Oregon Department of Environmental Quality awards grant to city composting program

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality awarded a $9,500 Materials Management Grant to the city of Lake Oswego and Phoenix-based Republic Services to help fund its public outreach effort for its residential food scraps composting program, a report by the Lake Oswego Review says. The outreach effort aims to answer resident’s questions on the program and to increase participation.

The grant funds will go towards a series of four short educational videos that will teach residents more about the program and how to participate, the report says, with a larger focus on how to manage the countertop pails provided to residents by the city. The pails are meant to serve as temporary receptacles that can be emptied into the resident’s yard waste collection bin.

Cleanliness is a large concern among residents, the report says, so the first video in the series will go over tips for cleaning out pails and bins. Another will focus on tips for avoiding odor issues.

The third video is planned to show a how-to that will detail which materials can be recycled and which should be thrown out. The fourth topic is yet to be determined, the report says.

While the videos will be primarily made for Lake Oswego residents, the report says that the community will shoot the videos with the intention of using them for other areas throughout the state—a requirement by the department.

The second half of the grant will fund an effort to measure the amount of food scraps the program is collecting from the city through data collection. According to the report, the city has been struggling to collect this data because food scraps are mixed with yard waste in collection bins.

This will be achieved by comparing data sets of yard waste collection in previous years. Because the composting program is in its first year, the report says, previous data sets will show if tonnages have increased or decreased since the amount of yard waste will likely be the same.

The data will be collected over the summer and delivered to the department by September, which will also allow the city to gauge if its outreach efforts are working.