Steve Winter: State $$ to fund bags and education.
The city is $3 million closer to rolling out a curbside composting system, now that the Board of Alders has approved a state grant funding outreach and education around color-coded bags in which to put egg shells, lemon peels, and other organic waste.
The city received that $3 million from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP)’s Materials Management Infrastructure Grant Program.
All of the alders present voted unanimously to accept the funding at a full board meeting at City Hall on Thursday evening.
East Rock Alder and City Services and Environmental Policy Chair Anna Festa advocated for her colleagues to approve the grant. “This will allow residents to put their food scraps in special colored bags and throw them away in the toter with their regular household trash,” said Festa, to be turned into “bio-gas and soil.”
The grant is the second pool of funding that the city has received from DEEP to jumpstart large-scale municipal compost collection. The city is finalizing a contract with DEEP for a separate $3.3 million grant awarded in the spring to fund the construction of a waste-sorting facility at the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority’s Middletown Avenue transfer station. That facility would separate out bags of compost from bags of trash based on a color-coded bag system.
As plans for the new facility move forward, city Climate & Sustainability Director Steve Winter said that the city would begin to require all households using municipal trash pickup to sort their compost from other waste via the specific color-coded bags.
The city provides trash collection for buildings with up to six residential units.
According to Winter, implementing this new system will require public outreach from the city to educate residents about what qualifies as compost, why the city is adopting this new system, and how to obtain the new color-coded bags.
That outreach, as well as an initial set of free bags for residents, will be funded by the $3 million accepted by alders on Thursday.
“We would have teams following the refuse routes” to speak with residents about the new program and provide “starter kits” with the new bags, Winter said.
“The end goal of this program is to have a program that is affordable, that provides food scrap diversion for all households that have city refuse and recycling services, and that is financially self-sustaining,” said Winter, who has advocated for curbside composting since back when he was an alder in 2021.
He noted that the cost-per-ton of large-scale composting is about half the $122-per-ton that the city currently pays to incinerate trash.
Festa highlighted that point in her remarks to colleagues on Thursday. The program “would not only be better for the environment, it would save the city hundreds of thousands in waste disposal costs,” she said.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa: Let’s save money while saving the planet. Credit: Laura Glesby Photo
The current plan is for the food waste to be composted in an anaerobic processor in Southington, although Winter said he hopes to someday see an anaerobic compost processor built closer to New Haven.
Many details have yet to be worked out. “We’ll need to recruit a network of retailers, supermarkets, and local markets to carry the bags,” Winter said. “And we’ll need to decide on colors of the bags, what to call the program, who the city will bring on to provide technical assistance for the education and engagement.”
He said he anticipates that the compost system will begin to roll out for certain trash pickup routes around the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027.
Winter said that he envisions the incoming curbside compost system as part of a broader network of food waste diversion efforts across the city.
“If you’re in a big apartment building… you wouldn’t be using the color-coded bags, most likely,” he said, since larger apartment complexes don’t receive municipal trash pickup. Additionally, “We want to make sure we have a home for the food scraps leaving our schools,” he said. To fill in the gaps, Winter envisions continuing to support the growth of local compost business Peels & Wheels; “We love the work that [founder] Domingo [Medina] is doing,” he said.
Meanwhile, the future is uncertain for the city’s pilot program of four solar-powered, enclosed sidewalk compost bins operated by the company Bigbelly, which are located in Fair Haven, Wooster Square, and downtown. That pilot program is funded through the end of June, according to Winter. Ideally, those sidewalk bins would continue on, he said. “The goal really is to provide multiple pathways for people to divert their food waste.”
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