Our in-house composting program, managed by employee Green Team Member Angie
Sedlacek, delivers 17.8 pounds of organic kitchen waste per day, five days a week, from our organic Co-op Cafe. This roughly translates to 2.5 tons per year! This goes straight to our onsite compost heap on our corporate headquarters farm in Norway, Iowa. Finished compost is directly applied to our employee-maintained organic gardens; a spot reserved for employee green-thumbers (including Angie) who grow a variety of vegetables for use in their own homes all summer long.
Still on the fence about the value of composting? Dr. Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, based in Washington State, has developed an Excel-based model called Environmental Value of Recycling and Composting.
This is the culmination of research projects and peer-reviewed articles going back more than five years, including work for the San Luis Obispo County (California) Integrated Waste Management Authority, Seattle Public Utilities, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the King County (Washington) Department of Natural Resources.
These findings set an important new precedent for waste management accounting. The cost differential between composting and other disposal options is so large that the debate surrounding the economic merit of composting is over. More info on this research can be found here.
Frontier's employee Green Team is made up of volunteers who suggest ways — large and small — to increase our sustainability. As another example of the significance even small changes can make, consider our initiative to reduce the number of printed copies of our weekly employee bulletin. By encouraging employees to access the bulletin electronically and placing just ten printed copies strategically throughout the facility (e.g. break rooms and the cafeteria) to read and share, we have been able to use 240 pounds less paper per year. The annual environmental savings of this reduction are 3 million Btus, 432 lbs. of CO2e, 1244 gallons of wastewater and 139 lbs. of solid waste.
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