Tacoma Grows
As spring nears and you head back outside to your gardens, consider adding locally-produced materials to your landscaping lineup. TAGRO, short for Tacoma Grows, is a line of low-cost soil amendment products loaded with elements that are good for your plants and grass, all while helping you reuse community resources and protect our local environment.
Using a blend of pasteurized wastewater byproducts and various weed and pathogen-free landscaping components, TAGRO creates an ideal environment for grass and plant growth. The products are packed with nutrients that plants not only need, but thrive on.
Since its beginning in 1991, TAGRO has earned numerous national awards, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s first place award for best biosolids program in the country. By the bucket or truckload, customers say their gardens grow faster, lawns grow thicker and trees grow taller. Vegetables and flowers grown in TAGRO have earned hundreds of awards at the Puyallup Fair since 1992.
In fact, TAGRO products have been known to yield beautiful gardens and lawns so successfully that it has been hauled to locations as esteemed as the White House. Just last fall, Joel Holland, a retired fire department battalion chief of Sumner, Washington, was featured on Live with Kelly and Ryan with “the world’s largest pumpkin.” It was grown in TAGRO and weighed a whopping 2,363 pounds!
As with any product created with biosolids, the question of safety often comes up, and rightfully so. Many products created by wastewater are classified by the EPA as “Class B,” meaning that it is “generally safe” to use on farmland. TAGRO believes that “generally safe” is not good enough.
Tacoma chooses to make products that meet the most stringent safety standards of the USEPA: Class A, Exceptional Quality. Meeting these tough standards means that TAGRO products are of the highest quality and are completely safe. As one of the pioneers of Class A biosolid treatment and product innovation, Tacoma’s treatment program exceeded the EPA’s very definition for the process and remains a national leader in the industry.
When Tacoma’s community gardens program began in 2010, it quickly developed a strong partnership with TAGRO in an effort to create flourishing, sustainable gardens that would yield strong harvests, year after year. TAGRO continues to sponsor all Pierce County Harvest community gardens by providing free TAGRO products, which helps break up heavy soils, helps retain moisture, and slowly releases nutrients in to the soil.
The benefits of biosolid recycling extend far beyond the reinvention of the fertilizing process. In fact, the recycling of biosolids continues to have a major impact on the local environment. By creating soils and soil remediation products with biosolids, the City of Tacoma keeps 4,000 dry tons of waste out of the landfill each year, or the equivalent of about 1,300 truckloads.
“Most people just want to make it go away. We’ve made a viable product out of that and I’m really, really proud to be part of that. We are doing the right thing for the environment. We are not landfilling any of this – it’s of beneficial use, and going back to the community.”
-Dan Eberhardt, Biosolids Program Manager for the City of Tacoma
TAGRO products include: mix, potting soil, topsoil, and aged black bark. The
plant also offers self-haul TAGRO mix that customers may take without charge,
although quantities are limited. Customers interested in seeing the materials and
self-hauling can visit the TAGRO office at the Central Treatment Plant, located
at Gate 6, 2301 Cleveland Way, Tacoma, WA 98421. TAGRO delivers within
and beyond Tacoma city limits, conditions apply. For more information, visit
TAGRO.com or call 253.502.2150.
