Meriden to launch state’s pilot program
Household foodscrap collection to help reduce waste
A pilot food-scrap collection set to launch this month in 1,000 Meriden households is meant to spearhead a reduction in organic waste throughout Connecticut.
Green bags will be distributed to homes on Jan. 22 and 23 for the four-month program, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection announced. The bags will be collected along with other trash in orange bags, but the organic waste will be sent to Quantum Biopower in Southington to be transformed into energy.
“The city of Meriden is leading the way by launching this pilot at a critical time for Connecticut’s waste system,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said. “These strategies have been shown to work elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad.”
The program is part of an effort to address the statewide wastedisposal crisis, which will soon get worse with the planned shutdown of the trash-to-energy plant in Hartford in June and the certainty that much of Connecticut’s waste will be going to out-of-state landfills. State environmental officials have been urging recycling and reuse solutions.
The city of Middletown last year launched a pioneering food-scrap recycling effort, enlisting Main Street restaurants in collecting all vegetable and meat scraps from their kitchens and patrons’ plates. The scraps go into yellow-lidded blue bins and smaller black pails, to be collected twice weekly by Hartford-based Blue Earth Compost.
DEEP officials say about 35% of material sent from Connecticut homes and businesses to landfills and trash-to-energy plants is organic and could be used as compost and animal feed or converted to gas and fuel at anaerobic digestion facilities.
The DEEP, Dykes said, has
been working closely with municipalities over the past year through the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management (CCSMM) to expand solutions to the waste problem.
“We look forward to supporting the progress of this pilot as a model for others to replicate, and, if successful, explore at scale,” Dykes said.
The learning curve about organics recycling, however, is nationwide.
New York City recycles less than 20% of the 3.1 million tons of garbage that its residents produce each year, The New York Times reported. In neighborhoods where brown organics bins are available, just 10% of residents use them, the paper reported.
Connecticut law requires supermarkets, industrial food manufacturers and resorts and conference centers that generate at least 52 tons of organic material each year and are located within 20 miles of a composting facility to separate the organics from other solid waste and ensure the material is recycled.
Funded through a $40,000 DEEP Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART) grant, the Meriden pilot program, according to a news release, “will provide the city and the state with valuable information on how the process of food scrap co-collection can reduce the amount of trash residents dispose of at a time when cities and towns have seen municipal solidwaste tipping fees increase considerably over the last few years.”
With tipping fees for municipal solid-waste disposal increasing over the past couple of years, “the economic impact to all residents is significant. Fully implemented programs could help keep costs down,” said Meriden City Manager Tim Coon.
State funding will cover the color-coded bags, personnel to sort the bags and shipment to Quantum Biopower. In addition to DEEP, the city and Quantum Biopower, project partners include the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG), HQ Dumpsters (waste hauler), Sustainable Meriden and Wastezero.
DEEP has found that foodscrap collection programs are most effective when paired with unit-based pricing programs, according to the agency’s news release.
Unit-based pricing is based on the amount of trash disposed and is meant to incentivize participation in foodscrap collection and other recycling programs.
For more information on the pilot program, visit meridenct. gov.