On Friday mornings, an electric-assisted cargo tricycle pulls up outside Catherine Stankowski’s apartment in Beacon.
An employee of the Beacon-based recycling startup Zero to Go collects Stankowski’s food waste and trundles it off on the first leg of a journey that ends on a concrete slab in the Town of Ulster.
There, at the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency’s transfer station, the scraps are mixed with wood chips and transformed into rich compost. It’s a fate replete with far more promise than the more common outcome — incineration at Dutchess County’s waste-to-energy facility.
“Knowing the least amount of stuff is going into the incinerator,” Stankowski, 37, said, “is important to me.”
The tale of Stankowski’s peelings is representative of what experts say is the next frontier in recycling — the diversion of food waste and other organic material from landfills.
And the path her food waste takes highlights successes in Ulster County and gaps in Dutchess County that officials are studying how to fill.
“You want to eliminate as much transportation as you can,” said Lindsay Carille, deputy commissioner at the Dutchess County Division of Solid Waste.
Officials recognize Dutchess will not reach its goal of a 60 percent recycling rate by 2020 without more effective capturing of organics.
And that will require a delicate dance of education, economics, planning and advocacy.
Food scraps in landfills produce greenhouse gases
The cost for failure is dear. When organic material is trapped in a landfill with no exposure to oxygen, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that traps far more heat than carbon dioxide.
The EPA estimates Americans compost just 5 percent of their leavings. By comparison, 60 percent of yard trimmings and 40 percent of consumer electronics are recycled.
One ton of food waste generates six tons of heat-trapping gas, according to research conducted by the University of Washington. And that happens in just the first 28 to 100 days, long before large landfills are required to begin trapping methane.
To read the full story, visit http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/tech/science/environment/2016/08/06/recycling-food-waste-dutchess-ulster/87572290/.