Starting April 1, 2030, residents who live in single-family houses in cities of 25,000 population or more or in urban growth areas will be required to pay for curbside organics collection. Service will need to be provided year-round by April 1, 2027, with exceptions.

HB 2301, sponsored by Rep. Beth Doglio (D–Olympia), was amended significantly in terms of impacts to cities. The bill still retains its food waste prevention activities and the mandatory collection, but any city that currently provides seasonal organics collection will not be required to provide increased service if it provides collections at least 26 weeks per year. Service is not required to be provided to multifamily residences. The bill also removed the requirements to replace all solid waste collection bins according to a statewide color scheme.

On the compost procurement side, HB 2301 changed the reporting requirements as follows:

• Reporting is now annual but starts March 31, 2025, instead of December 2024, and then every year on March 31.
• In addition to reporting tons of organic material diverted from curbside programs and drop-off sites that the city operates or requires a hauler to provide, cities must report the processing facility.

Costly changes proposed to new Organics Management Law

January 21, 2024

During the 2022 session, the Legislature passed a lengthy bill that intends to reduce food and yard waste in landfills by 75% in eight years—the Organics Management Law. To do that, the law focused some of its attention on how cities can play a role in collection of organics, siting management facilities, and procuring the result—compost. The compost use mandate went into effect one year ago (i.e. procurement ordinance); the collection requirements for businesses are just a few weeks old; but the collection requirements for cities with 25,000 or more in population don’t go into effect until January 2027. That requirement is to provide optional food and yard waste collection service at least bi-weekly to all residents.

There are two key challenges with increasing large-scale composting of food and yard waste in this state – contamination that renders the collected load of “organic” materials destined for a landfill, and lack of composting facility capacity. Both issues have been repeatedly brought up to bill advocates during the last three years of stakeholder process, not only from cities but from the Department of Ecology (“We can’t compost our way out of this problem”) and compost facility owners and operators.

We support the intent of the proposal, HB 2301 and its companion SB 6180, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the amount of organics material that goes to landfill and we are thankful for the removal of the costly compost volume purchase provision. But we are concerned that the additional new changes for cities will be costly for residents and will exacerbate the two key problems in expanding organics recycling.  Here’s why – the bill requires:

• Cities to force all residents to pay for weekly organics collection service whether they want it or not. This will lead to significant contamination of collected loads because dissatisfied residents may use the organics cart for unintended purposes. This is a costly mandate for those making difficult decisions to pay for heat, gas, food, or medical care. This is also a costly mandate for cities who have been providing every-other-week service for more than two decades without issue from their contracted compost facility. The rates and greenhouse gas emissions will increase due to doubling of collection service, but the diversion amount will not.
• Cities to replace all recycling, garbage, and organics collection carts in accordance with a mandated color scheme. We agree with the policy of aligning cart colors statewide to reduce resident confusion but ask that this be done on a replacement timeline only, due to the significant costs that will be passed on to ratepayers—carts range from $40-$53 each (20-96 gal). This amounts to millions of dollars for each city.

Dates to remember

HB 2301 is scheduled for public hearing in the House Environment & Energy Committee on Tuesday, January 23 at 4 pm.

SB 6180 is scheduled for public hearing in the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee on Tuesday, January 23 at 1:30 pm.