(Photo by Stina Sieg - KJZZ)

In the Southwest, compost can be vital to getting a garden to thrive. Above is Food Conspiracy's little plot, infused with compost.

(Photo by Stina Sieg - KJZZ)

The San Xavier farm, where Compost Cats is based, is playing a big role in the process. Above is a contraption that does all the heavy lifting of composting: watering and turning the soil.

(Photo by Stina Sieg - KJZZ)

UA's Chet Phillips and his students founded Compost Cats four years ago. He estimates that this year, they'll turn 5 million pounds of waste into rich, usable compost.

Across the country, food is being thrown away constantly — about a half pound per person, per day. That’s according to the EPA, which estimates that food waste makes up nearly a quarter of landfill space. Tucson recently started a citywide composting program, the first in the state.

The basic idea of composting sounds great. Food scraps and yard waste decomposing into useable, nutrient-rich soil.

But sometimes, the process can be a little more like Kelly Kriner’s home composting experience.

She remembers “a pile in the corner that sometimes was doing OK and sometimes had a lot of flies, and sometimes didn’t smell very good,” she said.

The general manager of Tucson’s Food Conspiracy Co-op said she still hasn’t perfected that art. Neither did the co-op. Despite best intentions, Kriner said a lack of manpower always kept the store’s past composting attempts small and less successful as she would have hoped.

“But it’s really great now to just have the truck pull up, you know, with its little automated arm,” she said.

That’s because Food Conspiracy is one of about 50 Tucson businesses participating in the Food Scraps Collection Program. Compostable food gets picked up twice a week by the city, just like recycling or trash.

Except, instead of heading to the landfill, those pieces of pita bread and organic coffee grounds end up at the lush, windy San Xavier Co-op Farm south of town. There, they’re mixed with tree trimming and outdoor waste as well as a heavy dose of exotic animal dung from the local zoo. If you ever pay a visit, expect to see long rows of dark, chunky soil being run over by a machine that kind of looks like a tractor, except it’s turning and water the compost as it goes.

This contraption is one of the many upgrades the program called Compost Cats has seen since it started at the University of Arizona in 2011. Chet Phillips is the sustainability coordinator at the university and director of the program. He said that even though it’s partnered with the city now, Compost Cats is still entirely student-run. Last year, he said it kept 3 million pounds of food out of the local landfill.

“We expect to be somewhere between 5 and 6 million pounds in 2015,” he said. “And I’m guessing we’re going to continue to grow for several years after that.”

Compost Cats is self-sustaining, with fees for pick-up service and compost sales making more than its $80,000 annual budget. While this is a new thing for Arizona, Phillips sees composting as a trend all over the country. New York City recently began a program and San Francisco requires residents to compost.

“They’re doing that because landfills are expensive,” Phillips said. “And also because there are just better uses for a lot of this stuff.”

One of those uses is creating the kind of soil that doesn’t come naturally in the arid Southwest.

“Compost adds water-holding capacity to the soil and it adds nutrients,” Phillips said. “We need all of that that we can get.”

So, it’s good for gardens and it’s good for the environment. But it’s also good for businesses’ bottom lines. For many, it costs the same or less to compost as it would to throw away all their food waste. Now, several restaurants and grocery stores are getting on board that may never have if it wasn’t this easy and economical.

One of them is the downtown fixture Hotel Congress along Maynard’s Market, where Todd Hanley is the manager.

“I’m not an activist by any stretch,” Hanley said.

But he believes his industry is going to have to go in this direction. Otherwise, he said, it will simply be wasting a resource that could be used for good.

“Trash is inevitable," Hanley said. "Unfortunately, that’s just what comes out of the type of world we live in. But to minimize the trash and then, more than anything, take advantage of what is considered to be trash, in a positive way? I guess it’s just hard for me to fathom why you wouldn’t do it.”

 As Hanley put it, “it’s a no brainer.”

And he imagines that pretty soon, even more businesses will see it that way, too.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A photo caption in this story has been modified to relect Chet Phillips' position at UA.