One month after Princeton suspended its organic food waste recycling program, town officials are seeking feedback from residents and program participants as it explores how to bring back the program – including whether it should limit what is included for pickup.
The organic food waste program was suspended as of Jan. 30 for several reasons, including a doubling of the price for the service charged by the hauler, and the hauler’s failure to pick up the organic food waste on a consistent basis.
The food waste occasionally was taken to a landfill or an incinerator instead of being composted, because of contamination. Everything from plastics to trash to soccer balls had been found in the buckets.
Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert said town officials met recently with the nonprofit New Jersey Composting Council, whose representatives advised that Princeton would likely have more options if it scaled back on the list of items to be collected and composted.
Princeton’s organic food waste recycling program accepted food scraps, including meat, bones, vegetable scrapings, eggshells, coffee grounds, paper products, pizza boxes and other items that were unable to be composted by most farms or other processing facilities, Mayor Lempert said.
If the town continues to accept a wide range of items, the hauler will have to take the contents to a special processing facility, she said. Those facilities are not near by, she said, adding that traveling 75 miles away would cost more money and would add to the town’s carbon footprint.
But if the town restricts the types of things that it collects, “we might have better options. We might be able to find a farm or processing facility close to us. That is interesting information, and we want feedback from (program) participants. How important is it to be able to dispose of a wide range (of material),” Mayor Lempert said.
“We are still at the stage of digging down into what our options are,” she said.
Meanwhile, the town is reaching out to farms and processing facilities to find out what they would accept, and whether they would have room for Princeton’s organic food waste program contents, Mayor Lempert said.
“We expect they would be limited in what they would accept,” she said, adding that the town is narrowing down the geographic areas where it is looking for farms and processing facilities. That’s why Princeton officials are soliciting input from residents and program participants.
“We are interested in hearing from people in the program – what their thoughts are on what we expect to find – whether the program will still be viable if we limit the contents, or if we should cast a wider geographic net (for farms and processing facilities),” Mayor Lempert said.