Employees at 125 Safeway stores along the East Coast ship
everything from flowers to coffee grounds and spoiled vegetables
to the Maryland return center, which then must transport the
waste at least another 100 miles to be recycled into compost. It
illustrates composting's complicated trajectory in the United
States. The movement is inching forward But increasingly, local
governments, entrepreneurs and community activists are
experimenting with composting. Last month, Washington, D.C.
Mayor Vincent Gray announced that the city's Office of Planning
was awarded $600,000 in grants to build three to four compost
sites for urban farms or community gardens in the city to test
composting methods. Howard County, Md., has collected food waste
from 1,000 households since September 2011 as part of a pilot
program; Freestate Farms, an agricultural consulting company, is
working to launch a compost facility in Northern Virginia. "It's
been under the radar screen until now, and seen as a boutique,
West Coast thing," said J