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http://www.clackamasreview.com/sustainable/story_2nd.php?story_id=127810878337058500

Greenies working in the state office building near Lloyd Center used to pack their lunchtime food scraps and bring them home to bury in backyard compost piles.

Not any more.

Thanks to volunteer employee efforts, some 1,200 workers in the 12-story office building can now stow compostable waste in a bucket on each floor.

The new composting system, launched June 7, is reducing trash sent to the landfill and enabled its reuse as garden mulch. It's also cutting the building's monthly garbage bill.

"It's actually been pretty easy," says Brad Daniels, rules and enforcement coordinator for the state drinking water  program, and a lead member of the Portland State Office Building Sustainability Committee.

Using money from a past fundraiser, committee volunteers bought 6-gallon yellow buckets for each floor of the building. They placed the buckets, which open via foot pedals, near each floor's employee break room, along with signs and other how-to material.

"My guess is that every third day our bins are completely full," Daniels says. "We have received nothing but positive feedback."

Fears of a fruit-fly invasion proved groundless because of the lids. And volunteers avoided smelly buckets from rotting food by lining the containers with biodegradable BioBags, Daniels says.

Custodians haul the bags out to a loading dock with the rest of the garbage. Waste Management, the building's solid waste contractor, picks it up and takes it to a Metro transfer center. From there it gets trucked to Cedar Grove Composting near Seattle.

The sustainability committee organized the composting for the environmental benefits, not to save money, Daniels says. However, Waste Management charges about half the normal garbage pickup rate for the compost, he says.

Portland lacks a central composting facility, but there are multiple efforts under way to open one in the area. The city is operating a pilot project to experiment with curbside compost pickup for selected neighborhoods. Ultimately, curbside pickup will be offered to all residents, to be included with yard debris.

Some Portland groceries and restaurants have been setting aside food waste and sending it to the Metro transfer center for composting. But much food waste in the Portland area winds up in the landfill.

Now there's a big push for offices and other large employment centers to start composting, and companies like Waste Management are gearing up.

It's more complex at office buildings because it requires education and training of all employees, says Jackie Lang, director of sustainability at Waste Management's Portland office.

For instance, it's OK to put leftover pizza and the takeout pizza box in the compost, but not a frozen pizza box because of its waxy coating.

The keys to offering composting at a commercial building are education and getting employees engaged, Lang says - much like the active volunteers in the state office building.

"For a lot of Portland businesses," Lang says, "this is the next big sustainability opportunity."