Model Municipal Ordinance on Advancing Community Composting, With and Without Commentaries

Coauthored with Linda Breggin, Taalin RaoShah, and Leah Fattor of the Environmental Law Institute and Brenda Platt, Sophia Jones, and Julia Spector of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

NRDC, the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) recently released a Model Municipal Ordinance on Advancing Community Composting, a template ordinance intended to reduce regulatory barriers to and provide opportunities for community composting. This model is a companion to the NRDC/ELI Model Municipal Zoning Ordinance on Community Composting, which reduces zoning barriers by establishing community composting as a permissible land use under a municipality’s zoning code. Together, these models can advance community composting, which, in turn, can help municipalities cut solid waste management costs and meet their economic development, climate, and waste reduction goals while achieving various other co-benefits.

More than 30 percent of all food in the United States goes uneaten at enormous financial, environmental, and social cost. Although the preferred pathway for diverting food waste from disposal in landfills and incinerators is to avoid wasting the food in the first place, there will always be food scraps that need to be managed. Composting—the controlled, aerobic, biological decomposition of organic material into a valuable soil amendment known as compost—serves as an important complement to other food waste reduction strategies.

Composting offers many environmental, economic, and social benefits. By diverting organic waste from landfills, composting reduces emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Composting instead of landfilling or incinerating can also decrease disposal costs and ultimately reduce the need for expansion or construction of new landfills and incinerators, which have harmful public health effects and are disproportionately sited in low-income communities and communities of color. Applying compost to soil offers significant benefits, too, including improving water and nutrient retention capacity, sequestering carbon, preventing erosion, reducing stormwater runoff, and decreasing the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Composting can take place across a spectrum of sites and operational sizes, from backyard composting to community composting to large industrial facilities. This model focuses on community composting, defined primarily by its local character and size relative to industrial composting—i.e., occupying a smaller operational area and processing substantially less organic material than industrial composting, sourcing organic material locally, typically engaging the community in the composting process, and distributing or using most of the compost locally.

Community composting is designed to meet local needs, serve local interests, and engage the community in a variety of ways; for example, community composting facilities may run educational programs on food systems and sustainability and provide local jobs and job training. Due to its size and local focus, community composting can also reduce costs and emissions related to hauling and distribution. Further, community composting can be a powerful tool to promote equity, including by filling service access gaps in communities where there are no municipally provided organics recycling opportunities and by providing valuable green space that can help reduce urban heat island effects. 

Unfortunately, community composters often encounter regulatory barriers at both the municipal and state levels that can hinder their ability to establish and sustain operations. 

The model is intended to help municipalities advance community composting by providing clean, “off-the-shelf” legal language to address “unreasonable” regulatory barriers that impose burdens that are unintended, unnecessary, or disproportionate to the expected benefits of applying the requirements.

Specifically, the model requires a municipality to inventory municipal ordinances and regulations that could apply to community composting operations and to determine whether any of them presents an unreasonable barrier. For any municipal ordinance or regulation that is determined to present a barrier, the model requires the municipality to reduce or eliminate the barrier to the extent practicable. The model also directs the municipality to identify any state laws that may present unreasonable barriers, such as solid waste permitting requirements.

In addition, the model addresses specific barriers in the following areas: nuisance determinations; floodplain management; licensing of haulers and collection of organic material; regulation of the distribution and sale of compost; and procurement of compost and composting services. 

The model also addresses the ways in which a municipality can provide opportunities for community composting, including promoting public awareness and education, offering technical assistance, and committing to financial assistance.

The off-the-shelf version of the model is accompanied by a version with commentaries and a background memorandum, which offer alternative approaches and additional information to help municipalities tailor the model to their local circumstances. For example, because community composting can take many different forms and operate at varying sizes, its definition in the model is intentionally flexible; a municipality could choose to include a quantitative threshold, such as throughput volume or site area, to determine what qualifies as a community composting operation.

A slide deck is also provided to help municipal staff or community members share the model with decision-makers and other stakeholders.

This policy is also accompanied by a Model Resolution; resolutions are adopted by municipal legislative bodies (most commonly city councils), typically state a formal opinion or position, and can be used to express municipal policy. Resolutions vary in form and content—and in the process for how they are adopted. This Model Resolution is drafted to reflect commonly used structures and language but can be modified as needed to conform with a municipality’s requirements with respect to form and style and a council’s scope of authority, which may be set out in the municipal charter or code. The Model can also be tailored to align with a municipality’s priorities and its available staffing and funding resources.

The model is part of an ongoing effort to provide municipalities and advocates with tools to reduce the time and resources associated with taking food waste reduction actions. 

Additional resources and information can be found at ELI’s Center for State and Local Governance, ELI’s Food Waste Initiative, NRDC's Food Waste Reduction initiative, and ILSR’s Composting for Community.