West Hartford will not get out of its own way.
To be fair, most places haven’t figured out how to yet.
What happened was that in May 2023, the town began piloting a municipal compost collection program, via Blue Earth Compost. While it seems redundant to do trial runs for something that other municipalities have adopted, this also seemed to be a clear step forward: do the pilot, assess, and then expand. There was no reason to believe that West Hartford would have data to suggest the program should be abandoned; as scmeone has to keep reminding them, West Hartford is not special. In almost every category — traffic safety, waste management, etc. — the town is simply going to follow the same patterns demonstrated by other places with similar design and demographics.
After one year, the Town of West Hartford shared that 300 households in the pilot zone participated, diverting 1.27 tons of food scraps from the landfill each week. Participants reduced their landfill/incinerator-bound waste by half. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with one person saying: “I’m not good with change, but this was an easy change.” The negative comments seemed to be coming from folks who don’t know that by virtue of living in a suburb, they’ve opted to live in a civilization . . . and there was one questionable complaint about “too much plastic.”
Expansion of the program seemed like a no-brainer. Even if “only” 40% of households town-wide were to participate, that still reduces outsourced trash by a sizable amount.
A resolution to expand curbside collection of food scraps, along with adoption of a unit-based pricing model for trash collection, was on the agenda of West Hartford Town Council’s June 25, 2024 meeting. That got tabled. It does not appear to be listed on the July 16, 2024 meeting, which means it’s likely getting pushed into August, with any action being delayed until September.
Part of that resolution meant voting on whether or not to accept a $1.5 M grant from CT DEEP to expand the program. There’s the question of whether or not this grant will continue to be available.
Everyone should feel backed into a corner right now. Since 1960, Americans have tripled the amount of waste they produce. We’ve begun our roughly billionth heatwave of 2024, thanks in part to how we’ve literally been trashing our home. CT DEEP spells it out: “Solid waste contributes directly to greenhouse gas emissions through the generation of methane from the anaerobic decay of waste in landfills, and the emission of nitrous oxide from our solid waste combustion facilities. Both of these greenhouse gases have high global warming potential: methane has 21 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide has 310 times the warming potential.”
For those who are not making the connection between the need to reduce their consumption and manage their waste appropriately, and how all signs point to us experiencing the hottest year on record (so far), how do we make this real for people?
One way would be to establish landfills in bustling town centers. Instead of sneaking them off into wrong side of the tracks areas, put the landfills and incinerators right in view of where people are having their patio dining. Instead of making garbage some other community’s problem, live with it.
As a Hartford resident who could smell the former dump site when machinery broke and trash piled up, I think this could be an effective way to make people consider cause and effect. There were a few days when because of the wind direction, I was able to smell the trash by the State Capitol — two miles away from MIRA. Think about how it is when a garbage truck passes on a hot day, except that the stench doesn’t dissipate after a few seconds. What impact would this have on outdoor dining? Strolling?
Of course, nobody would consent to this town center landfill creation for a myriad of good reasons. But, just as we have as a society become so removed from food production, we have become removed from waste management. Shining a light back on all aspects of these processes, including labor conditions, would shift attitudes and behaviors.
The same could be said for revealing true costs.
People tend to think driving is convenient because they don’t actually take a hard look at how much it costs to legally own and operate a vehicle. Driving is heavily subsidized. How different would people treat this mode of transportation if they received monthly bills for road maintenance including all the repairs that need to be made following destructive crashes — replacing sign posts, street trees, street lights, destroyed lawns, debris clean up? What if all the parking currently promoted as “free” — whether on-street, at grocery stores, museums, or shopping malls — was switched over to cost something per use? What if those fees reflected not just cost of land, pavement, lighting, lot security, and whatever the owner wanted to earn over that, but also the harms caused by run-off and by contributing to heat island effect?
By rolling costs of trash collection into taxes, people don’t think about it. This is a fee they have to pay. It’s efficient, but strange in a few ways. It shows that people are entitled to trash removal in a way that they aren’t entitled to water or electricity. If you don’t pay those bills, service is cut. There’s no threat of jail time hanging over one’s head.
According to CT DEEP, each Connecticut resident produces about five pounds of garbage per day. Aside from those with a diaper situation . . . how? Why? That’s a lot!
For those in West Hartford, that trash is destined for a facility in Bristol. For those using the food scrap collection pilot, their organic waste was sent to an anaerobic digestion facility in Southington. These two sites are within less than half a mile of each other, as the crow flies. For a very small ask — sort your materials — there’s a big difference in outcome. Put in the right place, materials can become compost or converted to biogas. Put in the wrong place, and they simply pile up. You don’t get compost in a landfill, and containers that are billed as compostable just sit there inside their plastic garbage bags.
This is better than shipping trash the nearly 200 miles to Pennsylvania, but why settle for simply better when we could be reducing even those trips?
The unit-based pricing model for trash collection that West Hartford should have voted on but tabled honestly lets people off the hook a lot easier than they can or should be. People would be automatically given one 15-gallon trash bag per week, which holds about ten pounds of trash. After that, residents would be charged for additional bags. One dollar per excess bag is a number that’s been floated out there, though not finalized in any way. By CT DEEP’s numbers, the average person is disposing of 35 pounds per week. Knowing that those participating in the pilot were able to cut their trash by half, that would amount to only one purchased garbage bag per week. People who bother to recycle correctly would probably eliminate need for any additional bags.
As The Jonah Center puts it: “Once residents have a financial incentive to reduce their waste, they do, just as utility charges give them an incentive to use less water, electricity, and fuel.”
What we can expect, just like with congestion pricing, is that people who don’t like change or having to pay for what they consume will act as if they have any concern about the lower income people in the community. While some of us identify as humans above all else, there are plenty whose core identity is that of a consumer, and they will fight for their right to take resources for granted. With lower income people generating less waste per day than those in any other income bracket, we have to be ready to call out the concern trolling for what it is.
In 2019, Middletown began collecting food scraps at its recycling center — something some other towns only began in the last year. That’s a better-than-nothing option, but as we know, people who can’t be bothered to walk two blocks from a parking garage to a restaurant are not going to be hopping at the chance to drag their food scraps beyond the end of their driveway. It works better when the collection site is somewhere people regularly go, like a park or rec center. It’s even better when there are many convenient locations. In places that are not overly walkable, like NYC, I see this drop-off model as a way for a municipality to plant seeds.
The time to plant those seeds was five years ago, and unfortunately, many towns and cities ignored their waste issues.
While West Hartford stumbles around trying to decide if the town should accept money to move toward a more sustainable future, Middletown approved a similar permanent co-collection program last September and has already begun working out a few kinks since the unit-based pricing model became mandatory in November.
In Middletown, the average household is expected to save $100 annually through the Save As You Throw program. It pays to evolve.
