The food waste diversion pilot program at Quincy High School had a soft launch just after February vacation. Finbar Heaslip, who recently graduated from UMass Boston with a focus on sustainability, is the Program Director and is advised by volunteer Ruth Davis, a QCAN member who recently retired from managing MIT’s solid waste program. Finbar and Ruth did an interview with QATV to explain how the program works.

With the help of school staff, students are separating all food waste, recycling, and garbage, diverting about 100 pounds of food waste per day – over a ton per month. This includes the compostable lunch trays that Quincy Public Schools switched to in 2020 (from styrofoam) after QCAN members suggested it in a meeting with Mayor Koch.

Black Earth Compost is picking up the food waste from the school (Black Earth also offers weekly curbside compost pickups from Quincy homes for about $21 per month, or biweekly for about $16/month; Bootstrap Compost also serves Quincy for $11 per weekly pickup or $15 per biweekly pickup.) The food waste is mixed with yard waste and other organic materials in a big yard to break down, and is eventually distributed as compost for use in agriculture and gardens.

QCAN has advocated for food waste collection in Quincy for years. Several of our members served on the mayor’s task force to research curbside food waste pickup, which presented its report to the city council in November 2022. Their report supports collecting food waste not only in the schools, but city-wide, as is done in several other Massachusetts towns and cities.

Food rotting in landfills represents the third-largest source of the greenhouse gas methane in the US. Quincy incinerates its trash — about 30,000 tons of it per year — to generate energy. Still, since food waste is so water-rich, burning it consumes almost as much energy as it generates. So removing the 6,600 tons of food scraps that end up in our waste stream would improve the energy production of the remaining trash – and produce compost that improves soils and helps remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.