Note that if you purchase something via one of our links, including Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
Islanders are taking a decentralized approach to food waste management.
Island food waste experts are working collaboratively to ensure that the Vineyard can eventually redirect 100 percent of its food waste away from the landfill.
The Oak Bluffs select board recently agreed to pursue more than $2 million in grant funding from the EPA’s Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Program to construct a composting facility at the Oak Bluffs transfer station. In the meantime, Island Grown Initiative (IGI), the nonprofit that initially provided centralized compost processing to the Vineyard, is looking to install a smaller rapid composting machine at the transfer station while the town pursues funding for the larger operation. IGI is exploring grant opportunities to pay for the rapid composter, and state subsidies are available from Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s (MassDEP) Recycling Dividends Program. Eventually, IGI hopes to have rapid composters at every transfer station on the Vineyard.
Since 2014, businesses in Massachusetts have been obligated to divert a certain percentage of their food waste into composting machines as part of a holistic commercial waste ban.
“The state hasn’t come down too hard on businesses yet, but we don’t know how the state’s approach will change, so we need to make sure we can accommodate our local businesses,” said Woody Filley, manager of the Martha's Vineyard Vision Fellowship Organics Recovery Project.
After careful consideration over the last several years, Filley said most officials on the Island see potential in a more distributed composting system; one where smaller operations are installed at town transfer stations and schools, and residents might even have rapid composting machines or dehydrators in their homes. IGI hired an engineering firm in 2020 to conduct a study on designing a facility that would handle all the Island’s food waste, both commercial and residential. “They came back to us and said it would cost close to $10 million, so at that point there wasn’t an appetite to do that,” Filley said. He said that the town should hear back from the state about the EPA grant application around June or July.
Sophie Mazza, who founded the Vineyard’s composting efforts through the Vineyard Vision Fellowship program, said she and Filley are working in parallel on two different projects. She is working on bringing on-site food scrap management to Island schools, along with facilitating residential food scrap processing at transfer stations and waste dropoffs located in each of the six Island towns. “The real goal is to give residents a place to bring their food waste and be able to keep at least some of this out of the waste stream until a larger commercial site or sites are developed,” Mazza said. According to Mazza, the machines that IGI is looking to install aren’t termed dehydrators, although they do use heat to reduce the overall volume of organic waste. She called the machines rapid composters, because they use a carbon source and microorganisms to initiate the composting process. After being processed and cured for three weeks, the final product is a nutrient rich soil amendment similar to compost.
Because local students are already accustomed to separating their food waste, and Vineyard schools are all engaged in on-site gardening programs, Mazza said installing rapid composters at schools is a good first step. A number of different sized machines are being considered for the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School and the West Tisbury School, which will be the first two schools to implement the program. For Mazza, another advantage to the rapid composting program is that the machines don’t require permitting from the MassDEP, so IGI should be able to move ahead quickly after receiving funding.
According to Mazza, each machine can process about 90 tons of food waste per year. The most food waste IGI processed at its Thimble Farm site in one year was 360 tons, “so if we had one of these machines in each town, we would actually be processing as much as we’ve ever processed before on the Island,” Mazza said. “That’s very promising.” After the Charter and West Tisbury schools conduct waste audits and the machines are purchased and installed, all food scraps from the cafeterias and unused produce from school gardens will be processed on-site.
Any material that’s not used in the gardens could be given out to parents, teachers, and even nearby farms. And Mazza said teachers are excited to use this as an educational opportunity — she said it would be a good addition to the garden and food system education that kids are already engaging with in Island Grown Schools programs. “They will get to see what can happen to our food waste when we dispose of it responsibly and how it can sustain us. They can see the whole process,” Mazza said.
IGI could have rapid composting machines installed at the Edgartown and Oak Bluffs transfer stations and some schools as soon as summer 2025. In order for the Vineyard to eliminate food waste and safeguard its composting future, Mazza said municipalities, schools, residents, and businesses will have to work together on an approach that addresses the problem at multiple scales. “There may never be that magic space where there is enough land to have this one big central facility,” Mazza said. “That’s why we moved to decentralize and split it up into separate operations that altogether can accommodate the whole Island.”
