Nearly half of Kodiak's landfill is organic. A resident wants the borough to look at composting.

Forty-three percent of the waste going into Kodiak's landfill is organic material — food scraps, yard waste and the like — and Kodiak resident Marion Owen wants the borough to study whether composting could keep some of it out.

Owen brought a proposal to the Kodiak Island Borough Solid Waste Advisory Board's July 29 meeting asking not for a program, but for a first step: that the board recommend borough staff evaluate whether community composting would work and bring back options. "I'm not suggesting we approve a composting program tonight," she wrote. "I'm asking this board to recommend that Borough staff evaluate the feasibility."

She pointed to that 43 percent figure from the borough's own Regional Solid Waste Management Plan, and argued Kodiak wouldn't be starting from scratch — other communities have already tested approaches worth learning from. The borough has long encouraged household composting, but a community-scale program would be a larger step.

The materials released for the meeting don't record what action, if any, the board took on the request.