Creating a Composting Network on the Vineyard

When Catboat Coffee owner Naji Boustany arrives at work in the morning, he gets the coffee brewing, makes sure all the food prep stations are up and running, then walks over to two small, unassuming bins and presses a button to start dehydrating and breaking down all the food scraps the restaurant produced in the past few days. “My wife Meredith is in the waste management business, so once [Island Grown Initiative] stopped accepting compost, we knew we had to have a solution,” Naji told me as he demonstrated the capabilities of his new Mill food recycler during a tour of his restaurant. “Right now the Mill accommodates all the food scraps we have at the end of the day.” 

Currently, there is no centralized location to which Island residents or businesses can bring their food scraps (read Bluedot’s previous story on local composting efforts). Although there is a new, large-scale commercial operation in the works, for the time being, most people are dealing with their food waste on-site, in restaurants, schools, and residential kitchens. Catboat Coffee, in the Tisbury Marketplace, is an early adopter of the Mill food recycler, which turns food waste into a nutrient rich soil amendment that can be used to create compost, worked directly into soil, or turned into feed for livestock such as chickens. With two Mill bins in his restaurant, Naji never has to throw food scraps in the trash. “Egg shells, stems, ends of vegetables, and any other leftover food goes into the bins,” he said.

According to Naji, the Mill bins emit no odor, consume very little energy, and are virtually silent as they process food waste. By the time the bins are ready to be emptied, they’ve reduced the food waste volume by about 80%, so Catboat only needs to empty the bins about once a week in the offseason and once every two days during peak summer. Having grown up and worked with farmers all his life, Naji values a hyperlocal food system, and for this reason, he donates all the material that his Mill bins produce to IGI and North Tabor Farm, where it’s used to feed chickens. “They tell me that the chickens like this food more than regular chicken feed, and because we are putting both meat and vegetable scraps in, it’s a complete nutrient for them,” Naji explained. 

Catboat uses a new program offered by Mill that helps restaurants track how much food waste they are producing, how much processed material they are producing, and how many times they open the bin to deposit food waste. So far, Naji’s food recyclers have turned more than 1,200 pounds of food waste into material that can be used right here on the Vineyard, which feels to Naji like part of a long-term solution to food waste on Martha’s Vineyard. “I think every restaurant should do an assessment of how much food waste they make in a day, then they can get in touch with me, come check out the Mill bins and see how they work,” he said. “I think if each business can make their own impact, that could make it much easier to process the entire Island’s food waste.”

Food waste comprises about a quarter of all the mass in United States landfills, and the majority of that waste comes from people’s homes, Mill spokesperson Amanda Plante said. “It’s not an issue of having a curbside bin to put food scraps in, it’s a decision that happens at the cutting board, when you're cleaning up after making dinner.” Amanda said Mill was originally designed for residential use, but she’s observed that many restaurants, like Catboat Coffee, find the bins more than adequate to accommodate their food waste. Amanda said that, from both restaurants and residences, Mill has gathered data indicating that the technology is influencing behavior in ways that go beyond simply not putting food in the garbage. After four months of use, Amanda said Mill owners see significant source reduction — people are opening their bins at the same rate, but they’re putting fewer food scraps in each time. “This tech is making people more aware of the food they’re wasting or not wasting,” she concludes.

While individuals and businesses are finding ways to handle their food waste, members of the Martha’s Vineyard Organics Recovery Committee, IGI, and the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District (MVRD) are working on a new, large-scale composting facility. Woody Filley, who manages the Recovery Committee, said that there is an existing schematic plan and feasibility study that would enable a commercial composting operation to be built at the MVRD. At their dropoff facility (for all trash) on West Tisbury Road, the district is about to engage in a major restructuring that will create separate dropoff areas for residential and commercial waste. “This will hopefully free up space for them to have an organics program. Once the restructuring is finished, everyone will have a better idea of what space could serve as a dedicated composting setup,” Woody said. 

Filley said the facility would aim to process between 1,000 and 1,500 tons of food waste annually, using an in-vessel composting system that would keep out birds and rodents, prevent odors, and eliminate disease vectors. According to a 2017 report conducted by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) and outlined in the 2024 MVC Martha’s Vineyard Solid Waste Report, the Vineyard produces about 6,500 tons of food waste annually. This means, Woody said, that even with the larger facility, “there is no single solution to this.”

Ideally, Woody believes, every household, business, farm, and school should be implementing their own composting program, with all the resulting compost going to those who need it to grow locally. He suggested that no food waste should need to be shipped off-Island, and much of the compost we use (that currently comes to the Island on barges and ferries) could be produced right here at home. “Think about composting programs in your subdivision, in your neighborhood. It can’t be ‘either/or’ when it comes to centralized or decentralized composting,” Woody said.

”In 2020, IGI hired an engineering firm to conduct a detailed engineering analysis of various composting technologies. Stantec Solid Waste Management produced a final report that year which suggested that the facility at the MVRD be an in-vessel system with three rotary drums, with a whopping price tag of almost $10 million. The project was put on the back burner. Though the three rotary drums are considered the “Cadillac of projects” for an organics recovery program on-Island, there are some more affordable options that would still be able to process the entire Island’s compost, according to Bob Spencer, a Vermont consultant who created a solid waste report for the MVC in 2017. Spencer’s own facility in Vermont just significantly expanded composting operations. They now use aerated pile technology developed by a company called AgriLab, which takes hot, moist air from one compost pile and transfers it into an adjacent pile, and they’ve been able to process about 5,000 tons of food waste annually using this technique. Spencer thinks this method could be a viable alternative to in-vessel rotary drums and that it could handle most of the Vineyard’s food waste. Spencer broke down the rough cost savings for the Island if no food waste needed to be sent away: “Let’s take the 6,500 ton per year figure that was in those studies I did in 2017, and let’s say it costs $200 a ton to ship away, which is definitely a lowball,” Spencer said. “That’s $1.3 million a year you wouldn’t have to spend, and I built my facility for less than a million dollars.”

Meanwhile, Sophie Mazza is currently working on installing EcoRich food recyclers at Island schools. Similar to the Mill bin that Catboat uses, EcoRich recyclers produce a material that is different from traditional finished compost. “It’s a nutrient-rich soil amendment,” Sophie said, adding that the EcoRich recycler is “more than just a dehydrator, but it’s not a monthslong full biological breakdown composting process.” Regardless of when and where a centralized composting operation will take place, Sophie said, schools are a perfect ecosystem in which to incorporate on-site composting. With IGI already offering programming for students, including an EcoRich composter would allow schools to close the food cycle loop in a more direct and efficient way. “Students are already learning to collect their food waste and put it in the compost bin; they are already learning what compost is,” Sophie said.

According to Sophie, the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School will be the first to acquire an EcoRich system, which will be installed before the next school year is underway. Next in line are the Chilmark School, the West Tisbury School, and the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, and phase two of the project will provide systems at the Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Tisbury schools. 

EcoRich systems come in a range of sizes that can handle between 20 pounds and a ton of food waste per day. Sophie is helping schools conduct waste audits to enable IGI to determine how large each school’s machine needs to be. To account for fluctuations caused by different foods being served for lunch each day, the audits are covering five days of food waste at each school. “When you are using fresh produce, there will be more peels, stems, and more food waste. There is not much food waste on pizza day, for example,” Sophie said. 

When the waste material comes out of the machines, its decomposition process has been jumpstarted, but it still needs to sit and become less biologically active before being used. Each school will have a small area where the material can sit for three weeks until it’s ready for use. Schools are planning to use it in their gardens, and, if there is excess, to potentially use it on their playing fields. Additionally, Sophie said schools could incorporate the material into educational programs, using it to learn about plant life cycles, for example, by filling empty milk cartons with the nutrient rich soil amendment combined with potting soil and planting seeds. If schools are still producing more material than they need, partnering with farms would be the next step.

If the Island is going to close the food waste loop locally, Sophie said schools could serve as an example of micro-communities where composting becomes a regular practice. The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School produces approximately 18,000 pounds of food waste each year, and the West Tisbury School produces about 13,300 pounds. If EcoRich machines were installed at each Island school, hundreds of tons of food waste would be diverted from the landfill each year. 

After schools install their machines, the next phase of the initiative may be to put EcoRich machines at each transfer station for homeowner use. This would free up any larger centralized facility to focus on commercial food waste. “I could see these machines being in operation long term, integrated into the flow of the residential dropoff system,” Sophie said. “This network of machines, including schools, when it’s complete, could be saving about double the amount of food waste that the IGI Thimble Farm operation was able to at its peak,” Mazza said.

Thanks to the efforts of several groups and some innovative technology across all scales of food waste management, both centralized and decentralized, the Vineyard is looking ahead to a hyperlocal composting future.