A Clark County program to divert food waste from the landfill is striking “black gold” by turning the region’s food scraps into a rich, dark compost capable of adding nutrients back into the soil.
We Compost is a partnership among Clark County Solid Waste, Waste Connections and local organizations, churches and businesses that provides Clark County residents who don’t have curbside compost services drop-off sites where they can dispose of food scraps.
In 2024, the program helped keep more than 50,000 pounds of food waste out of the local landfill.
“It’s important to keep food out of the landfill because it can’t decompose the way we want it,” said Celina Montgomery of Clark County Green Business.
In a closed landfill environment, food waste cannot decompose naturally to become the valuable “black gold” compost coveted by gardeners, Montgomery said.
Instead, food waste languishes inside the landfill, eventually contributing to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“When organic material like food waste ends up in a municipal landfill system, it creates a gas called methane and that methane can exacerbate climate change,” Camille Shelton with Clark County Green Neighbors said in a video about the program. “When we send our food scraps to a municipal compost facility instead of a municipal landfill we’re able to cycle those nutrients back into the soil.”
According to Clark County, about 22 percent of the nation’s garbage is actually food waste that could be turned into nutrient-rich compost. In 2021, Clark County residents and businesses generated an estimated 35,000 tons of food waste.
“That’s 70 million pounds of reusable organic material going to the landfill in one year,” according to the county’s We Compost video.
The We Compost program offers more than a dozen food-waste drop-off sites where Clark County residents can dump their food scraps — including bones, dairy and meat — into a collection bin bound for Dirt Hugger, a commercial composting facility located in Dallesport in the Columbia River Gorge.
There, the mash of uneaten produce, dairy, meat, bones and other food scraps is converted into a soil-amending compost, which can help fuel future food growth.
Meat, bones, dairy
“This is an opportunity available to everybody in Clark County,” Montgomery said, adding that the program hopes to open more food-waste drop-off sites.
“We would love to get two or three hubs in Camas and go into Washougal, La Center and more rural areas,” Montgomery said.
Although Vancouver and Ridgefield both offer curbside food-waste pickups, the service is only available to residents of single-family homes inside city limits. Apartment residents in Vancouver and Ridgefield — as well as residents of unincorporated Clark County and those who live in other cities — have limited options for keeping their food waste out of the landfill.
Some may choose to set up compost bins in their own yards, but that limits the type of scraps that can go into compost bins, Montgomery said.
The green We Compost food-waste bins, which store the food scraps before they’re sent to the commercial composting facility, can accommodate any type of food waste, including dairy, meat and bones. The county also provides free food-waste bins for people to store their food scraps at home before bringing them to the drop-off hubs. To order a free at-home food-waste bin, visit the We Compost website at clarkgreenneighbors.org/we-compost.
“We’ll take anything that was food,” Montgomery said. “If you used it to contribute to a meal, save it. We want it in our food carts.”
In the county’s video, Dirt Hugger co-founder Pierce Louis asks that people only dump food waste into the We Compost program’s food-waste collection bins.
“If it’s something you would have eaten or it’s part of what you were preparing, please put that in there. But if it’s anything else, maybe a twist tie around a vegetable, or a rubber band or fruit stickers, we ask that those be pulled off,” Louis said.
The We Compost program, which is funded by a state Department of Ecology grant, offers 13 food-waste drop-off hubs, including nine in the Vancouver metro area, two in Battle Ground, one in Camas and a new site in Brush Prairie. A 14th site, in Ridgefield, also is expected to come online this year.
The Camas site, located near a bus stop on Northwest Parker Street, outside the TSMC Washington semiconductor facility, formerly known as WaferTech, had an unusual beginning.
The compost site was originally only available to TSMC employees, but Montgomery said it failed to catch on.
Last summer, the hub moved outside TSMC and became available to the general public. Now, the Camas site is a popular drop-off spot for people hoping to keep their food scraps out of the landfill, Montgomery said.
“People are very excited about putting their food waste into the carts,” Montgomery told Camas City Council members during a presentation about the We Compost program at the council’s Jan. 21 workshop. “We would love to establish a second, third or fourth hub in Camas and hope to keep increasing use at the TSMC Washington hub.”
Camas origins
The We Compost program’s popularity in Camas makes sense considering the city was where the seed of the county’s food-waste collection program was first planted.
In 2021, Camas resident Kristin Yoshimura helped launch a free food-waste pickup service at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church following her graduation from Clark County’s composter-recycler education program.
She said Pete DuBois, Clark County’s composter-recycler program manager, wanted to see if people would be more likely to compost their food waste if they had a free, convenient drop-off site.
Yoshimura, who attended and worked at St. Thomas in 2021, convinced church leaders to test DuBois’ community composting idea.
“We got the word out on our social media sites and reached out to all the neighbors,” Yoshimura said. “And we got a really great response.”
The St. Thomas pilot project helped launch Clark County’s Congregation to Compost program, which would eventually morph into the We Compost community composting hub program available to Clark County residents today.
Since 2021, the county’s community composting programs have diverted an estimated 100,000 pounds of food waste from the landfill, with more than half of that diversion occurring in 2024, when We Compost leaders made a concentrated push to publicize the program and expand its reach outside the Vancouver metro area.
“We had a boom in 2024, when we diverted more than 52,000 pounds of food waste,” Montgomery said. “We’re trying to make it easy for people who have a lack of access … and we’re getting more information out to the community.”
