MZA has partnered with Compost Nashville to introduce a weekly commercial composting program as a part of our office operations, in an effort to further reduce the amount of waste leaving our office and heading to the landfill.

“We’ve had a small, in-house outfit going for years—a five-gallon bucket that lived in our break room and would go home to someone’s personal compost pile each week,” said architect Brad Province. “It was great, but only had so much capacity and really couldn’t handle the full breadth of acceptable materials that a commercial composting center can process. I’m really excited that we’re taking this next step and committing to a more comprehensive composting practice.”

Compost Nashville provides a weekly pick-up that will remove methane-producing food waste from landfills, along with paper goods that have reached the end of their recyclable life, turning these nutrient rich waste products into useful resources for local farmers and community gardens.

This program has invited more mindfulness about the kinds and amounts of waste that we are generating as an office, a perspective that we look forward to sharing with our clients and the design community at large. Compost Nashville’s Micah Puncochar met with MZA’s Sustainability Committee to discuss the benefits of composting, and ways to make our projects compost-ready by designing in the necessary infrastructure and sharing the importance and ease of composting with our clients.

We look forward to sharing our annual report from Compost Nashville about the volume of useful, compostable waste that we have helped divert from landfills!