“Velvet, you’re still here?” Davey Stewards yells up the driveway to the woman who’s been gardening for a few hours straight on a sweltering, 90-degree afternoon.
Velvet Moock’s face is hidden under a wide-brimmed straw sun hat as she bends to plant-level in the garden. Hunched over in a striped blue short-sleeved button-up, and a matching pair of bright blue shorts, she works diligently and with care in the dirt. There’s another man working in another section of the garden, in a salmon-colored shirt that’s mostly darkened with sweat, and leather loafers.
Webster, Stewards’ fluffy Australian cattle dog, meanders around the property, snout in the dirt, scrutinizing all the smells that the facility has to offer.
Moock comes to the community garden at Star City Compost, a private composting company owned by Stewards, to help plant crops multiple times every week, and works happily for a long time under the hot sun.
The garden is a small one, with five or six rows of crops that grow upon raised piles of dirt, black plastic tarp covering the ground between each raised section of crop, creating a long row of stripes like those on the American flag. It’s hard to walk through the garden without stepping on something that’s living. A thin hose snakes around each plant, with a small hole in the hose that drips just the right amount of water onto that plant.
The garden sits right on the property of the small composting venture, started and run by Stewards. Both the garden and Star City Compost were started by the Harvest Collective, which is a community-based agriculture business that helps individuals reconnect and restore their relationship with their local ecological systems, according to its website.
Stewards and Moock, among other volunteers, grow a number of different crops in that garden. Stewards holds up a large, leafy green plant, called callaloo, which he said is “delicious” and has an abundance of nutritional value, similar to spinach or kale, but is cheap and easy to grow. He said it’s a “staple food” across the tropical equator, but grows as a weed here in the U.S. and is often thrown away.
Moock, while demonstrating how to plant a sweet potato, laughs at her experience seeing so many people intimidated by gardening, which in her eyes, is simple.
Just about one hundred feet from these thriving, growing crops are huge piles of organic material in their last stages of decomposition — on the opposite end of the cycle from the food growing just across the dirt driveway.
“When compost is added into soil where food is being grown, the nutrients from the decomposed food waste are redistributed back into the soil.”
Davey Stewards
When Stewards isn’t helping Moock in the garden, he is unloading bunkers, turning cured piles of waste in his field, picking up curbside customers’ compost, processing waste, cleaning the facility and collecting data. It’s just him and two part-time employees most of the time at Star City Compost.
He is making an effort on that other, often forgotten side of the cycle — something that Virginia as a state is just in recent years beginning to show an interest in.
Virginia has not implemented any kind of regulation on how much food waste can be landfilled before a business or municipal building must start composting. There’s also a lack of statewide financial incentivization to support private composters, and a whole lot of red tape and money needed to start a composting facility. But the state and Roanoke city are slowly warming to the idea of making composting a policy priority.
Star City Compost currently has over 200 household customers, Stewards said. Customers pay a rate of $12 per month to drop their compost off, or $27 monthly to have their waste picked up.
It also works with Hollins University, Alexander’s Restaurant on South Jefferson Street, and the Starbucks on Brambleton Avenue near Cave Spring. Blue Ridge Catering, the RAM House, Local Environmental Agriculture Project, or LEAP, and Raleigh Court Presbyterian also separate out compost for Star City Compost, Stewards said.
Terry McGuire collecting his compost from the week on his porch. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Terry McGuire dropping his compost off at a drop-off station for Star City Compost to pick up. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
The inside of the Star City Compost barn. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Bunkers of decomposing and heating compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Davey Stewards mixes food waste with wood chips, the first phase of the composting process. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Davey Stewards relocates the mixed wood chips and food waste into a bunker, to begin decomposing. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
The garden and screening machine sit outside the barn at Star City Compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
As compost decomposes, it naturally heats to about 150 or 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Davey Stewards checks the temperature on a pile of compost in its final stages of decomposition. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Multiple piles of compost in their final stages of decomposition in the field at Star City Compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Compost is picked up from the piles in the field and screened to remove wood chips. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Davey Stewards picks up a handful of freshly-screened compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
The Harvest Collective garden at Star City Compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Davey Stewards holds stalks of callaloo from the garden. Photo by Samantha Verrelli. 
Velvet and another volunteer work in the Harvest Collective garden, on a sweltering summer day. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
He said the idea of charging to collect food waste is “a new concept for a lot of people.”
Facilities like Star City Compost can accept some types of food waste that home composters can’t, like meat and dairy. Craig Coker, Stewards’ business partner and a composting expert, said backyard compost piles don’t usually reach temperatures high enough for full decomposition of these types of waste.
Composting at home takes a lot of effort, and there’s a significant “ick” factor, Coker said, which is why some people choose to compost through a facility like Star City Compost.
“We’ve done a lot of conversations about recycling,” Stewards said, “and truly composting locally is a more effective environmental solution than sending our plastic off to giant plants processed in a lot of ways.”
A simple, natural process becomes complicated when replicating it in a controlled environment
Composting, at least at this level, is more than just collecting waste and waiting for it to rot. At Star City Compost, various pieces of industrial infrastructure surround a barn in the middle of the facility, which is equipped with a few offices, a bathroom and an old couch — on one cushion, an open plastic container holds a discarded banana peel, waiting to be added to a compost pile.
The entire process, from peeling a banana to having a complete batch of compost, takes months at a facility like Star City Compost. Stewards said taking your compost to a facility like that, rather than composting in your yard, is more efficient for creating new, healthy soil. Take a look at what happens once your food waste is at the facility, and what you need to do to get it there:
The Food Waste Adventure
Choose the path of your food scraps and discover where they end up
Where will your food waste go?
It’s Sunday evening, and you’re cleaning your kitchen. In your refrigerator, you find half a bag of wilted spinach. On the counter, you see coffee grounds from this morning. What do you do?
🌱 The Composting Journey
Watch your food waste transform into nutrient-rich soil
Collection at Home
Waste is collected at home in a bucket.
Roanoke Vice Mayor Terry McGuire collects food waste at home. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Drop-off or Pickup
Customers drop off their waste at a drop-off facility or have it picked up from their home for a convenience fee.
Roanoke Vice Mayor Terry McGuire drops off his food waste at Star City Compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Mixing with Wood Chips
Wood chips and food are mixed in the first bunker.
Star City Compost owner Davey Stewards mixes the food waste with wood chips. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Initial Decomposition
The mixture is dumped into other bunkers, where it sits for weeks as it begins to decompose.
Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Microbial Activity
The microbes naturally heat to 150-160 degrees using what’s around them: air, water, food, carbon from the wood chips, and nitrogen.
Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Odor Reduction
At this point, the smell starts to go away and flies disperse.
Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Extended Curing
Waste is dumped onto piles in the ground, where it sits for 2-3 months, continuing to naturally heat to high temps.
Davey Stewards checks on a pile of compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Screening and Preparation
Mixture is screened to take out excess large wood chips and prepare it to be spread in a garden or on a field.
Davey Stewards inspects the compost. Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
Nourishing the Soil
Compost is added into soil, redistributing nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and carbon. The soil with these added nutrients grows healthier plants with less weeds, increases fertility and production, and produces greater resistance to bugs that would eat the plants. Isopods, roly-polies and worms distribute the nutrients around the soil and “put it into forms that are more available for your plants to drink.”
Photo by Samantha Verrelli.
🌍 Environmental Impact
By composting, you’ve transformed waste into a valuable resource! This process returns nutrients to the earth, supports healthy plant growth, and helps create a sustainable cycle of life.
🗑️ The Landfill Journey
Follow the path of food waste in a traditional disposal system
Trash Collection
Food waste collects in the trash can, mixed with other household waste.
Illustration generated by Gemini AI.
Collection Facility
The waste is taken to a collection facility.
Illustration generated by Gemini AI.
Dumping at Landfill
Trucks dump the waste in the landfill. In 2023, more than 20% of waste in Virginia landfills were imported from other states.
Illustration generated by Gemini AI.
Cell Organization
Landfills are organized by cells. When one cell is full of waste, it’s covered with another layer of dirt.
Bristol’s landfill. Courtesy of City of Bristol.
Gas Release
After the cell is full, gas pipes are connected to expel landfill gas, which can take about a year. By this point, organic waste has usually decomposed and released as carbon dioxide and methane, a “super greenhouse gas” before the pipes could capture it.
Illustration generated by Gemini AI.
🗑️ Environmental Impact
In the landfill, food waste creates methane — a gas that traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere. In large quantities, methane has negative effects on the environment. Unlike composting, this process doesn’t return nutrients to the soil.
Note: The coding to build this “choose your own adventure” was generated by Gemini AI. The words, photographs and information contained in this interactive were written, taken and researched by Cardinal News staff.
The challenges of running a composting facility are amplified in Virginia without regulations on food waste or economic incentives to compost
Virginia places no regulations on the amount of food waste a business or entity can produce. Out of 27 states studied in 2019, Virginia ranked 25th for the amount of tons composted per 1,000 residents.
Some states, like Maryland and New Jersey, have implemented laws requiring businesses, schools and agencies to compost if they produce 1 ton of food waste per week, and are located near a facility that accepts compost.
Coker said state law plays a large role in the feasibility of composting.
“So in the absence of those mandates to recycle, the only driver is economic,” Coker said. “It has to be cheaper for a generator of waste material to want to be able to recycle it at a composting facility.”
In 2023, 22.6 million tons of solid waste were received at Virginia’s solid waste management facilities, according to a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality Annual Solid Waste Report. About 17 million tons originated in the commonwealth, the other 5 million tons being brought here from out of state.
Less than 1% of that waste was composted onsite, according to the 2023 report; 75.2% was landfilled onsite.
Virginia has an “extremely robust solid waste landfilling industry,” Coker said. “It’s very cheap to throw trash in a hole in the ground.” Southwest and Southside Virginia have the open land and capacity to take in that waste.
The state is now reliant on the profits that come from importing waste to be disposed of in Virginia, Coker said.
“That cash flow is a powerful incentive to [keep] land for that landfill open,” he said. “And that landfill makes money by the people sending trash to the landfill, paying the tipping fee.”
Coker said for businesses who pay for trash removal on a per ton basis, it could actually be cheaper to compost. But he said the vast majority of solid waste producers (such as grocery stores, restaurants, commercial buildings) are charged for waste by the dumpster — whether it’s half full or overflowing, making the argument for composting less economically enticing.
For these financial reasons, among several others, Stewards said he doesn’t know how he survived the first year of his business.
Startup costs for a private composting facility are high because state governments treat these facilities similarly to landfills, Stewards said. This is especially true in Virginia, where the state government does not historically provide financial incentives to compost.
Composting is gaining local and statewide support, but Virginia isn’t within the top states who are moving the fastest on legislation to support composting, Coker said.
Virginia has 13 total composting facilities; only eight of those handle food waste, while the others deal with sewage sludge, yard trimmings, manure and other agricultural waste. Coker said this is because accepting food waste requires more rigorous design and operations through a different permit classification.
Coker said it’s hard for the state to enforce laws requiring companies to compost when the state simply doesn’t have the existing capacity to manage it. More facilities like Star City Compost are needed for those laws to be introduced.
“There’s a chicken-and-egg problem,” Coker said.
Food waste is the single most common material landfilled nationwide, with 24% of landfilled material being food waste, the EPA found.
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Click on the icon next to the title to look at compost facilities across Virginia by whether or not they accept food waste.
Star City Compost faced high startup costs and must maintain the fees that a landfilling facility would
Coker’s work involves facility design planning, creating cost estimates, helping projects get through local and state approval, training, and troubleshooting operational problems once a facility is running, he said.
He started his own facility in North Carolina, and came to the Roanoke Valley in 2006 to work on the development of the Royal Oak Farm composting facility in Bedford, where he now works part time.
Coker said in an article he wrote for BioCycle that all states require some degree of financial assurance when starting a composting facility. This is to ensure, in the event that the managers leave or stop maintaining the facility, that the state would have the necessary funds to step in and properly close the facility down.
This is the same procedure for a landfill. The idea is, if someone were to abandon a landfill, there would be some costly environmental hazards to deal with. But the distinction that the state code is missing, Stewards said, is that compost transforms to not be solid waste after about three weeks in the facility.
“So we’re, by definition, doing something different than landfills are doing, because we’re recycling it,” Stewards said. “But there’s no incentives to reflect that.”
Coker wrote in his article that in starting Star City Compost, the estaimated closure cost, or the amount of money it would take to safely close the facility down, was $7,735. The facility also pays a $2,500 annual maintenance fee to the bank, and almost $1,700 annually to the Department of Environmental Quality for a solid waste management permit, Stewards said.
Stewards said he was required to pay over $2,000 for a professional environmental engineer to put a stamp on his plans, who provided “no helpful feedback” on how to improve the plans. Engineers of that type “specialize in landfills,” he said, not compost.
Coker said the startup costs added up to about $85,000. He said most of the remaining costs were spent on building the facility and its infrastructure.
Coker wrote in an article that the team had to demonstrate to the state a net financial worth of $10 million, in order to self-insure, with the closure costs, he said.
“If these requirements seem overly burdensome to a young composting company, I would agree,” Coker wrote. “These requirements may be contributing to the reluctance of some small-scale composters to obtain required state permits.”
Now, Stewards is planning suggestions to make on Virginia’s solid waste management plan, which was up for comment until late December.
He made recommendations pertaining to ending the financial assurance for closure costs, and suggested a state level commission of farmers and professionals who can provide technical support and regulatory oversight to facilities.
“This is the avenue to try to change the present laws about financial assurance for closure costs, which are the most crushing,” Stewards said.
In 2022, Gov. Glenn Youngkin raised red flags on how much food Virginians were throwing away
In recent years, the Virginia state legislature has started paying attention to composting.
In 2021, the Virginia General Assembly requested that the DEQ study the potential effects of composting and food donations, and whether it would reduce the volume of waste accepted by landfills.
This led to an April 7, 2022, executive order signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that noted that “food waste is the single largest substance by volume sent to solid waste sites across Virginia and the United States.”
At the same time that large amounts of food waste are ending up in landfills, 8.5% of Virginia households were food insecure in 2020, the U.S. Department of Agricultural Economic Research Service reported.
The report that coupled Youngkin’s order recommended a number of strategies to mitigate food waste, including using extra food to feed animals, donating extra food, finding industrial uses for waste and composting.
Roanoke and the state are talking about composting and slowly making it a policy priority
The Virginia DEQ just introduced a new program to support statewide composting at the college and university level.
The program will award approximately $8 million to support around 15 to 20 projects at colleges, universities and state agencies over the course of three years, the application states. The deadline for applications ended in late November.
The program was established through funding from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant Program.
The goal is to reduce emissions associated with landfilled organic waste and to support education and opportunities for food waste prevention.
The application document states that 40% of food is wasted, and this wasted food is responsible for 58% of landfill methane emissions, according to the EPA.
Virginia Tech currently composts food waste through Royal Oak Farms in Bedford County. It’s a 73-mile trip with a high carbon footprint, but there wasn’t a closer composting facility in 2011, Coker said. It’s an even further journey for James Madison University’s waste, which also ends up at Royal Oaks Farm.
Stewards said he was in conversations with a university, which he did not feel comfortable naming at this time, but said that university did not apply for the grant before the grant period closed. But, he said, he is still in conversations with them about becoming their composter.
Conversations starting in Roanoke
On a municipal level, the city of Roanoke has begun having more conversations about composting.
Vice Mayor Terry McGuire said composting support is one of the pieces of legislation that the legislative committee will bring to the state this year. Another councilman says he wants to bring to the council an initiative for a pilot project. And composting is listed as a priority in the city’s long-term planning documents.
Coker said he and Stewards decided to start Star City Compost after Roanoke had “made it clear that they [were] going to rely on the private sector” for recycling of organic waste. This was made clear in their Sustainability Plan, adopted into City Plan 2040, he said.
Stewards said that Roanoke hasn’t done much to support local composting thus far.
“It’s hard to hold the city’s hand to do this, because I have so much to do, right,” Stewards said. “There has to be a champion within the city who wants to push this forward.”
He did say that this city council, with four new members as of January, is more “friendly” to the idea of composting.
He said he has met with one of those new council members, Phazhon Nash, who is strategizing a way to bring this to the council, Nash said, potentially through the city’s Office of Sustainability.
Coker said though Star City Compost is a relatively small facility compared to the nearest Royal Oak Farm, which is 20 times the size of Roanoke’s facility, it does have the capacity to collect organic waste from the municipal building.
This would cost the city about $1,000 to $1,500 per year, Stewards said. The city is already working on an extremely tight budget this upcoming year, and had to make numerous cuts and an increase in the meals tax to make ends meet this budget season.
“How are we going to choose to do this sustainable thing when we’re barely surviving economically?” Stewards said.
In Roanoke’s City Plan 2040, one policy listed is improving options for sustainable waste disposal and providing solid waste reduction, through exploring opportunities for a city composting program.
McGuire said he’s a “huge supporter” of composting, and for him, those are not just empty words.
McGuire keeps his food waste in a metal tin in his kitchen, covered with a lid, and then dumps all of that waste into a bucket on his porch to take to the Star City Compost drop-off, located outside of the LEAP Community Store.
McGuire’s cat, Tofu, carefully watches and sniffs each piece of food before it goes into the bucket. McGuire works as an aide at Fishburn Elementary, and brings home leftover pre-packaged apple slices and fruit that the kids don’t eat to add to his compost pile.
McGuire was a former federal Clean Air Act policy advocate. He said he’s a customer of Star City Compost and uses compost at home to keep soil healthy for his garden.
He said composting “deserves” government support. But, he says he’s not supportive of statewide legislation requiring composting when there’s not enough state infrastructure to support it.
He said he’d be interested in exploring a pilot project at the local level.
McGuire, who is on the city council’s legislative committee, said that two composting-related issues made it into the legislative packet for this year that will be sent to the state, even though those two issues weren’t in the top priorities on that list.
These issues include supporting legislation that updates the statewide regulatory framework to better allow commercial scale composting facilities to operate, and supporting legislation to allow localities to require facilities of a certain size to divert organic waste to composting.
Stewards has constant updates as to potential statewide support and contracts with a local university. Conversations with universities and businesses seem to be warming up, albeit slowly, not unlike the natural processes Stewards’ business leverages for long-term success.