Cambridge Compost Program In Question

CAMBRIDGE, MA —Last month, the little mini green compost bins multiplied across Cambridge with fanfare from the city and from thousands of households. The free Curbside Composting program was expanded to include the biodegradable scraps of some 25,000 homes.

But it turns out all that food isn’t actually being composted, WGBH's Craig LeMoult broke the story to the shock and dismay of some residents.

Cambridge officials said although the scraps are actually sent to a wastewater treatment plant and not some special bin where they are mixed with worms and it's left to decompose, it is the best option for removing that waste from garbage that would otherwise be destined for landfills. And that was their main goal with the program.

The Cambridge food scraps are mixed with sewage sludge where the watery stuff is treated before being discharged into the Merrimack River. The solid material is dried out and broken down into pellets to fertilizer that is used for hay fields.

In a how-to video the city posted to its website an animation that explains the compost will go on to become fertilizer - just not the kind of fertilizer that people use in their gardens.

"The goal of citywide curbside compost collection is to significantly reduce both trash volume and greenhouse gas emissions," posted Cambridge officials to the city website.

Does it matter that Cambridge’s food waste is not really composting (defined as decayed organic material) and the end product is used as fertilizer? LeMoult asked.

“The city of Cambridge is doing the right thing by taking food scraps out of the landfill,” Laura Orlando, who teaches environmental health at Boston University told the radio reporter. “It's doing the wrong thing by adding those food scraps to a material that is known to be toxic."

LeMoult told Patch someone told the environmental reporter that the composting program wasn't exactly happening as a regular compost program. As a WGBH reporter always looking for story ideas about impact on the larger environment, he looked into it.

"At first I was wondering can that be true? And then most people that I spoke to were surprised to hear that it was not being composted, as well, because that's what it was called," he told Patch.

In the radio story he produced, the Cambridge couple he interviewed had two different takes on it, one of them was OK with the revelations, the other not so much.

And that's a good thing, he said.

"I assumed that that same conversation might be happening in kitchens all over Cambridge," LeMoult said Wednesday in a phone interview with Patch.

Since he broke the story, he's heard from folks who say they still support the program.

"We all have an idea of what composting is, and this sort of challenged that idea. I think it's important for people to understand what's happening behind the scenes and find out what they're not actually seeing," he said.

The rest is up to the listener or the reader, he said.

Read the full WGBH story here: Cambridge's Composting Program. Is it Really Composting?

Previously on Patch:

• Cambridge Just Expanded Its Free Curbside Composting (April 2018)
• Cambridge to Roll Out Curbside Composting City-Wide (Oct. 2017)

Photo up top Courtesy WGBH, Credit: Meredith Nierman