Composting goes electric

When Michael Levenston was offered the chance to bring a dragon into his demonstration garden in Kitsilano, he was skeptical. After some convincing, the Red Dragon–a cherry-red electric composter–found a new home.

“So far it’s working like it’s supposed to,” Levenston says. “I’m very excited about making clean, good quality compost.”

The Red Dragon–about the size of a bar fridge–is the smallest of a line of electric composters distributed by GreenGood Composters. It runs on 60 to 80 kilowatts of electricity per month (about four dollars’ worth), and can turn up to 100 kilograms of food waste into several kilograms of compost in 24 hours. It was so effective, in fact, that City Farmer recently started using a larger version, the White Dragon.

The composters are being used at restaurants and other businesses, as well as large public institutions like schools and even military bases, says Brian Leung, director of GreenGood’s Vancouver office. The advantage is that they allow on-site composting with no smell and no rodents.

The machines do this by heating food waste and mixing it regularly. Heat evaporates the water in the waste, which is usually 80 to 90 per cent of its weight and volume, and also kills any harmful bacteria in the compost, meaning it can be safely used in the garden.

“Most of the units now are being sold in Korea as well as in Japan,” explains Leung. These countries have banned food scraps from the waste stream because they simply don’t have the space to expand landfills.

Metro Vancouver and other jurisdictions in North America are slowly moving in the same direction by targeting food waste in residential and commercial sector. Restaurants and other food-related business produce approximately 95,000 thousand tonnes of food waste each year in the region.

Bishop’s restaurant, a Kitsilano institution, has partnered with Levenston and Leung to demonstrate how easy it is for restaurants to compost. Every week, Leung picks up food waste from Bishop’s, typically between 70 and 150 kilograms, and takes it the few blocks to City Farmer’s site.

The resulting compost, a dark loamy mix that looks and feels like potting soil, is then used at City Farmer and other community gardens in the area. In the spring, Leung says the process will come “full circle” by using the mix to grow tomatoes and other vegetables for Bishop’s.

“Collecting restaurant food waste requires a little preliminary organization but the systems are easy to follow once implemented,” Bishop’s executive chef Andrea Carlson told OpenFile in an email. “There is really no excuse for restaurants to not be composting their food waste–we have all the resources available to us in our city.”

“To me, it’s exciting in that you can be extremely local and large-scale, taking care of your waste as opposed to trucking it a long way away,” says Levenston. “We’ve talked a lot about community composting, but it hasn’t really had any real champion out there. Finally we have something that shows some promise.”