The town of Wellesley is inviting an additional 300 households to participate in its pilot program to assess the viability of a food waste drop-off program at the Recycling & Disposal Facility.
After signing up, you will be given a free starter kit (paid for by Department of Environmental Protection grants) including a counter top bucket, compostable bag liners, and a container for transporting your food waste to the RDF. When you pick up your kit, you will be provided with a brief tutorial on how to use the starter kit and what items to include or not include. This educational flyer includes frequently asked questions and a detail of acceptable and non-acceptable items. During the pilot program you will drop your filled bags into a container located in the trash drop-off area. From there, the food waste will go to a farm or an anaerobic digester to turn into compost or biogas
If you would like to participate in the pilot complete this sign up form, and click the ‘Submit’ button. (Mr. & Mrs. Swellesley are among the early adopters of this food waste system, and so far, so good.)
If you have additional questions, please call the RDF at 781 235 7600 x3345.
To recap phase one, in the first 12 weeks of the pilot, over 10 tons of food waste was diverted from the landfill and sent to Waste Management’s CORe facility in Charlestown where it was made into a slurry and then sent to an anaerobic digester at the Greater Lawrence Sanitary District resulting in the generation of approximately 3,000 kwh of electricity.
In this second phase, the town is looking to scale up the program, incorporate recommendations from user surveys, determine the pros and cons of transporting the waste ourselves, evaluate the program during the warmer months, and to continue to look for additional opportunities of reducing overall costs.
MORE: So how’s the Wellesley food waste pilot program going, Supt. Azano-Brown?
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