By Susan Aldrich, Contributor
Last month we talked about the gold in the garbage—composting food waste to reduce hauling fees and create valuable soil—and invited the Sterling community to comment on Facebook. Many of you agreed there might be gold, but just as many saw, well, garbage in that gold.
The big idea on the table is that we could establish a food waste composting facility in Sterling. Instead of paying others to take our food waste (such as from homes, schools and Senior Center), Sterling could avoid the fees by composting at a town facility. Bigger idea, the town could get paid to take regional food waste. MassDEP is keen to help Sterling learn how to be a food waste landfill operator. We already have one grant to study the idea, and DEP has approved the 26 acre site near the police station for a composting operation.
What We Like About the Idea
Lower costs: This year, Sterling paid $620,000 to haul away 2,325 tons of Trash, 365 tons of Comingle, and 426 tons of Fiber. Statewide, food waste is typically about 25% of household waste. At $90 a ton to dump it, that represents $52,300. On our current course, Sterling’s waste management costs will climb to $1M by 2025. Diverting our food waste saves a great deal of money. If we accept food waste from the region, the fees we collect will offset even more of our waste management costs.
Environmental Impact: Composting rather than dumping in a landfill has important environmental effects. Landfills generate about 14% of the methane caused by human activity. (Cows famously generate about 40%). Diversion of food waste from landfill disposal reduces greenhouse gas since, unlike decay in landfills, methane, a far more damaging gas, is not created by composting.
Fine Soils: Sterling has an ever-decreasing treasure of prime agricultural soil. Composting can replenish it. Also, compost can be used to engineer soil for purposes such as managing storm runoff, improving our infrastructure’s resilience at lower cost.
Gardeners’s Bounty: People are enthusiastic about getting low- or no-cost compost and wood chips from the facility.
What We Don’t Like About the Idea
Stench: Our mouth-watering meals turn into eye-watering stench in just a few days. Locating a mountain of stink in our town is a bad idea, and this issue generated by far the greatest concern.
Traffic: How does the waste get to the facility? Whether it is trucked by the town, by a private service, or by us determines how many vehicles, and what types, drive through every day.
Critters: There is considerable concern that flies, bears, mice, rats and all the other local critters will just adore a pile of garbage while it’s turning into compost. We need to look into how other facilities deal with critters.
Rubbish in the Compost: People are concerned about how we keep plastic out of our waste, which results in compost that can’t be used to grow food. There was also some concern that the compost would carry pesticides and weed seeds. Since weeds and pesticides are not involved in food preparation, this is one issue we don’t need to worry about.
Decisions: How Would This Work?
There are a number of decisions to make before we commit to this composting idea.
Go Big or Stay Home? A food waste composting effort could be purely residential, at our homes. It could be municipal, managing just food waste from Sterling at a central facility. Or it could be regional, accepting food waste (and payments!) from outside Sterling.
No Tech or Low Tech? Brattleboro buries the food waste and wood chips, using a front end loader. Catlin Farm aerates the waste by pushing air through tubes that run through each pile of manure and wood chips. The
farm’s compost piles are covered to control moisture. Composting happens rapidly and predictably, in about a month. Sterling could take either approach.
Quality or Quantity? We need to explore our options for controlling the quality of our output. This is definitely a case of rubbish in, rubbish out. It’s also a case of rubbish in, rubbish forever: if we accept food waste and cardboard containing plastics (such as packaging and labels), we will have contaminants such as plastic particles on our site forever. If we insist on purest inputs, will food generators eventually comply? In the short term, many would be excluded from our operation. But in the longer term, I think we can expect a big change in waste-generators’ behavior. There is already pressure to get plastic out of food and packaging, and our operation can contribute local economic pressure. What if we charged less to take pure food waste and cardboard? Market Basket and Hannafords would have a powerful incentive to switch to biodegradable packaging.
What We Really, Really Need to Know
No one wants a big stinking mess in Sterling. As much as we want to cut costs and improve our land, we live here.
We need to find out if food composting can be accomplished without the stink. My garbage spends its time in a bin in my garage. It doesn’t smell too bad in the garage, and it doesn’t smell at all outside the garage. I compost vegetable waste in a backyard composter. It smells a little sometimes when I stick my nose in. It smells not at all with the lid on. So my experience tells me that food waste can be nearby without being offensive. The big question is, can a big pile of composting food be just as inoffensive?
We’ve visited the facility in Brattleboro. It stinks up close, and maybe not so close. We’ve visited Catlin Farm, home of tons and tons of composting manure. It does not stink. It smells like dirt. Two obvious differences: Brattleboro’s organic compost is open to the sky, and includes food waste. When it rains, garbage-y water spreads and puddles and stinks. Catlin Farm’s compost is cow manure only, and it is covered to keep dry and aerated to work quickly.
The town of Hamilton composts its organic waste in a settled area. We’ll take a trip there and find out first hand what the stink is about. What do the neighbors say about the smell? Have they been plagued by critters?
Does covering the operation to keep it dry make the difference? Does the mechanical aeration make the difference? We need to know before we take another step.
BTW: Measuring Our Garbage
Sterling reportedly hauls away more than 3,000 tons of waste every year.I confess I never wondered, “How do we know that?” Thinking about it, I really couldn’t picture that each truck gets weighed, let alone each bag. Blaine Bershad, DPW Board member, explained it to me. It’s done by “audit,” or sampling. Twenty times a year the contents of a truck get pulled off and weighed. So much trash, so much commingle, so much paper. Whatever those weights are, multiply by the number of trucks per year, and there’s our tonnage. If that sampling was done the day we each decided to throw out a few bags of rocks, we pay more for our trash this year. We can ask for this audit anytime. The numbers in these audits vary significantly.
But we can collectively “game” this system. Those “bags of rocks” are actually our mistakenly discarded bottles and cardboard. We could increase our recycling numbers and decrease our solid waste numbers by a lot if everyone did this:
Make sure we put out the right recycling on the correct week. Never EVER put recycling in plastic bags.Blaine tells me that he sees these mistakes occur 10-20% of the time. Wrong-week recycling and recycling in plastic bags is thrown into the $90/ton solid waste. These are large numbers with large cost!