By Paul Sheldon
In this era of tight budgets, one great place to start saving money is reducing bio-degradable waste through composting.
The American Correctional Association Policy on Environmentally Responsible and Sustainability-Oriented Practices states “… public and private agencies at the federal, state and local levels should: Promote and engage in composting.”
One easy reference for how to get started on a waste-reduction and composting program is the National Institute of Justice Corrections Center of Excellence’s Greening Corrections Technology Guidebook, which you can download for free here.
Various institutions and programs have taken different approaches to composting. For example, at Putnamville, Indiana, all food wastes are composted and used in a unique program to grow native wildflowers for seed that is used to beautify Indiana’s highways.
The State of Washington has led the nation in composting at most of its facilities, and offers several programs that accept “green wastes” from surrounding communities, which are composted at the correctional institutions. For example, Larch Corrections Center, in Yacolt, Washington, was composting as much as 40 tons of food waste as early as 2006, achieving a 70 percent reduction in their annual trash hauling bill, and Monroe Corrections Center saved $43,000 per year on its annual trash bill.
In addition to the highly effective recycling and waste reduction programs at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, the composting program has enabled the facility to reduce its total waste to a very small amount of medical and biological items – the rest is composted or recycled. At Cedar Creek Center, the compost is used in a “mommy and me garden,” where women residing at the facility are encouraged to plant vegetables when their children visit, which the children can help tend and enjoy on their subsequent visits.
The County Jail in Boulder, Colorado, used revenue from inmates working at the local county recycling center to fund composting and gardening facilities at the jail. This revenue stream allowed the jail to purchase two large bins with electric augurs, in which they compost all food wastes into their organic garden, where they grow all the vegetables for the facility all summer. Their vegetables are so outstanding that they have won blue ribbons at the County Fair.
As early as 1999, North Carolina’s Sampson Correctional Institution began composting food wastes using worms, in a process known as “vermiculture.” Washington State facilities also offer a number of vermiculture programs, which produce a very nutritious form of compost that is highly effective when used in organic gardens. Mississippi’s composting and related farming operations combine to produce different varieties of vegetables, corn, soybeans, wheat rice, 7,300 hogs, and 36,000 chickens, all grown for inmate consumption, livestock feed, and outside sale. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola has been composting food wastes for more than 100 years. According to former Louisiana Corrections Commissioner Richard Stalder, “What they now call ‘composting’ we used to call a ‘mulch pile.’” Mulch piles are a simple and age-old way of turning food wastes into useful compost.
Composting facilities are so compatible with correctional institutions that nearly every state has at least one: even the Rikers Island facility in New York has one, which also supplies horticulture landscape compost used to beautify the visitors’ area.
Composting offers the combined advantages of reducing costs, producing edible vegetables, providing pre-release training, and post-release employment opportunities for formerly-incarcerated individuals.
Paul Sheldon is a Senior Advisor for Natural Capitalism Solutions, a founding member of the American Correctional Association’s Clean and Green committee, and a member of the Board of Trustees of www.PlantingJustice.org.