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In a recent article from The Virginia Pilot, a local waste management company has found a solution to the odorous, if planet-friendly problem of composting yard waste for multiple communities. As anyone with a compost bin knows, the smell of organic materials being processed can be unpalatable to some, but no different than the smell of a local farm , and certainly not as pungent as a dump site.

That being said, communities in the Norfolk, VA region recently saw a change in the chain of command of their community composting efforts when their previous vendor, the Southeastern Public Service Authority, was replaced with a private company, McGill Environmental Systems when SPSA stepped down due to complaints about fees and their practice of burying the waste into a local landfill in lieu of composting it.

According to the article, “The company, based in North Carolina and with operations in Ireland, now handles yard waste from Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Isle of Wight County, as well as organic waste from clients including Smithfield Foods, Birdsong Peanuts, Lipton Tea, Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch, the Virginia Beach Convention Center and the College of William and Mary.”

“Broom was surprised by how Virginia – and the United States in general – has not embraced composting the way Europe has.

“Composting has the potential to recycle 70 percent of the world’s wastes,” he says, “but we somehow don’t do it.”

Finding a location for a new compost center is usually difficult – except here, where there were no neighbors to contest plans and worry about odors, and because Sussex County welcomed a new, tax-paying business within its borders.

In Ireland, where McGill’s president, Noel Lyons, hails from, composting is done entirely indoors – to control smells and because open land is so scare.

“We could never do in Ireland what we do here,” Broom says.

The McGill facility in Waverly contains indoor and outdoor curing areas, and today it generates about 175,000 tons of compost a year, according to company literature.

Broom says the company’s “secret weapon” is a labyrinth of underground pipes beneath the indoor facility that blows air into stewing piles of organic material, all alive with microscopic growth that is so active that it creates heat (hence, all the steam).”

The move towards public composting continues as private companies like McGill Environmental Systems continue to turn the waste management industry towards ecologically-friendly practices. It is the effort of companies like this that will make composting a norm and not an anomaly across the US.

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