PRESS RELEASE
June 19, 2012
Contact:
Noah Fishman
Project Manager, Close the Loop VT!
Highfields Center for Composting
802 472 5138 x207
Noah@HighfieldsComposting.org
Hardwick, VT – The Highfields Center for Composting has been awarded a one-year $160,000 grant by USDA Rural Development to provide technical assistance and training to assist rural, under-served Vermont communities to reduce their solid waste stream through the composting of organic materials in the waste stream. Target areas for the project will be the Lamoille Valley, Northeast Kingdom, and Rutland County and the implementation of the project will be from September 2012 to September 2013.
Highfields will be working in these communities along side with the Lamoille Regional Solid Waste Mgmt. District, the Northeast Kingdom Waste Mgmt. District, and several on the ground community groups to develop small-scale, low-cost community composting programs. Waste operators and managers at various levels within the waste management industry will receive hands-on training and technical assistance in composting. Grant funds will also be used to build a Rural Community Compost Toolkit, a set of resources and blue-prints on how to establish composting programs in rural communities. Creation of the toolkit will draw support from a partnership with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington DC-based national research and educational nonprofit organization that provides technical assistance and information on environmentally sound economic practices. Additionally, Highfields will launch a series of model composting demonstration projects in rural Vermont communities.
Development of these models will meet a key challenge in Highfields’ statewide “Close the Loop VT!” goal of developing the infrastructure necessary to compost all of Vermont’s organic waste by 2017 by targeting hard-to-reach areas that currently have little to no infrastructure or programming for organic waste management.
It is estimated that Vermont produces some 120-130,000 tons of food waste annually, much of which is landfilled, a practice that contributes dramatically to greenhouse gas emissions and toxic leachate. The farm-to-table-to-landfill model is one echoed throughout most of the United States, making landfilled food waste the largest source of methane greenhouse gas emissions in the country.
Emissions from organic materials in landfills, and the nitrogen fertilizer required to offset their loss from agriculture, are equivalent to emissions associated with 21% of the coal-fired power plants in the US (Source: Stop Trashing the Climate Report, 2008).
Here in Vermont food waste makes up almost a third of the waste stream, making it the single largest recyclable segment of the waste stream that is typically landfilled. Eliminating food scraps from the landfill has dramatic consequences for prolonging the life of Vermont’s active landfills, a scenario that will soon play out in Vermont. On June 7th, 2012 Governor Peter Shumlin signed into the law the Act Relating to Establishing Universal Recycling of Solid Waste, whose goal is to move Vermont towards sending as little solid waste to landfills as possible while maximizing recycling and composting.
The Act Relating to Establishing Universal Recycling of Solid Waste creates phased-in composting requirements starting with the largest producers of food waste and eventually applying to any person who generates food waste. The award of grant funds to target hard-to-reach rural communities in Vermont that currently have little to no infrastructure or programming for organic waste management synergizes well with the inauguration of the Act Relating to Establishing Universal Recycling of Solid Waste and will help keep rural Vermont on par with food scrap recycling initiatives taking root in more populous areas of the state.
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