The Wellesley Board of Public Works on Monday approved a pilot program to encourage more residents to keep their food waste out of the landfill (see Wellesley Media recording at about the 22-minute mark). Food waste can account for about a fifth of household waste, and general trash disposal is getting more and more expensive for the town’s Recycling & Disposal Facility.
The town plans to partner with an outfit called Black Earth Compost to handle the actual pickup and processing of food waste, which can include everything from meat bones to fruits and vegetables to general food scraps. Other communities, including Natick, already use such a service, which costs $115 a year for weekly pick-ups and $90 for every-other-week pick-ups.
Customers will receive a bag of compost every year they participate in the program.
Registration for the program is open.
The town has had its own program in recent years, where residents dispose of food waste in bins at the RDF, but it’s looking for more uptake. The current system can be a bit unwieldy, as users need to have a system down for containing their food waste in between trips to the RDF—a sometimes stinky proposition (we stick ours in the freezer, and then often forget to bring it with us to the dump).
DPW Director David Cohen, in briefing Board of Public Works members, said the idea would be for the DPW to subsidize a food waste container/toter ($36 value) for the first 250 people to sign up for the service, then those early adopters would deal directly with Black Earth to pay a monthly subscription fee to be determined. The more people Wellesley can get doing it, the lower the monthly fees would be.
“One of the barriers to getting people to do food waste recycling is that they don’t want to handle it—they don’t want to handle it in their cars, they don’t want to handle it at the RDF,” said Cohen, citing past surveys and anecdotal evidence. “So we’re thinking this might be a way to get people who wouldn’t otherwise participate.”
If the town could get 250 adopters who don’t already use the town’s food waste program it could save about $5K per year in its trash tipping fees at landfills, so the program would pay off within two years, Cohen said. While he doesn’t think he’d get 250 newbies, even if a third were, that could help the town get to its goal of reducing food waste in the general trash by 25%.
Board members said coordinating with Wellesley schools that have already made food waste inroads could prove to be a valuable partnership. What’s more, getting kids to understand food waste recycling early in their lives could pay off down the road when they’re grown up.
Possible places for the DPW to market this pilot program could be at Town Meeting and Wellesley’s Wonderful Weekend.
Town agencies are welcome to advertise on The Swellesley Report
Board member Jeff Wechsler said he noticed when his family began separating out food waste that their other trash not only got smaller, but didn’t stink, so it could sit around longer.
“Divert the yuck to the truck,” Cohen quipped, as a possible marketing slogan.
Post updated on 4/14/24, including with the registration link for the program.
