MIAMI — Miami-Dade County is setting a path towards scaling composting countywide.
The proposed new ordinance will be seen by Miami-Dade commissioners on Thursday for a second reading and final vote.
Miami-Dade District 5 Commissioner Eileen Higgins sponsored the new ordinance.
“What we’re offering now is a community composting permit,” Higgins said. “You still have to make sure you’re protecting our environment, but you’ll be able to open your community composting operation to help neighborhoods, to help hotels, to help restaurants begin composting all of their organic waste.”
The new ordinance would ease the current rules and streamline the permitting approval process for community composters.
“In Miami-Dade County, it was virtually impossible for community composters to operate,” Higgins said. “When they would try to go to the county and ask for a permit to open a business or expand a business to help us with composting, they had to go through the same process as a huge industrial facility.”
It’s very expensive and complicated for community composters, especially at a time when composting is critical in the reduction of heat-trapping methane gas produced by organic waste decomposed in landfills.
“Methane is the worst,” Higgins said. “It’s 80 times more horrible for our environment than carbon. Composting eliminates all of that.”
Composting is also the linchpin to Miami-Dade achieving its zero-waste goals: to divert as much trash as possible from going to the landfill.
“We’ve been wanting to make this community composting a standard, legalized process,” Higgins said.
It’s urgent, because the county is dealing with a mounting solid waste crisis. The available landfill space is running out, as five million tons of trash is generated each year, double the national average.
“When you’re composting these organic materials, first of all, they’re not going to a landfill,” Higgins said. “40% of what we put in the garbage is food waste or yard waste, and all of that is compostable.”
Composting is a natural process where organic materials like food scraps and yard clippings are broken down by microorganisms, insects and other organisms, transforming it into a nutrient-rich soil called “black gold.” It’s prized by farmers and landscapers with no need to add chemical fertilizers.
“You’re supporting organic growth,” said Francisco Torres, the founder and CEO of Compost for Life. “You’re restoring the soil; finished compost has more than 50 billion microorganisms in a handful, so you can actually remediate soil that has been depleted.”
Torres launched Compost for Life in 2020, providing composting services to residents and businesses in Miami-Dade and Broward.
“We are collecting an estimate of 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of food scraps every week,” Torres said.
The new ordinance is exactly what Torres needs in order to grow his mission.
“It’s gonna make composting a reality in our county,” Torres said. “It’s not gonna give us an opportunity to scale this up, work with municipalities, work with through pilot programs, and really give an opportunity to our community to do the right thing.”
The village of Pinecrest has been offering composting services to residents since 2023. Over 100,000 pounds of organic waste have been processed as they have worked with Fertile Earth Worm Farm, another Miami-Dade community composter.
“If food waste (were) a country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind the United States and China,” said Lanette Sobel, founder and president of Fertile Earth Worm Farm. “So this is something small that all of us can do that makes a huge impact.”
Pinecrest residents have been feeling it.
“We are now expanding into nine different locations within the village of Pinecrest, where we’ll be dropping off and picking up compost,” said Pinecrest Councilwoman Shannon Del Prado. “So it’s really grown. It’s become quite a robust program.”
The new ordinance will allow community composters to scale their operations, take on more clients, like hotels and restaurants that produce a lot of food waste, and inspire Miami-Dade County residents to get on board.
“It’s very scalable,” Higgins said. “You’ve seen it in Europe, every major city in Europe, compost. New York City, a place you would never imagine could be composting, you see the little compost bins on Lexington Avenue outside of restaurants. It’s happening all across this country. It’s long past time that it happens here in Miami-Dade County.”
“It’s life-changing,” Torres said. “We were making the planet and our city a better place to live.”
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