Composting

General Compost Information

In 2017 the Basalt Town Council adopted ambitious and necessary climate action goals to significantly reduce Basalt’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 2014 levels by 2050.

The Town’s Strategic Work Plan contains several environmental goals, including supporting regional waste stream reduction efforts. To this end, the Town is investigating ways to effectively encourage and incentivize composting throughout Basalt.

Trash services in Basalt utilize the Pitkin County landfill. The data shows that there is a large opportunity to remove waste that could be composted from the stream of trash going to the Pitkin County Landfill. In 2022, Pitkin County performed a waste sort over the course of three days. Samples were taken from 32 incoming trash trucks that were sorted by community (Aspen, Basalt, Carbondale, and Snowmass Village), weighed, and categorized by material type.

The waste sort revealed that nearly 20% of Basalt’s landfill waste was food and organic matter. No other single material came close to the double-digit percentage of food waste being thrown away. To meet our climate action goals, it is vital that, as a community, we minimize the amount of organic materials that are sent to the landfill.

The Town of Basalt wants to support our residents and businesses by investing time and resources into finding solutions that work for our community.

Survey

Please let us know how we can best contribute to higher composting rates in our community by taking the survey below. The results will help us better understand the barriers and opportunities to residential and commercial composting and how we can assist and support service delivery into the future and make an impact on climate change in our region.