BOOTSTRAP COMPOST SERVICE, UPDATE:

We reported around this time last year that Bootstrap Compost service was trying to gain a foothold in Wellesley by getting a critical mass of customers signed up to make it worthwhile to do business here. With almost 20 customers ready to separate their kitchen fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps into a Bootstrap-provided bucket and pay $8 for weekly or $10 for biweekly pickup, the company starts here on Thursday.

Read more about how it all works…

In Wellesley, there are three options for getting rid of fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps: throwing them down the garbage disposal, tossing them into the trash, or mixing them in with your backyard compost heap. Of the three, the compost heap is the most environmentally friendly because the average household composting operation isn’t on a large enough scale to trap and give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But not everyone wants to compost in their backyards. Homeowners in town tend to feel that it’s messy or time-consuming, or that it might offend their abutting neighbors. That’s where Bootstrap Compost would like to come in and pick up your kitchen scraps on a regular basis.

Operating already in several Boston communities, Wellesley is the latest place where Bootstrap will provide a five-pound drum for you to fill with kitchen scraps (excluding meat), which you then leave at the end of your driveway. In exchange, you receive five pounds of rich compost three times a year for your garden. If you don’t need the compost, you can donate it to local farms, community gardens or school projects. The point is that your kitchen scraps are helping grow food rather than increasing landfill and greenhouse gases.

At our house, we have been committed back yard composters for many years, with a nifty double-chamber composting tumbler going behind the shed. In one chamber, I put my Spring/Summer kitchen scraps. In the other chamber, in go my Fall/ Winter scraps. Right now, while my Fall/Winter scraps are piling up, the Spring/Summer scraps are breaking down. Come next Spring, I’ll take out all that beautiful black gold from the Spring/Summer side of the tumbler and use it in my garden.

And all those scraps that I don’t put down my garbage disposal are scraps that aren’t flowing all the way to Boston. Wellesley is part of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) Wastewater System. The town’s wastewater is discharged into the MWRA’s collection sewers, which flow to the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Facility, located on one of the Boston Harbor islands. From there, the wastewater is treated, and recycled solids are delivered to a sludge treatment facility in Quincy on the Fore River where it is heat treated into fertilizer.

That’s quite a road trip for carrot and potato peelings when really they don’t need to stray far from home at all.

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