Waste Management Inc., the firm striving to turn the traditional model of garbage handling on its head, is expanding its business in organics recycling by investing in a company that owns the largest composting facility in the eastern U.S. and by building a new organics processing site in Florida.

The two moves announced this week are intended to strengthen Waste Management's position in organics processing and recycling and further the firm's efforts to recast its business model.

Waste Management is working to transform itself into a company that does not merely dispose of rubbish, but provides solutions that derive value from it. That includes reducing waste, recycling it and tapping markets for products made with the recycled materials.

"We want to extract the highest value possible from the materials we manage," Waste Management executives Tim Cesarek, managing director of Organic Growth, and David McConnell, a market area vice president, said in announcements this week. The statement has become a mantra for the company, and in the area of organics processing and recycling that has translated to a series of investments and projects that have accelerated in the past two years.

Investing in the Peninsula Compost Company

The first of the two most recent developments surfaced Tuesday when Waste Management released highlights of its strategic investment in the Peninsula Compost Company LLC. PCC owns and operates the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, a $20-million, state-of-the-art, large-scale facility that processes commercial food and yard waste, turning it into compost.

Developed on a former brownfield site, the 27-acre facility is located across from the Port of Wilmington, making it readily accessible to waste haulers in Delaware as well as Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The Wilmington facility processes up to 300 tons per day of organic waste and has permitted capacity for as much as 600 tons per day. Through its investment, Waste Management now considers the Wilmington site part of the WM network of organics processing facilities. WM has an organics processing capacity of more than 1.7 million tons a year, and the Wilmington facility could add over 200,000 tons to that figure, according to Waste Management.

Organics Processing in Florida

Yesterday, WM said it is building a facility to process pre-consumer commercial food waste, yard waste from residential and business customers, and clean demolition wood waste from the Central Florida area. The composting facility is being developed at WM's Vista Landfill in Apopka, Fla.

The Vista property is about 160 acres and the new organics recycling facility will occupy 16 acres of the site, WM Community Affairs Manager Amy Boyson told GreenBiz.com.