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Nezih Pistar, owner of three restaurants in downtown Frederick, hopes to harness the excitement surrounding recycling to move toward a "zero-waste" business.

Pistar hosted a breakfast for other business owners at Brewer's Alley earlier this month, which further fueled his excitement for recycling paper, bottles and even food waste.

He said that Acacia Fusion Bistro, one of his restaurants that focuses on serving locally grown organic food, would be the pilot for his no-waste approach.

He supports a large-scale composting program for Frederick County in order to save money for business owners and the city, which pays $76 per ton for trash taken to the landfill at Reichs Ford Road. Much of the city's trash is food waste from restaurants, he said, and composting could reduce the need for an incinerator, which Pistar feels will devalue land.

He acknowledged it would take some time to plan a composting program, but because putting less trash in the dumpster would cut overhead costs, "sooner is better."

"My goal is six months," Pistar said.

City business owners gathered May 1 to discussing what some consider an undervalued resource: food waste.

They invited Steve Simon, an Atlanta, Ga., restaurateur who has embraced composting, who owns restaurants in Atlanta's Zero Waste Zone which have gone "dumpster free" — all waste is either recycled or composted.

His main point was that compost is a resource. Gardeners and farmers need fertilizer because "the soil sucks," drained of the nutrients plants need to grow. Composting food waste allows it to break down into those vital nutrients, and can be used to feed crops.

Elin Ross, who owns Moxie Bakery & Café in Frederick, said that she was intrigued by the possibility of commercial composting. She said she used to work in a restaurant in Chicago where it was common practice, and was looking for a way to implement composting locally.

"I'm familiar with it," she said. "I wanted to see if there were some resources in the county and city to do it."

Simon said the key was that everyone — businesses and government— is on the same page. Frederick County, which provides residential, single-stream recycling, does not compost food waste, though yard clippings are composted.

Frederick city is in the midst of a pilot business recycling program, extended to 91 businesses on Market and Patrick streets, but without a city, county or commercial facility to compost, a large-scale operation would be impossible.

Residents and politicians who are opposed to the planned incinerator or "waste-to-energy facility," as some call it, have expressed interest in composting as an alternative for reusing trash.

Steve Cassis of the Solid Waste Analysis Group, said that he had "gotten really involved in promoting a local [composting] facility" during the county's discussion of the incinerator.

He said it would be a simple enough solution to over-burdened landfills, but all parties would have to be onboard.

"You can say it's fairly simple but a lot of it depends on [coordination]," he said. "Everybody has to be on the same page."

The Frederick Board of Aldermen, represented at the breakfast by Shelley Aloi (R), Michael O'Connor (D), Kelly Russell (D) and Karen Young (D), have recently commissioned an ad-hoc committee to study different ways that the city could expand its recycling program. O'Connor said the committee, which has six weeks to study the issue, would consider how the city could implement composting.

Frederick County Commissioner Kai J. Hagen (D), who attended the breakfast, said the possibilities of compost as a fertilizer for local farms would be crushed if all the food waste were burned to ash in an incinerator.

"We're burning a tremendous resource," he said.

But the logistics of creating a food waste composting program are not clear cut, according to Michael Marschner, director of the county's Division of Utilities and Solid Waste Management.

He said that in order to create such a program at the county level, there would be hurdles such as locating land, getting environmental permits and transporting compost, all of which would cost time and money.

He said it was also important to consider what went into the compost. He said some people argue that diapers, paper and animal waste, which would all break down in compost, should be composted. However, this could attract vermin, or in the case of glossy magazine paper, contain dyes that could be toxic.

Marschner, who has a personal compost heap at his home, said a goal of any composting program should be creating a high-quality product that could be sold to farmers, gardeners and landscapers. Otherwise, the compost will simply go to the landfill, and not solve anything.

Phillip Harris, Frederick County's superintendent of solid waste, said a proposal for a pilot program to demonstrate whether the county could manage a food waste composting operation is in the early stages. He envisions a 1,000- to 1,500-ton composting project, a fraction of the 175,000 tons of trash the county deals with annually.

If it were successful, he said the next step would be county commissioners deciding whether there was money available to run a larger project.

Another obstacle is the political will of the community. Marschner said that in order for a composting program to be successful, residents would have to be willing to pay higher fees for it. He said even if a 300-home community had 150 homes that wanted to participate, all the homes would have to be charged.

"Not everyone in the community would embrace it," Marschner said.

E-mail Christian Brown at chbrown@gazette.net.