TUCSON, Ariz. — The University of Arizona's student-operated Compost Cats program recently stopped accepting all materials at their current site, the San Xavier Cooperative Farm on the Tohono O'odham Nation, to begin moving to a location that will facilitate future growth.
Compost Cats, which is part of the UA Office of Sustainability, is partnered with the City of Tucson to operate the FoodCycle Program – a voluntary, full-service compost program for commercial businesses and restaurants, in which food scraps are collected by the City and given to Compost Cats for processing.
Compost Cats is the only organization of its kind in Southern Arizona to divert food waste, manure and other organic material from businesses and homes that would otherwise be tossed into local landfills and transform the waste material into high-quality compost for local agriculture and landscaping.
"I want to be clear," said UA Office of Sustainability director Trevor Ledbetter, "Compost Cats has a very bright future and a growing partnership with the City of Tucson."
The move will facilitate such growth.
"At the San Xavier Co-Op, we have approximately three acres of land and process 2,500 tons of organic materials a year," Ledbetter said. "We've outgrown the land and we don't have reliable access to the resources or the space we need."
The program has barely grown, he said, because of these restraints.
Ledbetter is currently working with the City of Tucson's Environmental Services department to choose a new site, which could be Los Reales Landfill, where the program would receive reliable access to water, more space and additional infrastructure on the scale Compost Cats requires.
Additionally, more than 80 percent of what flows into Tucson's landfills is compostable or recyclable, according to Tucson's Environmental Services Department.
With more resources, Ledbetter hopes to recruit more businesses into the FoodCycle program, which provides most of Compost Cats' organic material. He envisions processing up to 50,000 tons of organic material a year.
To do so, Compost Cats is currently seeking donations, both financial and in-kind. As the program looks to scale up, larger, more specialized equipment will be necessary and the funding for this is not yet fully secured. The program's restart date is contingent on its ability to garner the necessary donations, but Ledbetter hopes to be up and running again in mid-to-late fall.
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