photo by: AdobeStock

Food waste is shown in a compost bin in the AdobeStock photo.

You sure can recycle food, and I’m not just talking about taking a chance on the meatloaf a week after it was served.

For a long time, gardeners in the know have been saving their food scraps in buckets or bins to allow those scraps to break down into a nutrient-rich compost to feed their plants.

But what if you are not a gardener but like the recycling idea known as “food composting” nonetheless? Soon, Lawrence residents may have a curbside recycling service that will take your food scraps and turn them into compost that will fertilize vegetables at a local farm.

Plans have been filed with Lawrence and Douglas County planners for a Kansas City company to open an approximately quarter-acre composting facility on the edge of North Lawrence. The proposed facility at 1701 E. 1500 Road — just northwest of the intersection of Seventh and North streets in North Lawrence — would be operated by the Compost Collective KC. The organization has operated a curbside food waste recycling program for years in the KC metro area. It currently does some food waste pickups for Lawrence restaurants and commercial food service operations, but it doesn’t operate a true curbside program for residential customers in Lawrence.

If plans for the North Lawrence composting facility are approved, that will change. Tony Whitter, chief executive of the collective, told me the company intends to provide a broad-based curbside service in the Lawrence area upon completion of the compost facility.

“We do residential curbside pickup where people keep a bucket at home and they keep their food waste and compostable materials in there,” Whitter said of the system. “On their assigned day, they set it on their curb, we pick it up, empty it, clean their bucket and they are good to go until the next one.”

The collections would be taken to the North Lawrence site, where the food waste would be combined with other organic material that facilitates the breakdown of the food into compost. The site at 1701 E. 1500 Road already is the site of a local vegetable farm, so the resulting compost will be used to help those local crops grow.

“It is a model that we call farm to table, table to farm,” Whitter said.

The project is seeking a county use permit, which means the Douglas County Commission ultimately will be asked to approve the project before it can move forward. Such use permit applications generally focus on whether the use will fit well with the neighborhood, create any noxious conditions or cause a big spike in traffic on local roads, for example.

Whitter said his company’s plans for Lawrence don’t call for large scale truck traffic coming to the site. The service will use regular pickup trucks instead of large trash trucks to collect and haul the food waste.

“It is a smaller scale operation, so it would be quite awhile before we are looking beyond one or two vehicles on the property,” Whitter said.

On the issue of odors, Whitter said the smells of a compost pile can be minimal, if the pile is properly maintained. He said a key to that management is ensuring the food waste pile is properly mixed with carbon materials, such as leaves or wood chips.

“When you maintain the pile properly with those fixtures, then it takes care of any of those perceptions people might have with a compost pile,” Whitter said.

As for the service that the Compost Collective of KC plans to offer in Lawrence, Whitter didn’t provide specific details. However, in the KC metro area, the company currently offers curbside residential collection for $20 to $30 per month, according to the company’s website.

The Lawrence project is still working its way through the local review and approval process, so it is uncertain when the service might begin. Whitter said he is hoping that the approval process will be completed in the next couple of months.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

A portion of the site at 1701 E. 1500 Road is pictured on July 13, 2026.