Sophie Mazza is the Community Food Waste Director at Island Grown Initiative, on Martha's Vineyard. She’s working to install food wase recyclers at all seven of the island’s public schools as well as local trash drop-offs and transfer stations around the island.
She says recyclers are now up and running at the regional high school, Chilmark School, and the Public Charter School.
"These are part of a strategy that Island Grown has put together," Mazza said. "We're working with the organics subcommittee through the Martha's Vineyard Commission. And this is all kind of fitting into this larger plan to reduce food waste on the island by 70% by 2035."
Mazza said residential food waste is a big piece of the puzzle on the island, and the recyclers are good at handling that.
"Due to the high food costs, restaurants are really savvy at not wasting a lot of food," she said. "And we don't have manufacturing facilities here, which account for a lot of commercial food waste. So it's a real high percentage of residential food waste here. So we've kind of like zeroed in on these recyclers."
Mazza said, unlike traditional composting, you don't need to add carbon-rich "brown material" like dried leaves into the mix.
"They run on just food waste," she explained, "and you load the food waste in, you press a button, and in 24 hours the food is kind of ground up. It's dehydrated. You know, high heat is introduced so the water is evaporated."
It's not technically compost, but they recyclers do produce a nutrient dense product. Mazza says, after a three-week curing period the recycled food waste can be used to amend soil at the schools’ gardens and possibly be used on playing fields. She added that the schools are already working the recyclers into lesson plans.
She said high school students "take all the food scraps after the lunch period, they weigh them and they load them into the machine."
Once the scraps add up to close to 100 pounds – the machine's maximum capacity – it's time to turn it on.
"They're just great in these places, like the schools and transfer stations because they're low labor, they have built in odor control," said Mazza.
According to Mazza, four of the six towns on the Vineyard recently passed Town Meeting warrants to purchase recyclers.
