Every year we talk with hundreds of businesses, schools, and property managers across the DMV about food scrap collection. When someone tells us no, the most common reason by far isn’t price, and it isn’t skepticism about composting. It’s timing. The budget is already set. The trash contract has eight months left. The board meets in April. The kitchen is short three people and nobody wants to introduce a new bin right now.
That’s a fair answer, and we’d rather you start when you’re actually ready than start badly and quit in four months.
But there’s a difference between waiting and waiting well. Almost everything that determines whether a composting program succeeds gets decided before the first pickup: how much food waste you actually generate, where the bin goes, who owns the program internally, and what your trash contract lets you change. None of that requires a vendor. All of it can happen while you wait.
Here’s what we’d suggest doing between now and then.
1. Find out whether a rule already applies to you
Maryland law requires certain large food waste generators to separate and divert food residuals from landfills and incinerators. The requirement started at two tons per week and dropped to one ton per week on January 1, 2024, and it applies only if the residuals are generated within 30 miles of an organics recycling facility with the capacity and willingness to accept all of them. Restaurants with dining rooms open to the public aren’t covered, but businesses, schools, supermarkets, convenience stores, and cafeterias can be.
One ton a week is about 2,000 pounds. Most operations have no idea whether they’re above or below that line, which is the whole reason to check now rather than after an inspection. Montgomery County businesses also fall under county recycling requirements, and DC and Northern Virginia jurisdictions have their own rules that continue to evolve.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: someone at your organization can state, in one sentence, whether you’re currently covered, and what would put you over the threshold.
2. Measure what you’re actually throwing away
You don’t need a formal waste audit. Pick one normal week. Have your kitchen or custodial staff keep food scraps in separate bags or a spare container, and weigh them or count the bags. If weighing isn’t realistic, estimate by volume: how many of your trash bags each day are mostly food.
This one number drives everything downstream — bin size, pickup frequency, and cost. It also tends to surprise people. Kitchens that assume they generate a little usually generate a lot, and offices that assume they generate a lot are often mostly generating paper and packaging.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: you have a rough pounds-per-week figure and you know which days are heaviest.
3. Pull up your trash contract and find two dates
This is the step most organizations skip, and it’s the one that most often changes the math.
Composting usually isn’t a pure addition to your waste budget. Food scraps are heavy and wet, and pulling them out of your trash stream frequently means you can reduce dumpster size or cut a weekly pickup. Whether you can actually capture that savings depends entirely on your hauling contract.
Find the expiration date, and find the notice window for changing or canceling service. Many commercial waste contracts renew automatically unless you give written notice 60 to 90 days out. If you miss that window, you’re locked in for another term regardless of what you’d planned. We’ve watched organizations delay composting for a year and then discover they’d also quietly renewed their trash service for three.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: those two dates are on someone’s calendar with a reminder.
4. Walk the property and pick the spot
Collection trucks have real constraints. Our bins need to be outside, accessible 24 hours, and within about 10 feet of a curb or a truck-accessible roadway such as a loading dock. Most haulers work under similar limits.
Walk your site and find the spot before you’re under time pressure. Check whether it’s shaded, whether it’s on the path your kitchen staff already take with trash, and whether it’s behind a gate someone has to unlock. A bin placed 40 feet from where staff actually walk will get ignored, and a bin in full afternoon sun creates odor complaints in July that a shaded spot never would.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: you can point at the exact location and you’ve confirmed nothing blocks truck access.
5. Name the person who owns it
Composting programs rarely fail because of the hauler. They fail because the person who set it up changed roles and nobody inherited it.
Somebody needs to own training new hires, checking the bin for contamination, and being the point of contact when something goes wrong. In a school that’s often facilities plus food service together. In an office building it’s usually property management, and critically, the janitorial contractor, who frequently ends up operating the program without anyone having told them it exists. In a multifamily property it’s the community manager, with board approval behind it.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: a named person has this in their responsibilities, and their backup knows about it.
6. Start reducing and donating now, because you don’t need us for that
The waste hierarchy puts prevention first and donation second. Composting is third for a reason.
Tightening up over-prep, adjusting par levels, and improving inventory rotation cuts food waste at the source, which is better environmentally and cheaper than hauling it anywhere. And the federal Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act was revised in 2022 to expand liability protection for donating surplus edible food, which removed a barrier a lot of operators still believe is there. The Maryland Food Bank and organizations like Move for Hunger can help route surplus.
Every pound you prevent or donate is a pound you don’t pay anyone to collect, including us.
You’ll know you’ve done this when: you’ve made one concrete change to prep or ordering, and you know who’d take your surplus.
What it costs, and why “not in this budget” may be solvable
Commercial composting pricing comes down to three things: how much material you generate, how often it’s collected, and how many locations you have. That’s it. There’s no equipment to buy and no infrastructure to build.
Because of that, the service flexes in ways that fixed-cost services can’t:
You can start smaller than you think. A single 32-gallon bin collected once a week is a legitimate starting point, not a token one. Many of our commercial customers began with back-of-house kitchen scraps only, which is the cleanest and most concentrated stream, and expanded to front-of-house later.
Whenever that is
We’re not going anywhere. We’ve been collecting food scraps across the DMV since 2011, and the businesses we work with best are usually the ones who came to us six months after the first conversation with their numbers already in hand.
If you want help with any of the steps above, including figuring out whether the Maryland threshold applies to you, we’re glad to answer questions with no expectation attached. And if you’d rather work through it on your own and circle back next budget cycle, that works too.
