Description and Use of Municipal Solid Waste Composts in New Mexico

The average American generates approximately 4.5 pounds of garbage per day, for a total of 196 million tons of trash per year, most of which ends up in landfills (Shortridge, 1993). Various government and private programs have been organized to divert part of this garbage (metals, plastics, paper and cardboard, and yard and food wastes) from landfills by recycling. Yard and food wastes often are recycled as compost. A 1991-1992 landfill survey showed that yard waste made up 33.8 percent of the City of Albuquerque’s residential solid waste stream (Romo, Cave, and Watkins, 1992). During the same period, the city’s wastewater treatment facility was treating more than 50 million gallons of mixed residential and industrial wastewater daily, producing about 22 dry tons of stabilized biosolids (sludge) per day. To address these solid waste problems, the City of Albuquerque dedicated a state-of-the-art municipal compost facility in early 1992. Since then, portions of the source-separated landscape wastes (2,500 ton/year of yard trimmings) have been combined with biosolids (9,700 ton/year) and horse track manure (3,600 ton/ year) at the facility to create an EPA-certified (Class A) biosolid compost (Glass, 1997). In 1996, the same facility began making a green waste compost using urea (fertilizer) instead of biosolids as a nitrogen source. Other municipal composting operations in New Mexico are located at Artesia, Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Carlsbad, and Tucumcari (Baker, 1998). A number of private companies compost yard wastes, and permits are pending for other municipal composting programs.