Food scraps rarely inspire much thought once they disappear down a kitchen sink or into a trash can. But in Chattanooga, a growing effort is asking residents to think differently about what they throw away – and what that waste could become instead.
For Natalia Artz, project manager at NewTerra Compost, the answer is straightforward: food waste should return to the soil.
“Compost is a no-brainer,” she says. “It’s an easy, local, sustainable solution.”
Artz spoke March 11 during green|spaces’ monthly Lunch & Learn program at the United Way building in downtown Chattanooga, where she outlined the progress of a city pilot program exploring how composting could become part of the region’s waste system.
Founded in 2007, green|spaces is a Chattanooga nonprofit that promotes sustainability across the region. Its Lunch & Learn series regularly highlights local projects aimed at improving environmental practices across the city.
Artz’s presentation focused on NewTerra’s partnership with the city of Chattanooga to test two composting approaches – curbside collection and community drop-off kiosks – and to measure how willing residents are to separate food waste from their household trash.
For Artz, the issue extends beyond waste management to encompass soil health and the environmental costs of modern agriculture.
“I graduated with a degree in environmental studies from Yale,” she told the audience. “And I am anti-fertilizer.
“The fertilizer industry does not regenerate our soil. It’s rooted in harmful chemical production processes. Compost would solve the fertilizer problem if large corporations didn’t get in the way.”
A pilot program for a growing city
The composting pilot program emerged from a practical question: how can a growing city handle its waste more sustainably?
“People are moving here at a high rate, and extending the life of our landfills is important,” Artz said. “But if there are methods in place to extend the life of the current ones, we won’t need to allocate more land for landfills or waste collection.”
The pilot was launched through a Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation Organics Management Grant awarded to the city of Chattanooga. The city partnered with NewTerra Compost to operate the program, which began in October and is scheduled to conclude at the end of June.
Participation is voluntary, and during the pilot, residents can take part at no cost.
“There’s a low bar of entry,” Artz said. “This program was designed so that people could try composting without feeling like it was complicated or expensive. The goal was to see how people would respond if we made it simple.”
The pilot includes two collection systems: curbside pickup and compost drop-off kiosks located at recycling centers around the city.
The first neighborhoods selected for the program – Belvoir/Hilltop and Midtown – were chosen because they closely reflect Chattanooga’s broader demographics.
“If we wanted to choose a sample area that would give us the best picture of what a citywide composting program might look like, this would be it,” Artz said.
As the program expanded, additional neighborhoods were added. Brainerd Hills joined in November, followed in December by Missionary Ridge, Ridgedale and Highland Park.
“These areas are geographically connected to keep the pilot contiguous and to make collections easier to manage,” Artz explained. “When you’re doing something like this, you want the routes to be efficient and manageable.”
Alongside the curbside service, NewTerra installed compost kiosks at five city recycling centers – Lookout Valley, DuPont, the Chattanooga Zoo, Brainerd and Hamilton Place.
“These recycling centers are nicely located to serve different areas of the community,” Artz said. “So people who might not be in a curbside zone still have a place where they can bring their food scraps.”
Early results
Six months into the program, participation has grown steadily.
“We have 635 participants across both the curbside and kiosk programs,” Artz said. “And we’ve diverted over 17 tons of organic waste that would have otherwise gone to the landfill.”
Curbside collection accounts for roughly 420 of those participants, with the largest concentration in the first pilot zone. Other zones have also shown strong engagement, particularly those added later in the program.
The diversion data shows similar patterns.
“Zone one still has the highest diversion numbers because it has the highest number of participants,” Artz said. “But even smaller zones are making a difference. Zone two is small but mighty. We have just 14 participants there, and they’ve diverted almost half a ton of waste.”
A lesson from the kiosks
One of the more surprising findings from the pilot involves the drop-off kiosks.
While the curbside program has about twice as many participants, the total amount of waste diverted from kiosks is nearly the same.
“Curbside has slightly higher diversion, but the kiosks are right behind it,” Artz said. “That’s interesting given the much smaller number of kiosk participants.”
She believes the difference reflects the habits of the people who use the recycling centers.
“Our kiosks are located at recycling centers, so the people who sign up are already going there,” she said. “They’re already sorting materials – glass, cardboard, paper and other items – so organics simply become another part of that routine.”
Curbside participants are often new to composting and still learning, Artz added, but despite that learning curve, feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive.
A survey distributed in January generated 155 responses.
“Four out of five survey respondents reported no barriers to participation,” Artz said. “For the rest, concerns included scheduling, compostability rules, space in the home or odor if they didn’t have a garage or another place to keep the bucket.”
(NewTerra provides participants with starter buckets and educational materials.)
Cost and the future of the program
The survey also asked participants whether they would continue composting if the service were no longer free.
“There’s a stark decrease in how many people would continue composting if they had to pay the full amount,” Artz said. “These are early adopters. The low barrier to entry was educational and a great opportunity, but it might not have been on their radar before.”
Still, she said the pilot has already succeeded in introducing composting to many residents for the first time.
“The fact that we were able to put a composting service in front of them and see them use it successfully is great,” she said. “Everything we’ve learned from this pilot will serve as a strong case study for expanding programs or improving collection strategies.”
Artz encouraged participants to share their opinions with local leaders.
“If you want to see programs like this continue, reach out to your district council members,” she said. “Let them know you’re enjoying the program and share your thoughts.”
Normand Lavoie, co-founder and CEO of NewTerra Compost, said local politics can play a decisive role in shaping sustainability initiatives.
“One of the more interesting things we learned through this process is the political side of it,” Lavoie said. “District council members in Chattanooga have a lot of power – so much power that we were kicked out of one district by a council member who said recycling is fake. Their influence is just as important as the mayor’s office. Letting your council member know this matters to you can make a big difference.”
Questions from attendees
Following the presentation, attendees asked questions ranging from composting rules to the long-term future of waste management in Chattanooga.
One attendee asked what materials are accepted in the program.
Artz explained that NewTerra operates an industrial composting system capable of handling more materials than typical backyard compost setups.
“We take all the regular compostables – fruits, vegetables, eggshells and coffee grounds,” she said. “But we’re an industrial composter, so we take meat, bones, fish, eggs and poultry – anything you couldn’t put in a backyard compost. If it lived, we can take it. Most organics, anything we can eat, is compostable with us.”
Participants receive a refrigerator magnet with a quick reference guide and a QR code linking to the full list of compostable materials.
Another attendee asked how much of household trash could potentially be diverted through composting.
Artz estimated that about 24% of landfill waste consists of compostable material. Because waste from across the city is mixed together at the landfill, calculating precise diversion percentages has proven difficult.
Still, the pilot has revealed something else: most participants are new to composting.
“At least one in 10 participants were already composting before the pilot began,” Artz said. “For the other nine in 10, the program introduced them to composting for the first time.”
Participants have also come from a wide range of age groups.
“Based on my communications, Gen X is the most common group – heads of households and parents between 40 and 60,” Artz said.
Waste, climate and the long view
The conversation eventually broadened to the larger issue of waste management in Tennessee.
Michael Ryan, co-founder and owner of NewTerra, said the economics of waste disposal play a major role in shaping behavior.
“Chattanooga is one of the cheapest places in America to landfill waste,” Ryan said. “It’s about $40 a ton here, compared with about $120 a ton in Pennsylvania. That makes it easier for people to just throw everything away.”
However, that approach could become increasingly difficult as landfill capacity shrinks.
“Most of our waste goes to Bradley County,” Ryan said. “The last time I checked, that landfill has about 14 to 15 years left. And when it fills up, the waste won’t come closer to us – it’ll go farther away. When it goes farther away, the costs go up, and you’ll pay for that through your taxes.”
For Ryan, composting is part of a broader shift in how communities think about waste.
“Sustainability means looking ahead and investing now,” he said. “If we invest in better waste strategies today, we’ll benefit in the future.”
Madison Rollings, Chattanooga’s director of sustainability, added that waste reduction also plays a role in addressing climate change.
“Most people don’t connect waste to climate change,” she said. “They think things simply go away in a landfill. But landfills are one of the largest sources of methane and greenhouse gases for most cities, including Chattanooga.”
Reducing organic waste in landfills, Rollings said, can help cities lower those emissions while extending landfill capacity.
“So there has to be a mindset shift,” she continued. “This isn’t just about keeping waste out of landfills; it’s also about reducing our city’s emissions.”
Food scraps rarely seem important in the moment – a banana peel, coffee grounds, the remains of last night’s dinner. But multiplied across a growing city, those scraps represent thousands of tons of material each year.
The question facing Chattanooga now, as Artz and others see it, is whether those scraps will continue to be buried in landfills or returned to the soil.