c/o Harford Courant
The City of Middletown implemented its Save As You Throw (SAYT) Food Scrap Co-Collection Program in an effort to reduce waste on Nov. 1, 2023. Residents and businesses using the Middletown Sanitation District cart service must now use the new official green and orange trash bags as opposed to white, black, or other colored bags that may have been used previously.
The change comes in the midst of a waste crisis in Connecticut and the broader United States as the amount of waste incinerators and landfills decreases. An incinerator located in Hartford closed last year, leaving just four in the state, all of which are nearing the end of their approximately 30-year lifespans. The amount of municipal landfills in the United States has also fallen from approximately 6,000 in 1990 to around 1,000 in 2022, further stretching waste disposal capacities and increasing the associated costs.
“Because there’s a huge crisis right now in Connecticut with waste disposal, the main trash burning facility is now offline [and] a lot of municipal solid waste is being trucked or taken by rail out of state,” Middletown Mayor Benjamin Florsheim ’14 said. “There has not been a good plan for how to deal with this. And it’s also obviously a huge sustainability issue.”
Food scrap collection and unit-based pricing (UBP), where pricing is based on units of waste rather than a disposal fee, are the two main tenets of the new program, instituted to lighten the waste-load.
Food waste makes up about 20% of the waste stream in Connecticut and contributes to almost 60% of the state’s carbon emissions. If taken out of the waste stream, food scraps can be used for energy through anaerobic digestion, a process in which the food waste is broken down to create biogas. This can be then used as fuel to power electricity, and the nutrient-rich coproduct can be used to create compost. Under the new program, Middletown food waste will ideally be put in green bags and sent to Quantum Biopower, an anaerobic digestion facility in Southington which is also where the University’s food waste is sent.
“We’re trying to reduce the amount of waste going into the waste stream and we’re also trying to lessen the impact on the environment and make it more affordable for residents,” Florsheim said. “So food waste will be separated out and all other waste is going to be collected, and then we’ll be taking that to a different facility.”
UBP also greatly decreases the amount of waste that is thrown away. Instead of having taxes pay for trash removal, specific city-sanctioned bags must be bought for throwing away trash. Since people are more conscious about the amount of trash they are throwing out due to this per-unit charge, they are incentivized to reduce waste. According to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), places using this consistently have been able to reduce waste dramatically, including in Maine where municipalities using UBP saw an almost 45% waste reduction compared to those that didn’t. Residents’ sanitation bills are also expected to decrease from about $400 to $280 annually on average due to the difference in the sanitation fee reduction and the number of bags purchased.
“The goal of this is to hold individuals accountable for their own trash usage or the amount of waste that they produce, and just to reduce trash in general,” Lucy Schwalbe ’26, a student volunteer who canvassed in Middletown to raise awareness for the program in October, said. “It works like how electricity bills function. So instead of paying a baseline trash fee, you’re only paying for how much you produce.”
Middletown was one of 15 municipalities which received a grant from DEEP to support food scrap diversion and UBP pilot programs. Middletown first went through a pilot program last year to test out these changes and saw trash reduction, increased recycling, and diversion of food scraps. After several public listening sessions and meetings, the Common Council made SAYT Food Scrap Co-Collection permanent with the mayor’s support in September.
Households and businesses in Middletown will mostly feel the change through the requirement of orange and green trash bags for trash and food scraps, respectively. Waste must be disposed of in one of these two bags or it will not be taken away. Both colored bags should be put in the same bin, where they will be collected together by the same truck and later sorted at a facility and sent to different destinations.
Since the University is located entirely in the Middletown Sanitation District, waste disposal in residential housing on campus will be affected by SAYT. The vast majority of the roughly 140 residences using the cart service are wood frame houses.
“The bags used for the co-collection program will be provided by the University with distribution and education occurring at the same time,” Associate Director of Facilities Management Jeff Sweet wrote in an email to The Argus. “We will initially distribute enough bags to get by through the winter break then do another distribution in late January.”
Bags can also currently be purchased at seven locations in Middletown, of which the two most accessible from campus are Price Chopper on Washington Street and Smith & Bishel Co. on Main Street. Green bags cost $1.50 for a roll of 10 four-gallon bags and $2.50 for eight-gallon bags, whereas the orange ones cost $7 per roll for eight-gallon bags, $10 for the 15-gallon size and $16.50 for the 33-gallon variety. The green bags are priced lower in order to encourage the separation of food scraps from trash.
Spencer Landers can be reached at sklanders@wesleyan.edu.