Eugene city officials have begun rolling out a two-year pilot program to collect food waste in some neighborhoods, in their latest effort to keep garbage from the landfill.
Employees with BRING, the Eugene-based nonprofit recycler, on Thursday delivered special 2-gallon vented collection pails to about 400 residents in Eugene’s Friendly Street neighborhood who have volunteered for the test.
Residents will collect dinner scrapings of vegetables, carbohydrates, meat, egg shells, coffee grounds and other food waste in the pail and dump the contents, as needed, into their larger yard waste bin before it’s emptied via curbside pickup every other week. The first pickup will occur next week.
The test area is the only neighborhood in the city where residents using curbside pickup can dump food waste into yard waste bins. In other areas, food waste is banned from yard waste curbside pickup bins.
Josh Newman, co-chairman of Friendly Area Neighbors, the area’s city-sanctioned neighborhood group, said the pilot program fits with his neighborhood’s interest in sustainability and protection of the environment.
“Most people are really excited about it and want to be involved. They look at as a positive,” Newman said. “I haven’t heard anybody say anything really negative.”
The city will roll out the voluntary pilot program to three more test neighborhoods — each three months apart — following its introduction to a section of the Friendly neighborhood.
The Friendly test area is bordered by 24th Place to the north, 29th Avenue to the south, Charnelton Street to the west, and Amazon Parkway to the east.
The remaining neighborhoods for the food waste test are Harlow, Bethel and South University, in that order.
The city estimates 1,500 households will be eligible to participate in the pilot program by summer. Officials plan to track participation and survey those residents and haulers to find out what works and doesn’t work before deciding whether to make the program permanent and citywide.
“We hope that’s the case, but we’re not really sure,” said Allie Breyer, waste prevention analyst for the city. “We’re going to wait and see how the pilot rolls out first.”
Representatives of two haulers that will handle the waste, Lane Apex and Sanipac, did not return phone messages from The Register-Guard.
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