What’s the Future of Composting on Martha’s Vineyard?

The Martha’s Vineyard community needs a new long-term composting solution, as Island Grown Initiative’s drum composter will cease operating in September, and Islanders will no longer be able to drop off food scraps at town transfer stations or bring them directly to IGI’s Thimble Farm for composting.

Over the past eight years, IGI has collected more than three million pounds of food waste from households, farms, and local businesses, and turned it into compost that has helped enrich the soils on IGI’s farm. The program, which has been the only commercial composting operation on-Island, was created after the MV Organics Recovery Committee, under the leadership of Sophie Mazza, received a Vineyard Vision Fellowship grant to purchase a drum composter and install it at the IGI farm.

Now that the drum composting machine has reached the end of its useful life and must be decommissioned, the committee is working on a permanent commercial composting solution. First, they need to secure a location, then they’re hoping to get started as soon as possible. According to IGI co-executive director Noli Taylor, the drum composting at the farm was intended to serve as a pilot program for food waste processing, not a long-term solution. “To me, this is a municipal responsibility, like other solid waste handling, and we need our towns to move into this role,” Taylor said. 

For Taylor, the first step toward reducing the amount of food waste shipped off-Island is keeping it out of the trash. She said that her ideal vision for the future of composting on the Vineyard would include both centralized and dispersed processing, where people can conveniently bring scraps to be turned into compost for local farms and gardens. 

Woody Filley, who helped found the Island’s first recycling program in the ‘80s, is now leading the Organics Recovery Committee in their search for a long-term composting location. Filley said he’s grateful to IGI for initially volunteering to be the project site for the composting pilot, but now it’s time to create a dedicated facility that can handle the bulk of the community’s food waste. “We need a piece of land that’s large enough to handle a covered, in-building operation with enough space for trucks to come and go [as they transport food waste], and it needs to be far enough away from neighbors,” Filley said. “That was one of the main challenges for the IGI operation — they have a lot of neighbors, and people were concerned about smells and vectors for rodents and things like that — that’s why we did drum composting, because it was contained.”

Filley said the committee has located a prospective site, but the process is still in its very early stages. Filley is working with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection  (MassDEP) to bring a food waste consultant to the Island to create a plan that will fit the community’s needs. “Normally, the consultant looks at improving systems that are already up and running, but the state is looking to help us however they can,” Filley said. According to Filley, Vineyard Vision’s food waste reclamation project was originally created to address the 2014 MassDEP commercial food waste ban, which said that if businesses or organizations create more than a ton of food waste per week, they must find an alternative way of disposing of it. Now, that state regulation is down to a half-ton of food waste, so even more local establishments are being required to divert their food waste away from the garbage. Filley said the situation is desperate for businesses that don’t have their own composting operations, as they could soon be in violation of state regulations.

Currently, in agrarian towns like West Tisbury, commercial food waste composting is only permitted in light industrial districts. Filley said that’s a problem, as there are very few locations that are properly zoned for this type of use. “This just speaks to the fact that we don’t have enough commercial space to do the types of activities we need to do, but that’s a whole other conversation,” he said. Despite the immediate composting challenges, Filley is optimistic that the Vineyard will eventually come to view food waste as a commodity, instead of a burden, and composting as a necessity, instead of an option. “We are hoping to have something that can handle between 3,000 to 4,000 tons of food waste annually. That’s a significant amount of compost that would be kept on-Island and used to benefit our soils, our farms, and our economy,” Filley said. 

Each year, 33% of the overall waste stream on Martha’s Vineyard consists of food waste — that means around 6,500 tons of food waste is shipped off-Island as garbage annually. Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli, co-owner of Catboat Coffee Co. in Vineyard Haven and co-founder of waste reduction platform WATS (Waste Administration+Tracking Software), has been working on composting efforts on Martha’s Vineyard and nationally. Danberg-Ficarelli said her ideal vision for waste infrastructure on the Island involves activity at every scale — people composting at home, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, in each Island town, and a more Islandwide solution at the top of the hierarchy. “I think we need to decentralize in some areas. We need to scale down our idea of solutions; that would mean smaller-scale mechanical preprocessing of food waste to make it dry and inert, then collecting that material and composting it,” Danberg-Ficarelli said. 

For Danberg-Ficarelli, keeping the composting conversation alive is most essential if the Island wants to progress toward a permanent remedy to the food waste problem. “Talk to your neighbors about composting, talk to your coworkers,” Danberg-Ficarelli said. “Try to think about what would tie this issue to the thing you care about most — is it agriculture and soil health, is it economics and efficiency? Whatever allows us to bring more community members into this really important discussion.”

Bluedot will regularly report composting updates.