Hoboken has announced a plan to make the City’s waste management more efficient by improving composting and limiting the amount of recyclable material that gets thrown out into general waste. City officials have called it the finalized Zero Waste Plan, an initiative aligned with efforts to make Hoboken more environmentally sustainable and to target climate action goals of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 and net-zero energy by 2030.
The plan was initially launched in 2022, and its aim is to reduce waste, expand reuse and repair programs, and improve recycling and composting efforts to manage discarded materials and resources more holistically. An analysis of Hoboken’s waste management system had found that over 21,936 tons of recyclable material was still present in the waste stream, and organics, particularly food scraps, constituted approximately 45 percent of the overall waste collected.
The Zero Waste Plan seeks to address these issues through 18 action items broken into short-term and long-term goals. They range from expanding educational outreach to establishing waste requirements for future large building developments, developing networks to connect food donors with recipients, and establishing furniture donation services, among other things, officials say.