How a composting crusader is changing waste disposal in unexpected places

A retired marine biologist is tackling methane emissions where state laws don’t apply—rural areas

Mover and mixer: Kate Wynne’s B2G Compost in Winthrop diverted 16 tons of food waste from a landfill last year. Photo: Kate Wynne

By K.C. Mehaffey. October 24, 2024. In 2021, 13.8% of the Washington state’s landfilled waste was food.

If you’re concerned about carbon emissions from landfills you already know that’s a problem.

“Because food waste decays relatively quickly, its emissions often occur before landfill gas collection systems are installed or expanded,” according Washington’s Department of Ecology.

Decomposing food releases methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 81 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The EPA estimates that annual emissions from food waste are equivalent to 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—the same as 42 coal-fired power plants.

As part of Washington’s goal to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, the state legislature passed the Organics Management Law in 2022 and added new provisions this year. The law seeks to reduce organic material in landfills by 75% by 2030.

Under the 2030 goals, total organic material disposed of in landfills would drop to 570,350 tons, with 415,490 tons of it as food waste.

State agencies are focusing on ways to reach this goal—including initiating and supporting composting programs.

Problem is, composting isn’t readily available throughout much of Washington.

This is particularly true in rural areas, because organics collection regulations apply only to jurisdictions with more than 25,000 residents. Places like Okanogan County—where the largest city, Omak, has fewer than 5,000 residents—are exempt from many provisions of the new law.

This is where innovators like Katie Wynne come into play.

A retired professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska, Wynne has found a new purpose as owner and operator of the fledgling food waste composting business, B2G Compost, in Winthrop, Wash. (“B2G” stands for “Brown to Green.”)

Heat treatment: Wynne keeps her mixture moist “like a wet sponge” and gets the pile’s temperature to at least 131 degrees, which kills weed seeds and unwanted pests like apple maggots. No heating is required—soil microbes “do all the work.” Photo: K.C. Mehaffey

The idea came to her in 2021, a few years after she retired and permanently moved to the Methow Valley in northern Washington’s Okanogan County.

That was a record-breaking year for wildfires in Washington and Oregon. The Cedar Creek Fire in Washington, which scorched 55,000 acres between Mazama and Winthrop, was among 1.1 million acres of national forest land that burned in the two states that year.

“I was watching it come down the valley toward my house, pruning branches and taking them to the transfer station only to find they would chip them up, heat-treat them and transport them over the Loup to dump in the landfill and create methane,” Wynne tells Columbia Insight.

“The Loup” is the local name for Loup Loup Pass—a 4,020-foot mountain road connecting the Methow Valley, where Wynne lives, and the Okanogan Valley 50 miles away, where the county’s landfill is located.

Residents of the Methow Valley have only a transfer station for disposing of garbage, which is then hauled to the landfill.

The wood chips had to be super-heated before they could be taken to the landfill because the Methow Valley is an apple-maggot quarantine area, and the maggot-free Okanogan Valley is a large apple-growing region.

“All of it seemed so wrong,” says Wynne.

“Why is no one doing this?”

Wynne started thinking: she and other Methow Valley residents and businesses had nowhere to bring food waste.

Wood chips and sawdust—important ingredients for composting food—are plentiful in this fire-prone community.

And her property just outside Winthrop town limits was already zoned for compost manufacturing.

Garbage time: Wynne’s mobile Jay-Lor feed mixer contains two vertical augers that stir food scraps, water and other compost ingredients. Photo: Kate Wynne

“Because our soil is really moon dusty—there’s not much organic material in it—and we have all this carbonaceous material—branches that people are trying to clean up through the Firewise program—putting it all back into the soil base made a lot of sense to me,” she says. “I started asking, ‘Why is no one doing this?’”

So began Wynne’s quest to develop a small, food-waste composting facility to serve local businesses and roughly 6,000 residences in the Methow Valley, making use of two kinds of organic waste that are otherwise trucked to a far-away landfill.

She spent a year testing methods and different mixtures of food waste, sawdust and wood chips, fashioned an aeration system so she wouldn’t have to turn the piles and came up with a recipe that works well in this arid climate.

She also developed partnerships with local businesses.

Methow Recycles, which handles most of the valley’s recycling, had wanted to develop a composting program but discovered it would take significant funding and new property, and decided not to take it on.

In its partnership with B2G Compost, Methow Recycles charges $100 a year to people to drop off up to five gallons of food waste each week at their recycle center in Twisp. Wynne gets a tipping fee for the food waste she collects weekly. She also gives customers a cubic foot of compost at the end of the year, and a discount on a cubic yard of her finished product.

Wynne also partners with the Mazama Store, which serves as a drop-off location.

Missy LeDuc, owner of the Mazama Store and a Methow Recyles board member, has nothing but praise for Wynne’s efforts.

“She is kind of a one-man show, and she’s very dedicated,” says LeDuc. “She just put her money and her time into this. No one else would do it if she didn’t. We worship the ground she walks on.”

LeDuc says she’s surprised more people aren’t taking advantage of the service. The residential program currently serves about 50 households.

“Hopefully people realize what a huge portion of the waste that they send out weekly is food waste,” she says. “And what a better footprint we would have if we all were to compost, somehow—either by using Kate or composting at home. It’s one of the best things we can do.”

“I’m trusting the residential program will keep growing, but I’m way short of my capacity now that I’ve figured it out,” says Wynne.

Wynne also partners with other businesses—including a brewery—which pay her to pick up their food waste on a weekly schedule. She hopes some of the valley’s big resorts will join.

Model for rural communities

Wynne knows the food waste diverted by B2G Compost is a drop in the bucket.

Last year, she diverted about 16 tons of food waste and converted it to compost; this year she’ll double or maybe triple that amount.

Still, that’s hardly mentionable compared to more than 827,000 tons of food waste produced in the state.

Wynne says that in rural areas, multiple small food waste composting facilities make more sense than a large facility, and together they could have a bigger impact since the material won’t have to be transported long distances.

“I want this to be a model, especially for our county, because we will not be mandated to have curbside organic pickup,” she says. “I really am trying to prove that it can be done.

“If you talk to my accountant, it’s not much of a business. It’ll be years and years before it will break even. It’s more of a passion, or a calling, or a purpose. It’s what I want to be doing.”

Sun Mountain Lodge: The Methow Valley is dotted with popular resorts and lodges. And potential customers. Photo: Sun Mountain Lodge

Wynne encourages others to do their own composting, and shares her compost recipe with anyone who asks.

But in the Methow Valley—as in many rural places across the region—people don’t want to put out food scraps for fear of attracting animals.

Wynne sympathizes with the concerns of neighbors who worry about odors attracting bears and rats.

“They understandably have concerns,” she says.

But Wynne says she’s had no trouble with wildlife. Her food waste is kept in sealed bins until she mixes it with the sawdust and wood chips, which remove the smell.

Her facility is virtually odorless.

“I love my microbes, they do all the work,” she says. “All that carbon that is in that food—or wood chips or whatever you have—rather than turning into methane they turn into a carbon source and nutrients that can be consumed by microbes.”

The carbon is then stored in the compost and used by plants.

“It’s cycling the carbon into the plants and keeping it out of the atmosphere,” she says.

Aside from the work soil microbes do in breaking down the waste, Wynne does all the mixing and moving of materials at B2G Compost with her Bobcat.

In mid-October, Wynne attended a conference put on by the Washington Organic Recycling Council. Her purpose, she says, was to network with others in rural areas who are working to compost organic materials.

She wants the state and municipalities to know that even small amounts of aid—in the form of donated land, electricity and water—would go a long way toward creating more facilities like hers.