Grimmer: Turning trash into treasure
Valley Voices
On a recent Saturday, I had the pleasure of carrying buckets of freshly scooped warm compost from the Honeywagon container at the Brush Creek Pavilion to the waiting vehicles of my neighbors and friends. It was a joyful couple of hours.
“Is this the compost from the town of Eagle curbside compost program?”
“Yup.”
Folks cued up and shared their garden vision. Mostly vegetables, but some flower ideas and also some landscape refresh projects. Some brought 5-gallon buckets, some put trash bags over plastic bins and others brought 32-gallon rollers. A couple had small holes, but most of them held up great.
The shovel staff from Vail Honeywagon had great stories to tell. Conquests of compost out at the landfill property north of Wolcott. The avocado stickers were causing a ruckus, and we plucked a couple as the buckets filled. But mostly we saw warm and consistent bio-effervescent Rocky Mountain compost, freshly cooked and already chasing gold medals.
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We laughed that people were standing in line for the stinkiest sort of trash.
“What time does this end?”
“Noon.”
I wondered if people knew that we were just processing the stuff that they gave us a few months ago, and giving it back. Yeah, I suppose they did.
Fourteen percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the town of Eagle, according to our 2023 Net Zero Action Plan, was from waste, and most of that was in the form of methane, released by “organics” (food scraps). Methane (CH4) is nearly 30 times as efficient at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere as carbon (CO2). You can smell the difference when somebody farts in a small space, like an elevator or car. Otherwise, you might not think about it that much. And very few people I talked to are composting because of the gases, it has more to do with what will come from adding the compost to their gardens.
Anytime you can turn trash into treasure, it feels good. Improving the quality of life for our residents (the mission of the town of Eagle) benefits twice with compost. It makes flowers more vibrant and BLTs more juicy. It reduces methane in the atmosphere. It delays the need for a new county landfill. It creates income from landscapers. It gets people in their gardens with hyper-local compost. It models to kids how to conserve resources and turn lemons into lemon trees, the shade we may never enjoy.
Sure, we could improve our compost model with electric trucks, more regular organic pick-ups, and commercial incentives, but we are off to a good start. And we have a strong team of public and private partners. Besides adding the bear-proof compost bins, the town was able to sign a waste contract that allows for curbside cardboard recycling, a service that reduces the need for more driving back and forth to the drop site on Chambers.
Our refuse (trash) containers shrank, and we added bear-proof latches to those in one swoop while doubling the size of our rolling residential recycling receptacles. A sort of “reduce, reuse, recycling” model.
It was cool to see all the co-benefits cascading from the decision to add compost to our town’s waste repertoire.
“Lift with the legs?”
“Yup.”
It was a powerlift sort of morning as trunks and trucks were loaded with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of the good stuff. Compost happens.
“I absolutely love composting now,” a pleased young gardener declared.
“I thought the smell would be worse,” said another.
There was something about the way people came together in congregation alongside the free compost that brought us all satisfaction. We were a team, and we were doing something good and something fun.
I hope you will join me in thanking the hundreds of Eagle residents who have embraced and thrived with residential curbside compost since our launch in 2023. We appreciate your “early adopter” mindset — it has created enough critical mass to run the program and now grow the program. We look forward to seeing you all again very soon, in the back of a compost container at the town of Eagle Hard to Recycle Day in May of 2026.
If you are thinking about composting, visit the Honeywagon website or email the Adam Palmer Sustainability Fund at info@apsfund.org with questions. To learn more about the Adam Palmer Sustainability Fund, go to APSFund.org.
