have those scraps, she's also happy giving composting workshops, like the ones she's given for Cornell Cooperative Extension in Schuyler County and hopes to be offering this year in Yates County.
"Heather's definitely enthusiastic and very good at explaining compost to people of all levels," says Marissa Nolan, composting, horticulture and Local Foods Educator at CCE. "You can really see as she's teaching, her passion for the subject just overflows."
Gilbert's daughters are developing their own sustainability consciousness as well. This spring they're hoping to begin raising and selling red wiggler a.k.a. composting worms. These are usually raised in plastic bins but Gilbert is looking for compostable containers for the process.
Find out more about curbside compost pick-up, including rates, at fingerlakescompost.com or call 315-335-0424.