The City of Middletown Sanitation Department has contracted with Blue Earth Composting to distribute loose boxes to businesses and other entities where they can place their food waste to divert it from the waste stream. The Feed the Earth Middletown crusade will mitigate Connecticut’s next waste crisis, according to recycling coordinator Kim O’Rourke. Discarded food accounts for a quarter of Middletown’s discarded items, he said.
The 10-foot-tall pile of what looks like dirt at the back of a lot at Stonington Transfer Station doesn’t look much different from other nearby piles.
But it is.
And for Dave Aldridge and John Phetteplace, this is the long-term waste control in Connecticut.
“Oh, that’s a glorious thing,” Aldridge says, taking a handful of compost made from food waste, 25 tons to be precise, adding seven tons of discarded potatoes through Frito-Lay and at least one whole roasted bird with dates.
Aldridge, who is the executive director of the Southeast Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Authority (SCRRRA), a regional waste consortium of 12 municipalities, and Phetteplace, the director of fake waste in Stonington, which is one of 12, the compost pile is the cornerstone of solving Connecticut’s waste disposal crisis.
And there are a lot of communities that agree with them.
Removing food waste (more euphemistically, biological matter) from the waste stream will solve the state’s waste disposal problems, but it is widely known that those problems will be solved without them.
The Ministry of Energy and Environmental Protection has pinned its hopes on a small four-month pilot assignment in Meriden in which waste carriers collect two bags at once, one with food scraps that citizens have separated from non-recyclable waste in the other bag. And soon, DEEP will award Sustainable Materials Management (SSM) grants from a $5 million fund for further pilot allocations for which there are more than two dozen applicants.
There have been a number of other efforts such as SCRRRA and Meriden state. Much of the interest followed deep’s creation of the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management (CCSMM) initiative that brought together dozens of municipalities in late 2020 to discover waste control. it has become clear that the MIRA waste-to-energy plant in Hartford was nearby. The CCSMM produced a full set of recommendations in early 2021.
In fact, many communities and waste control operations have been operating with it for years, some for decades, seeking to treat waste in a broad sense, and this usually meant food waste in particular. political and almost no coordination. In the end, the maximum effort was left in the hands of the ingenuity of its creators, replicating what others were doing.
Aldridge began his food waste effort in 2019 and, like others in the state, by adding DEEP itself, he had to leave the state, in his case in New York, Massachusetts, and even the Pacific Northwest, to get the experience and even the money. to launch your pilot project. DEEP has contracts with outside experts from WasteZero in North Carolina and the EcoTechnology Center in Western Massachusetts.
It took Aldridge almost 4 times longer to get DEEP permits to start the pilot than it did to get it up and running, which took 10 weeks. Robert Isner, director of DEEP’s waste engineering and applications division, said aerodynamics.
After all this, Aldridge considers the pilot to have been good fortune and is now on the verge of reaching an agreement for a permanent composting site in the SCRRRA region that all 12 cities can use. He hopes this will remove enough curtains from the waste stream that goes to the waste-to-energy plant in Lisbon that SCRRRA uses to free up space for waste displaced by the mira closure. In the long run, this will save cash at all levels, possibly there will be short-term prices related to food waste collection in general.
While DEEP has the merit of focusing on the waste challenge now, many say this deserves to have been done years earlier and that this upcoming circular of pilot projects represents small steps, while leaps and bounds are needed, and many of them.
“It doesn’t even make sense,” Phetteplace said, “that we keep funding pilot systems that were seen as last time. Let’s do the things that matter. “
And not a few think that global state leadership and even mandates for waste management are desired.
DEEP is one of them.
“I think it all comes down to the municipal government. Often, municipalities don’t need the state to say what they deserve to be doing,” Isner said. “
So it is now. Garbage management is regulated through the municipalities, infrequently with more than one formula in place, employing loads from carriers throughout the state. The charge is integrated into municipal taxes, so citizens mistakenly think that garbage is collected free of charge. In places where citizens want to rent a carrier, they regularly pay a flat rate, so there is no incentive to pull less.
And 25% to 30% of that is waste.
Food waste is heavy, so in an industry where the more something weighs, the more you have to pay to get rid of it, which increases the cost. It is wet, so it does not burn well in the waste-to-energy plants that the state prefers; there will be 4 more even after MIRA closes in July. And there are other favorable uses for non-donatable food waste.
Compost is a vital product, a sellable and useful product, perhaps more so now that manufactured fertilizers are scarce due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; either were primary providers. Food waste can also be used to create electrical energy or so-called renewable herbal fuel, the non-combustion procedure of anaerobic digestion. There are less than a handful of digesters on farms in the state, which basically use manure animals, but also use crops. Based on recent rule changes, DEEP allows them to use more off-site food waste than before.
There is only one giant advertising digester on the net: Quantum BioPower in Southington. There are no plans for more at this time. The first three were completely legal by the state and had not yet been built.
The challenges that held them back were varied. But the main challenge is that Connecticut doesn’t have the aid structures in place to remedy food waste to ensure that some other Quantum can be funded and built. procedure every year.
The CCSMM Food Waste Working Group is very transparent about what Quantums’ long-term and total concept of food control need: state policy, perhaps even mandates to dispose of food, and infrastructure.
But there is a problem about who comes first.
Brian Paganini, vice president of Quantum, disagrees with the terms. “Without strict enforcement or strong incentives, those diversion mandates are just very ambitious recommendations,” he said.
Which is an update to the state’s fake waste control plan, last completed in 2016.
“We want to have a consolidated approach,” he said. Otherwise, “what you will get is many other ideas, many other programs, many other reflections on the processes. And those processes may or may not work.
And that makes it difficult for Quantum to have a reliable raw material, without which Quantum can’t get the investment to build an anaerobic digester, in other words: infrastructure.
“We would like to develop digestion capacity in the state of Connecticut. But the big question for us is, how do we convince our partners and investors to invest in capital-intensive technology, when we don’t even know where the next share of food waste will come from?»
So which is the first? The infrastructure for there to be a position to bring in the food waste, or the mandate and collection of food waste that make the structure of any processing operation worthwhile?
“To be honest, I see it as a burger out of thin air,” said Sam King, one of the founders of Blue Earth Compost, an 8-year subscription-based food waste collection service. “I don’t think we want to do one” to do the other.
“We haven’t seen, I would say, virtually any movement of any political point or anything like that to try to make those things happen. And yet, my business is to divert millions of pounds of food waste a year. Imagine if we had been helped in this process, we were going to get investments from DEEP.
Most Blue Earth collections end up in Quantum, but King has begun to focus on composting systems at smaller motion stations like the one SCRRRA is planning. we’re going to set up pilot systems where we select houses in a city and then process them within that city,” he said. It’s a simple, economical, feasible, sustainable and scalable generation, perhaps just adding waste food to existing leaf compost piles.
Branford is a city that is looking for a grant to do so. Blue Earth presented a pilot task of collecting loose food that had many interested until it was time to finish the “loose” part; two-thirds of the participants withdrew. The 17-member Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments is one of several GOCs seeking to pool resources along the way of scrra.
The of systems highlights that structuring a food waste control program remains a challenge. Phetteplace is pretty sure it has the first component of the solution. This is all Stonington has been doing for 30 years, called pay-as-you-go or unit price.
Stonington’s pay-as-you-go edition, as well as a few others in the state, is on the length of the container. In Stonington, it’s a yellow garbage bag that comes in two lengths at two other prices. The fewer you throw away, the fewer bags you use and the less you have to pay.
So far, food waste is still in Stonington’s bag. Residents now use a pink bag for textiles, a much smaller collection, though Phetteplace said it was larger than expected. She applied for a $500,000 SSM grant to load a third bag for food waste. and pick it up like Meriden does, even though he didn’t know if the bag will be green or brown.
“I can show them it works,” he said. What we hope to show is that once we start picking up food each week and everyone responds, we can reduce our collection of yellow bags to each. “and every two weeks. “
Over time, you’ll save money as you’ll send less waste to Lisbon. You will face a transitional annual fee of $100,000 for shipping food waste to Quantum until the SCRRA composting facility is operational. “The purpose here is to have anything in the domain so we can all start food composting programs. “
But Meriden’s volunteer program, at no additional cost to residents, attracted only a portion of the planned 1,000 participants. So short that the state requires payment systems as it goes, as Stonington necessarily does, and that food waste is separated from the trash. , as Stonington wants, in Connecticut is how to get municipalities to buy at least one of them. This has been a tough sell, especially for pay-as-you-go.
Aldridge describes public meetings to talk about pay-as-you-go have an incredible degree of virulence. “I think it will take some mandates at the state point to get things done. “
While Stonington first made the pay-as-you-go, the broader consensus is that it’s best to sort food waste first. And it all comes down to infrastructure.
“There has been no guilty party in the particular state tasked with creating infrastructure,” Aldridge said. “And that’s what you want. If you’re going to do anaerobic digestion, if you’re going to compost, if you’re going to build motion stations, whatever, it’s going to require infrastructure. If you want to pick up combined things and then sort them on the spot, you want a position to sort and an apparatus to do so. We have no way to do that. It’s a big, big deal. “
There is a food disposal mandate in Connecticut: a ban on food ads that spearheaded the package in 2011 when it was enacted.
Commercial merchants who generated 104 tons or more of food waste per year, or two tons per week, and who were within 20 miles of a qualified processor had to divert their food waste.
But the mandate came here with a bunch of caveats, adding one that exempted schools. In addition, there were and still are 3 advertising composters, all at the state borders: New Milford, Danbury and Ellington, just 20 miles away in Connecticut. When the weight threshold was lowered to 1 ton consistent with the week, with little change.
Since then, the Quantum facility was built and activated, but New Haven, much of Fairfield County, and the entire southeast of the state are still more than 20 miles away from a processor.
CCSMM’s Food Waste Working Group has debated what would be as effective as possible in expanding the diversion of advertising food waste: construction infrastructure, mandate tightening, or both. But in 2021, the lawmaker only lowered the threshold to one ton per week. This had little or no impact.
Greenwich is an obvious case. It’s full of restaurants, but the nearest processor is about 30 miles away, and in New York to get started, so all of its food advertising operations are exempt.
To complicate matters, much of the city’s waste recovery efforts are relegated to a volunteer organization, Waste Free Greenwich, formed about two years ago through Julie DesChamps. They have established residential food waste depots in 3 locations and are just beginning a crusade called the Food Matters Challenge to get corporations to handle food waste, even if they don’t have to.
CET worked with the organization and corporations to highlight tactics for food waste. And DesChamps got a lot of recommendations from Scarsdale and Rye in New York, as well as from Darien.
“It would be helpful to have some kind of regional coordination,” DesChamps said. “Everyone works on their own islands. And I think one of the biggest disorders is that there is no regional domain like a moving station for food scraps that would decrease the transportation charge.
More than a few people have raised the problem of the app: there doesn’t seem to be any.
“Restaurants and big turbines don’t know law enforcement, and no one knocks on their door and says, ‘Hey, why don’t you do that?What’s the incentive?” said Jennifer Heaton-Jones, executive director of Housatonic Resources. Recovery Authority (HRRA).
Heaton-Jones is no stranger to the effort of food. She has been operating there since 2013, pioneering an edge collection experiment in Bridgewater, one of HRRA’s 14 townships. It was a hit and popular until you knew it would charge more.
Since then, he has introduced into all sorts of projects the amount of waste sent to the Bridgeport waste-to-energy plant, which is almost as giant as hartford’s and, at 35, is starting to show his age.
It now looks similar to what SCRRRA did: local composting that reduces the cost of waste disposal if other people are willing to dispose of food scraps.
Thanks to a $76,000 grant from the USDA, he built a formula at the Ridgefield Transfer Station, which already accepts food waste deposits. It will use solar energy to run enthusiasts who help speed up the decomposition of waste. The symptoms are there; the tampon is in place. Deep’s final permit is missing, a procedure you’d like to see more user-friendly for cities that lack qualified personnel to record highly technical documents.
It also applied for a grant from DEEP to build a similar composting facility in Newtown and, in all likelihood, some of the other transfer stations will cover the entire HRRA region. He would also like to see the collection together, but with a touch of originality.
He asked for investment for an assignment manager to oversee him, whose tasks would also come with education. And that means in person, just like the public meetings Heaton-Jones held at each and every moving station last year.
“We can have all the billboards and all the flyers and all the social media data that we can, but until I have that face-to-face, one-on-one interaction with the audience, I won’t. they are educating them to have to act,” he said.
This lack of volunteer participants is a challenge everywhere.
When Brian Bartram, director of the Salisbury/Sharon moving station, launched a pilot food waste depot assignment with 120 people, it “took no time, days” to fill up. It does not charge those citizens anything. The challenge for Bartram is that “it’s extraordinarily expensive” for the food waste transporter he uses, Curbside Compost, to climb from Fairfield County to his transit station in far northwest Connecticut and then take the food waste to the composter in New Milford. .
“It’s the right thing to do,” Bartram said. However. . . you can only do the right thing at a safe cost. “
He worked with CET to locate tactics for greater economies of scale or locate closer locations that can treat food waste. To this end, it will increase the deposit program to 400. The 3 primary preparatory schools in the region are exempt from the advertising food waste mandate. , however, he expects them to do so anyway. The same goes for restaurants and other business operations in the area, which are more than 20 miles from the nearest processing site.
“We knew what we were getting into from the beginning,” he said, noting that the pilot program was only intended to last five months, but the citizens’ protest was so great. “They have to keep doing it. “
When DEEP began sounding the alarm about the state’s impending waste disposal crisis, West Haven paid attention.
“We told the state, ‘Well, what is Plan B?’And essentially, Plan B is just that. “
Also working with CET, he has raised about $150,000 in grants, most commonly federal, to load food waste into the lawn waste compost that West Haven has had for several decades. Building on its initial success, Colter is a $1. 5 year CCSMM grant of similar joint collection at Meriden and composting of food waste at the city’s five-acre landfill.
One wonders if it will work, but his elder re-specializes why he is stuck doing it on his own.
“We’re looking at cities bigger than the state of Connecticut. We take a look at the counties that are larger than the state of Connecticut. They take care of that. And we wonder why, in such a small state, this is not done at the state level,” he said. “What the state does well is drive the conversation. And what the state is doing is waiting for us to take the ball.
Stamford, also alone, discovered a grant that recycling and sanitation director Dan Colleluori used to buy a composting device to treat residential food waste deposited at the city’s main moving station. Already had to move to a larger size, you buy some other to place in Bartlett’s arboretum so they can use the compost. and is a 3rd place for restaurant food waste depot.
Middletown has been recording food waste deposits for more than five years. Kim O’Rourke, the city’s recycling coordinator for more than 30 years, is applying for a grant from CCSMM to begin sorting food waste and unit prices for a part of the city.
“There’s not much we can do. So we’re asking Americans to start thinking about this, but we also want government policy and we want corporations to take action to reduce our waste,” said O’Rourke, who called the state’s food. waste policy “really isn’t that strong. “
They’ve been baby steps, she says. For impacts, unit prices and even mandates are needed, he said.
Sharon Lewis, director of the Connecticut Coalition for Economic and Environmental Justice, said the food waste problems she faces in Hartford’s North End face another set of challenges, adding low-income populations, with several homes ranging from single-family homes to senior housing. attention complexes and persistent biases.
“We seek to destroy confidence that other low-income people and other people of color don’t know how to separate food waste,” he said.
With a small grant of less than $15,000, it is planning a two-month pilot allocation this summer for 150 citizens or locations. The plan is to locate the most productive way to collect food waste: Express the times when other people can bring in the trash, how to handle other people on the move, and public education to make sure the models work.
Connecticut neighbors provide recommendations on how to move forward when it comes to eliminating food waste. mileage radius or exemptions.
It’s a slow process and there were disputes over how to fund it. But according to Josh Kelly, head of Vermont’s fake tea program, a key component of the law that also required food collection. And it has fostered mandatory infrastructure at the more than one hundred mobile stations across the state, of which the maximum is expected to collect food for the first time.
Yes, Vermont is more rural than Connecticut, and Connecticut’s population is six times that of Vermont. But Vermont is nearly twice as large physically as Connecticut. demand. There are now more than 45. Food donations have tripled. The state has comprehensive interactive maps that show where food comes from and is collected.
The state, which has many dairy farms, has a history of “cow energy”: energy from manure and dairy liquids. But the food ban has accelerated that, adding one of New England’s largest digesters. manure and food to produce biogas. It goes into the pipeline and the maximum is purchased through Middlebury College.
“I think Vermont’s story is that if you set mandates that have a time frame to allow infrastructure to grow and help,” Kelly said, “markets will be created. “
They can be things, HRRA’s Heaton-Jones said, like buying food waste collection boxes in bulk like they did for their cities.
“It was a lot of paintings to coordinate as a local municipal company with very few staff,” he said. “Isn’t that something the state can just do?Couldn’t they buy 10,000 boxes and then distribute them in the cities?Or can we just buy and they ship to individual cities through the seller?There will have to be a better way.
Sam King of Blue Earth said he would like the state to provide resources, whether monetary and technical. “What we’ve lacked for many, many years is a little bit of leadership and a little bit of our partners in the public sphere. “
Laura Francis, Durham’s first trainer who is also co-chair of the CCSMM, said at this point that she doesn’t think it’s productive to live off past mistakes, such as the FAILURE of the MIRA plant.
“I am alone for the future, and we have sent a very transparent message to the governor, the commissioner and her staff that we cannot do this without her leadership. We can’t do it without state investment, but, on the other hand, we had to realize that we are in a position to do our part.
Yes, it’s a crisis, she says. But it’s also a much better storm.
“So dishonor for us if we don’t take credit for it, let’s take advantage of that. And that’s the message we all hear over and over again. Don’t let this crisis get lost. “
And then he laughed. A lot.
“No pun intended. “