Meriden recently ended a four-month co-collection program aimed at diverting food waste from the state’s landfills and has applied to expand it to 2,300 more homes. About 1,000 Meriden households were the first in the state to participate in a food scrap co-collection program in the hopes of demonstrating how waste diversion solutions can help address the statewide disposal crisis. The Meriden households are customers of HQ Dumpsters & Recycling in Southington, a trash hauler who participated in the scrap collection program. The participating households, located outside the inner city, scraped their plates and cooking pots into green bags to be turned into bio-gas at Quantum Biopower in Southington. Household trash was put in different colored bags.
The $40,000 in pilot funds covered the purchase of the special color-coded bags for food scrap separation over the four-month duration of the project, as well as personnel to sort the bags, and the shipment of food scraps to Quantum Biopower. “We are working to come up with a sustainable path,” said Jack Perry, owner of HQ Dumpsters & Recycling and a Southington town councilor. “It’s always been my goal to divert as much as I can. The great thing is the conversations the pilot started. How do you make this as efficient and easy as possible?”
Some weeks were heavy and some weeks had less volume, Perry said. He and data collectors at WasteZero, a state consultant on the project, are reviewing the data to submit to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “We want to know, what were the variables,” Perry asked. “Was it human error? People not putting out bins? “We are looking back on trends, certain weeks highs and low. See if we had as much participation as possible. This allows us to grab all this and look at this data, and see how we broaden this to other municipalities.”