Compost program turns food scraps into soil instead of waste in Washington and Ramsey Counties

Depending on your zip code, you may not have access to the things that you need for your family. When we moved from Texas to the Twin Cities, we were looking for a neighborhood that had really good schools focused on kids with autism, and we moved to Cottage Grove because Great Cloud Elementary had an autism program.

Our kids made great strides in the program, and one of the first people to friend us in the community and become allies and advocates for our family was Karla Bigham, Washington County Commissioner in District 4 since 2022.

I cannot tell you what kind of value she’s added to our family. She’s pushed me out of my comfort zone to advocate for myself, my kids and my business. Her family has become my family, and she’s become a close friend. She also continues to be one of the great advocates for our community.

Commissioner Bigham and her team make sure we have access to things that serve us, including The Food Scraps Pickup Program , a new way for residents of Ramsey and Washington Counties to recycle their food scraps. This program is currently rolling out to all residents of both Washington and Ramsey Counties, offering an easy, convenient way for residents to collect and separate these food scraps so they can be recycled, and turned back into soil instead of becoming waste.

Commissioner Bigham joined me on the Sheletta Show last week to share more about this new program where residents can put their food scraps to use. The Food Scraps Pickup Program is the only one in the state where residents of Ramsey and Washington County have this opportunity to recycle food scraps from their homes.

It's simple to sign up to participate. You can visit foodscrapspickup.com or call 651-661-9393 and sign up for your free compost bags. Whatever foods you have leftover or you bought too much of or forgot was in the fridge, you put them in the special compost bag the city sends you, tie a little knot in it, and throw it in your regular garbage container with the rest of your garbage.

Then it goes right on the curb on garbage day. If my family can figure out how to compost, so can yours. You don't have to worry about an extra bin outside on the curb or another truck making damage on your street – it’s environmentally sound, and efficient.

“Through the program, compost is co-collected and gets shipped to the recycling and energy center, and then we have these cool robots that use AI technology to grab those bags and then they get separated and then we take them out, to get composted,” said Commissioner Karla Bigham. “And then that compost is used instead of fertilizer because pesticides aren't really good for the environment, so it helps our farmers to help our community gardens, which flourish out here in Cottage Grove.”

As the Commissioner noted, we want to be able to get out of that waste hierarchy and create value from it. That value in this situation is the compost, which can be put back in the soil instead of pesticides. She hopes that someday we're going to be able to create actual energy from it that, that reduces greenhouse gasses It helps us put nutrients back into the ground that are healthier for us.

This program is already a blessing our family – we recently started doing it and it’s a lot easier than I anticipated. For a lot of parents, especially those who have kids with special needs, we pack their lunches every morning and nine times out of 10, that food is coming back home at the end of the school day, and we’re not able to keep it. I have been throwing it away until Commissioner Bigham was like, “no girl, you got to get in on this food scraps program.”

“Whether you live in an apartment building or in a single-family home, everybody has access to the Food Scraps Pickup Program – it's very equitable and, and everybody can do it because it all goes into the garbage area, not into a separate bin,” said Commissioner Bigham. “That is so important because a lot of times, people in apartment complexes or in townhomes are at the mercy of the people who run the place. So, they may want to recycle or do other programs, but they're not able to participate, whereas with this program, they can,” she added.

This program is really the great equalizer. Everybody wants to talk bad about AI, but AI has got this working. These robots are sniffing out these bags and regular trash and they are pulling them up. Everybody's like, “well, why should we do it, why should we care about it?” Well, you know what? Because food scraps are about 20 percent of our trash weight. And we want to remove that out of our land, our waste, our landfills and our waste system.

The program is available to folks in Washington County that live in the communities of Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Great Cloud Island, Landfall, Oakdale, Woodbury, and in Ramsey County in Maplewood and North St. Paul. According to Commissioner Bigham, the counties will be rolling it out across their entire communities in phases over multiple years.

For residents in cities listed above, visit foodscrapspickup.com , put your address in, insert your account and they will send you a nice box of a year's worth of supply of free bags. And if you prefer, call the 24/7 customer service line at 651-661-9393.

They also have a customer service line and websites available in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Hmong, Karen, Oromo, and Somali. That is so important given these counties have a very diverse population, and the counties are really making sure that the services they provide are culturally relevant so that they can understand the services that are available to them so that they're utilized.

Because that's the point. We’ve got to utilize the services that are available. And it's so important that people feel like what is happening is relevant to them. When we make things available in different languages, people say, this program is for me. It's not just “for them.”