City Lands Curbside Compost Grant

The star of a press conference at the city dump Thursday afternoon was an unassuming green plastic bag that, in the not-too-distant future, New Haveners will fill with apple cores and banana peels and leave for curbside pickup on trash day.

The bag wasn’t on the speaking lineup at a 260 Middletown Ave. presser that took place in between the capped landfill, a long line of garbage trucks, and separated piles of trash, construction waste, and recyclables. 

As seagulls swooped overhead and tractor trailers ferried trash to an incinerator in Bridgeport, Mayor Justin Elicker, city Climate & Sustainability Director Steve Winter, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, and state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) Commissioner Katie Dykes, among others, celebrated a $3.3 million state grant newly awarded to New Haven.

Those funds come from the state’s new Materials Management Infrastructure Grant program, and will pay for the city to create a food scrap sorting and diversion facility at the Middletown Avenue transfer station, which is managed by the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority.

That means that New Haven food waste that is currently trucked to Bridgeport, Preston, or Lisbon to be burned up along with 500 tons of other city trash a day will instead be converted into biogas or nutrient-rich compost.

Winter held up the green plastic bag and said that, when this program is up and running, New Haveners will be able to put their food waste in one bag and their regular trash in another. They can then put both bags in their city-issued toters for curbside pickup on trash day.

The city’s public works garbage trucks will then bring the bagged waste to the transfer station, as happens now. But instead of tipping all of the waste into the pile bound for the incinerator, the trucks will dump the bags — green and not green — into a to-be-built new facility with a conveyor belt where the green food-waste bags will be separated from the regular trash bags.

Those green bags and, more importantly, the lemon peels and egg shells and other food waste contained in them, will then be diverted to a separate facility — likely an existing one in Southington — where the organic waste will be converted into biogas for electricity, or into compost for gardening.

This curbside compost pickup program is still a while away from actually starting.

Zinn said his office will spend the rest of the year designing the new food waste diversion facility to be built at the transfer station. Construction should take place in 2026. Winter said the city will likely pilot curbside compost pickup on one or two of the city’s five trash pickup routes before expanding citywide. 

He also said this municipal food waste diversion program will apply only to one- to six-unit residences that already get their trash and recyclables picked up by the city; it won’t apply to larger apartment buildings with private trash collection. (Residents not eligible for this new curbside compost program can still use the city’s three recently installed Big Belly compost bins, located downtown, in Wooster Square, and in Fair Haven.)

This program, when it’s up and running, will reduce trash in landfills, improve air quality, and boost the supply of nutrient-rich compost, Elicker said. He said that food scraps currently make up over 20 percent of what’s thrown out. Having all this organic matter incinerated in Bridgeport ​“is clearly not the best solution for compostables.” 

“We know that recycling and diversion are proven strategies to help address [Connecticut’s waste management] crisis,” Dykes said, by directing recyclables and organics out of the waste stream, and away from the landfill and incinerator.