Page 17 - May June 2016 Vol 34 No1

remain correct, and that the compost does
not smell bad.
The partnership came at a good time
for The Compost Company. “We really
needed a larger feedstock, and companies
like American Snuff brought us over that
hurdle,” said Wansing.
Other customers of The Compost Com-
pany include Caterpillar, U.S. Smokeless
and Organix, a vendor to Wal-Mart. Nash-
ville’s new Music City Center, which has
its own sustainability management plan,
provides feedstock to The Compost Com-
pany, as well, which includes food prep
waste, compostable plates, box lunches,
and paper towels and napkins.
The bulk of The Compost Company’s
customers includes farmers, landscap-
ers, and gardeners, “but there have been
some surprises as well,” adds Wansing.
“The most unusual use of our product
was by a pet food facility for a bio-filter. ing more popular across industry sec-
They built the bio-filter to clean the air
before discharge from the facility [to
minimize odor].” The Compost Company
has also sold compost for use in several
rain gardens that filter storm water run-
off from parking lots before it enters the
watershed.
Composting is not the only sustainable
initiative that American Snuff supports,
and they have a sustainability team to
help them make environmentally sound
choices. They also land apply the process
waste tobacco from their Clarksville facil-
ity to a local farm and require that tobacco
farmers are provided with education on
sustainable farming techniques. There are
3,700 acres of farmland in Tennessee that
provide tobacco to American Snuff. “We
call our corporate-wide sustainability ini-
tiative Transforming Tobacco,” said John
Massey, manager of process improvement
with American Snuff and member of the
sustainability team.
American Snuff is also concerned with
making sustainable supply chain choices,
both at their Memphis facility as well as
their manufacturing site in Clarksville,
and now uses biodegradable Gaylord
boxes and other process materials that are
compostable.
Waste management solutions are grow-
tors. According to a recent survey by the
Tennessee Department of Environment
and Conservation’s Office of Sustainable
Practices, almost 30 percent of food and
food-grade product manufacturers like
ConAgra, Unilever, and the Mars Choco-
late Factory use land application or animal
feed supplementation to reuse process
wastes. Large-scale composting, while a
sought-after solution for many manufac-
turers, has not historically been an option
in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Department of Environ-
ment and Conservation hopes to change
that, and in 2016 provided the first round
of grant funding to promote compost-
ing and build or update infrastructure
that supports an increase in the diversion
of organic wastes away from Tennessee
landfills. “Grants offered by the Tennessee
Department of Environment and Conser-
vation’s Division of Solid Waste Manage-
ment will help to support and encourage
the spread of composting programs both
public and private across the state,” said
Patrick Flood, director of the Division of
Solid Waste and Hazardous Management.
“Providing incentive to reuse and repur-
pose food wastes is a priority with our
department.”
The Compost Company provides one
of the first of many outlets for companies
with organic and compostable waste.
American Snuff is taking advantage of an
environmentally responsible and fiscally
efficient method of waste management,
and as opportunities for composting
increase across the state, Tennessee’s land-
fills will be less burdened.
View online at tnpublicworks.com 17