Justen Garrity, president of Veteran Compost
What does a commercial composting facility look like? I was curious so I toured Veteran Compost in Aberdeen, Md. during the 2024 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Baltimore. Our guide, Justen Garrity, started the company with little more than a shovel 2010. The facility now takes in 20 to 40 tons of food waste every day. After several months, food scraps like discarded peels, unfinished burgers and watermelon rinds will be finished compost.
Here’s a virtual tour of their process:
Veteran Compost operates on a 30-acre tract of farmland, which includes a farmhouse that dates to the 1860s. Once you cruise down the entryway, you arrive at the spot where staff members unload food scraps.
Here’s where the unloading happens:
Staffers literally dump bins on the ground, tear away plastic bags and remove any obvious contamination (plastic shredded cheese bags, stickers and rubber bands from bunched veggies are common contaminants). On the day of our tour about 10 tons of discarded lettuce arrived. Justen said that rotting lettuce ranked in his top three worst smells. The other two? Spoiled raw chicken and crab waste in July. I’m taking his word for it!
This facility receives discarded food from places like hospitals, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias–nothing from individual homes. Household food waste (Like mine! I’m a VC residential customer) goes to a smaller facility in Virginia.
Food waste alone typically contains too much water and not enough carbon to produce high quality compost. To create an ideal buffet for food-decomposing microbes, you need to strike a balance between “greens” (wet, nitrogen-rich ingredients, like food) and “browns” (dry, carbon-rich materials like sticks, leaves and paper). Veteran Compost adds wood chips, supplied by local tree removal companies, to balance the food waste.
So, after a preliminary dump and sort, the food is mixed with wood chips and heaped into what professional composters call “aerated static piles.” They’re basically mounds threaded with air-circulating pipes–oxygen is also essential to a healthy compost process. The heaps are then covered with even more wood chips so no food waste is exposed. That prevents pests and odors and insulates the piles.
Insulation is important because a key step in composting is heat. To ensure any foodborne pathogens are killed, regulations require the aerated piles reach 131 degrees Fahrenheit or higher for at least three days, a temperature that VC exceeds. But Veteran Compost doesn’t need to install any special equipment to “cook” the compost. The heat comes from the energy released by microbes themselves as they get to work on the moist, nutrient-rich scraps.
After a week or two, most food waste is unrecognizable as food.
After four to five weeks the compost is screened using machines like this:
Screening will remove things that didn’t break down. That could be items that aren’t compostable, like plastic forks or straws, or items that simply need more time. Justen said fiber-based trays, like you might find at a cafeteria, can take a while to come apart; it just takes longer for moisture and microbes to reach them, especially if they arrive in a stack. Some of the strangest things they’ve found after screening include iPhones, shoes and guitar picks.
Justen told us that products stamped with compostable certification from BPI, an independent organization, quickly disappear in the piles. But staffers routinely find things that consumers might assume are compostable but never decompose. Like this fork. It says it’s made from plant starch, but it’s not going anywhere (by the way, it’s resting on a fiber tray that is taking its time to break down, but eventually will).
Anything that doesn’t pass screening is either sent to landfill or sent back to the aerated static piles. Everything else continues the journey in long, short piles aka windrows, where it “cures” for two to three months. The curing piles aren’t aerated, but staff members turn them every month. The intense heat from the initial piles dissipates during curing.
Throughout the process, Veteran Compost’s staff soil scientist checks on the piles’ temperature, pH and other factors. They also send samples to a commercial lab to get nutrient analysis and make sure heavy metals aren’t present. Before deeming the compost finished, staffers make sure it’s sufficiently cooled down and passes lab tests and seed germination tests.
Every day, they finish 10 to 30 cubic yards of compost.
Once the compost is ready, Veteran Compost sells it (here’s what they sell and where you can buy). Some of their products have special recipes, like their Organic Crab Compost, which is made from crabs that didn’t survive the journey from harvest to restaurant, as well as coffee grounds, organic produce scraps and mulch.
As its name suggests, Veteran Compost gives hiring preference to veterans. Each employee also gets their own garden plot on the property as well as unlimited eggs from the 10 chickens that roam the facility.
Thanks for the tour, Justen! And, cool shirt!
