by Molly Farrell
The World’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods – Whole Foods, Inc. – wants to reduce its waste to zero. The company is trying to reach this goal by composting its unusable food, floral and food-soiled paper residuals.
It hasn’t been easy, with having to find the right haulers, composting facilities, and enough space in the stories to pack and store compostables. Company officials realize, however, that composting could have a tremendous impact on reducing the company’s waste stream, and improving its bottom line.
Whole Foods started with a small natural foods store in Austin, Texas in 1980 employing 19 people. The company now has 162 stores in the U.S., Canada and the UK and more than 27,000 employees.
Company officials estimate that each Whole Foods store generates an average of 13 tons of organic residuals and trash a week. Of this, compostable materials (including food culls and trims, out-of-date food, floral trimmings, wet and waxed cardboard, wet paper, and used paper plates and cups) add up to 60%.
Currently, about one-third of Whole Foods stores are composting. These stores are located on the West Coast and in the Southwest and North Atlantic regions. Each region and each store operates differently.
How It’s Done in the West
Tom Wright is the sustainable business practices manager for Whole Foods stores west of the Mississippi. When he turned his focus to composting in 2001, only two stores were diverting their organic materials, and those went to hog farmers.
Wright contacted Community Recycling/Resource Recovery in Sun Valley, California, which had been processing organics for a number of supermarket chains at its industrial-scale composting facility south of Bakersfield. Over the past 10 years, Community Recycling has collected and composted 1.1 million tons of food residuals from the 1290 stores it serves.
“Community Recycling let me study the composting systems used at Von’s and Ralph’s grocery stores because it wanted our business,” notes Wright. They started composting organics from Whole Foods southern California stores and its regional bakery and commissary in June 2003 using the same system.
At the southern California stores, food banks get the first crack at produce that can’t be sold to the public. Produce that doesn’t go to the food banks is culled for composting. Employees put these culls directly into waxed cardboard boxes, which are stacked in the store’s staging area and then put on pallets. Whole Foods trucks delivering produce backhaul the pallets of compostables to the Whole Foods distribution center in Vernon, California where they are placed in a compactor. Once a day, Community Recycling collects the full compactor from the distribution center, drops off a clean one, and brings the full compactor to its composting facility in Lamonte, 100 miles away.
Training Employees & Marketing Compost
Wright devised a color-coded system to train employees to put materials in the proper containers: green for compost, red for glass, metal and rigid plastic containers, blue for mixed paper and yellow for plastics. Signs are in Spanish and English. Digital photos are taken of the trash and compostables containers and loads that are dumped at the compost facility, so employees can get immediate feedback on trash that is getting mixed in with compostables. “We take digital photos and put the best practice photos on www.sustainablebizness.com,” he says. “The worst practice photos are sent only to the store.”
Community Recycling conducted an audit during the summer of 2004 of 18 Whole Foods stores in southern California. “Thirteen are doing very well and five aren’t, compared with other grocery stores with similar sales,” says Wright.
Composting has spread to Whole Foods stores in Washington, northern California, Colorado, Texas, Oregon and British Columbia. Organics from 58 stores are being composted at seven different composting facilities in those regions.
In May 2004, Whole Foods began selling bagged compost in its southern California stores under the Green Mission label. An eight-quart bag sells for $1.99. “We’re selling a lot of compost there,” says Wright. “In fact, we’re surprised by how much we’re selling.” In February 2005, the compost went on sale in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Louisiana and northern California stores for $4.99.
Challenges to Program Expansion
Wright would like to see more Whole Foods stores composting, but there are obstacles. “There needs to be more industrial scale composters,” he says. “There really is a lack of market dynamics. Each market has one or two composters at the most. You’ve got to do business with them and they set the price. there are still some states where we can’t find any such facilities, like Nevada. It’s crazy because that area really needs compost. Las Vegas has to bring in topsoil on trucks from California.”
Another challenge is finding space in the stores to stage recycling and composting. Major supermarkets like Von’s and Ralph’s started composting easily because they have back ends (nonretail areas) that are significantly larger. Whole Foods has a commitment to more retail space and less backend. Where rain isn’t a problem, we stage it outside. The best place to stage compostables would be inside the produce cooler.
Wright says Whole Foods won’t be able to meet its goal of zero waste unless inexpensive biopolymers and compostable plastics are developed for food service and trash liners. “Plastic bags cost half a cent,” he explains. “There is no way a biopolymer bag will be that cheap due to lack of scale.” Whole Foods is pushing for it, but with 200 stores it doesn’t have enough volume. “It would be wonderful,” he says, “if one of the major grocery store companies gets interested in green plastics, because that would make it happen.”
Composting has caused stores to change purchasing practices. “We found that we were throwing out a lot of bananas and as a result, have reduced banana purchases by about 2%,” Wright notes. That’s an annual savings of about $220,000.
How It’s Done in the East
When Lee Kane began his job as environmental coordinator for Whole Foods North Atlantic region in May 2003, he took charge of 24 stores and four facilities in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and the United Kingdom. All the stores were doing some recycling and one store in Hadley, MA. was hauling its food residuals to a local pic farmer for composting for the past three years.
Kane heard about the Supermarket Recycling Organics Initiative (SROI), a program put together by WasteCap of Massachusetts, the MA. Food Association, and the MA. Dept. of Environmental Protection to help supermarkets divert food residuals and waxed/ wet cardboard for composting. Kane used this model to encourage composting in stores in his region. Like Wright, he provided color-coded bilingual signs to
train employees in proper material separation.
Getting employees to separate organics for composting has been relatively easy. “Many people work at Whole Foods because they are committed to sustainable practices,” notes Kane. “They are especially excited about composting because before they saw this wonderful material incinerated in Massachusetts, and landfilled in the rest of the region.”
Kane says there is also a strong financial incentive. “We estimate we can save $7000 annually in a small-to-medium volume store and more in our higher-volum
e stores by composting because we pay lower tip fees for organics than for trash.”
Of the 27 North Atlantic stores, 10 stores and the distribution center and commissary are composting. A new Whole Foods Market in Hingham, MA. is the first to open as a composting store. “It’s very exciting because it has all the right equipment and training. The others had to be retrofitted for composting and employees had to be trained to undo old habits.”
One unexpected benefit of composting is that the company is selling more of its recyclables. “We are doing a better job of recycling. The recyclables are cleaner and fewer are going into the trash,” Kane says.
Kane wants to have all the stores in his region composting by the end of 2005. He also hopes to sell Whole Foods’ compost in the North Atlantic stores and is in discussions with composting facilities about developing ways to package and market the compost.
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