Earlier this year, the city of Lebanon, NH gave a small group of residents the chance to bring not their trash and recyclables to the local landfill, but their compost too. It makes Lebanon one of a few cities in the state helping residents reduce food waste, which is a major contributor to climate change. For a few weeks in late winter and early spring, Brooke D’Entremont would pull out her scale before heading to the landfill. With her daughter’s help, they’d weigh their trash, recyclables and their compost. Then they’d write that all down on a form they’d received from the Lebanon landfill to keep track of their waste production. It was a key part of the compost pilot program D’Entremont signed up for back in January.
The program is focused not just on reducing waste, but on keeping track of how much they’re composting and how their habits changed. “I think like a lot of people I’m concerned about the state of the environment and I’m trying to be sustainable,” D’Entremont said. She had tried composting before: both in her backyard and using a curbside pick up service. But animals messed up the backyard composting, and curbside pick up got expensive. This new program though is a lot easier for D’Entremont. She puts her food scraps in a compostable bag, keeps that in a 5 gallon bucket, and drops it off in a bin at the landfill. That makes Lebanon just one of three municipalities that do their own composting in New Hampshire. Other municipalities, like Portsmouth, accept compost, but use a private company to process it.