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Boston expanding curbside food-waste pickup program

The mayor's office announced today that Boston will triple the number of households from which it will pick up food waste once a week from the current 10,000 to 30,000, starting in July.

Residents who sign up and are accepted into the program, will get one of those small green food-waste containers in which to put scraps and other food material, for collection on their normal recycling days. The material will then be either turned into compost or turned into a slurry at a Charlestown plant, which will then ship that to an "anaerobic digestion facility" in North Andover to be turned into "biogas" for generating electricity.

In June, compost bin “starter kits'' will be delivered to residents whose curbside pick-up service begins in July. Another batch of curbside bins will be delivered in July with service beginning in August. The “starter kits'' include an onboarding manual, a roll of liners, kitchen bin, collection bin, and a magnet outlining what food scraps are and are not accepted in the program. Accepted materials include common household food scraps such as coffee grounds, fruits and vegetables, meat and seafood, and eggs.

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Comments

If you want to compost in Boston and don't make the list, you can see if you're near a Project Oscar site where you can drop off compost:
https://www.boston.gov/departments/public-works/project-oscar

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I love curbside compost collection. We got to be included in the first wave. Roche Brothers carries the biobags so we don't need to order replacement bags online.

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This seems like a case where the carbon cost of running the program would be greater than the tangible benefits. Hiring people to drive around, collect food waste, and compost it is a big expense.

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Most folks who analyze/study this type of thing seem to show it's a net benefit, even with the addition of some trucks to do pickup (for example https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/11786302221128454 )

We've definitely seen a major impact on our household waste, we never thought we generated much food waste but we have cut our regular trash output almost in half with this program, so if nothing else it's definitely a landfill savings.

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Didn't know Roche Bros carried the bags, that's a great tip!

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The facility in North Andover is the sewer plant.

It would save a lot of garbage truck pollution if we could just throw our vegetable scraps into the garbage disposal at home instead.

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We got in on the first wave of the program. So far so good, we like it. Pretty much the same as bootstrap's service was for us, except hopefully more efficient. (Am naively assuming it's more efficient for one truck to handle an entire neighborhood rather than a bunch of different small companies to all send their own trucks like before when we had bootstrap but neighbors had black earth, etc. )

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Is free

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literally.

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I don't think you quite got the plot last time.

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