The Newton diner is one of hundreds of businesses around the state — including restaurants, grocery stores, schools, and hotels — to rethink the approach to food waste in the two years since Massachusetts banned businesses that generate more than 1,000 pounds of food waste a week from tossing those scraps in the garbage. And of all states with food waste bans, “ Massachusetts alone has reduced landfill waste ,” according to a study published in September in the research journal Science. The ban, first created a decade ago and then expanded in 2022 , sets the goal of reducing the state’s waste management costs by diverting at least 35 percent of all food scraps from landfills. Researchers attributed the Bay State’s success to strong infrastructure and enforcement, noting that Massachusetts has “the most food waste processing facilities per every 1,000 square miles” and “more than triple the number of inspections” per year than any other state. Restaurant owners such as Masterson have some help getting started. Through contracts with a local nonprofit, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection provides free assistance to businesses trying to figure out how to cut down their food waste. Services include multilingual signs to help kitchen staff distinguish between compostables and trash, funding to pay for composting, and connections to soup kitchens and organizations that take excess food, as well as to local farms and compost haulers eager to take scraps no longer fit for humans to eat. The researchers from business schools at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas at Austin found in their report that while Massachusetts was ultimately able to decrease the amount of food waste in landfills by around 10 percent, four other states in the study — California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont — were unable to significantly reduce food in landfills despite waste bans. The need to overhaul how Massachusetts addresses its waste is urgent: the Bay State already exports more than a third of its trash, and the state’s six landfills are expected to fill by 2030. All those landfills release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that fuels climate change. Research from the Environmental Protection Agency reports that US landfills account for 14 percent of the country’s methane emissions annually, roughly equal to driving more than 24 million gasoline-powered cars. Composting, on the other hand, aerates food as it decomposes, significantly reducing the amount of methane released. Global food waste contributes 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. The key in Massachusetts: lots of support. “In order for businesses to even know that these policies exist in the first place and then know what to do about it, somebody needs to help them,” said Lorenzo Macaluso, chief growth officer for CET (formerly known as the Center for EcoTechnology), a nonprofit in Western Massachusetts that contracts with state-funded programs like RecyclingWorks to help businesses reduce their waste and energy consumption. While some business owners have experience with composting and other food waste reduction strategies, other organizations are just starting to figure out the approach that works best for them. In Fall River, Rob Canavan, lead pastor of Christ the Rock Assembly of God Church, turned to a waste reduction consultant to calculate the amount of food scraps generated through community events and the church’s food pantry. Sam Salvatore, the RecyclingWorks consultant, commended the church’s existing efforts to provide excess food from local grocery stores and bakeries to low-income or homeless residents. As they devised a plan to handle the church’s remaining food waste, she offered to design and print custom signs with composting and recycling guidelines for the church in English and Portuguese, the languages spoken by his staff. Even if his church doesn’t hit the 1,000-pound-a-week limit, Canavan said he’d still like to avoid wasting any food he can. “When we have leftovers and they go bad, we throw them in the dumpster,” he said. “If there’s a better solution, we want to do that.” CET has provided no-cost assistance to roughly 16,000 businesses and organizations to date. During the last fiscal year, the organization estimates it diverted nearly 1,800 tons of food and other materials from landfills. “We’re immediately in a very trusted space when we’re talking to those businesses and helping them navigate their way to better solutions,” said Macaluso. While the food waste ban primarily affects the commercial sector, cities and towns across the state have also launched residential composting programs and other food diversion efforts. Roughly a quarter of the state’s 351 municipalities have either drop-off or curbside composting programs, either run by the city — as in Boston — or through a private vendor. Black Earth compost, one of the largest vendors in the state, provides composting in nearly three dozen cities and towns at roughly 40,000 locations, according to company data. It then sells the compost to residents in New England. For homeowners with the yard space (and a penchant for gardening), backyard composting is also an option. It’s a tradeoff — cheaper to do on your own, but it takes time to maintain and turn the compost. Another idea gaining traction: Keep food from going bad in the first place. Boston’s Office of Food Justice released its first food waste assessment this week, pledging to open a refrigeration facility to store produce and frozen foods, as well as increase grants to groups that “rescue” excess food from universities, hospitals, and supermarkets. In addition to picking up food waste from private homes, Black Earth and other composting haulers also work with businesses like Johnny’s. Masterson noted that especially for small businesses, having tailored guidance and financial support in the early stages is critical to slashing food waste. And for businesses that can’t afford or balk at the price of compost pickup (it costs Masterson just shy of $3,000 a year, which she said can be a “very painful” added expense for small businesses as baseline costs for food continue to rise), CET recently launched a funding program to provide the first few months of composting to small businesses for free. In North Adams, Door Prize catering co-owner Bryan Josephs said funding was indispensable to helping him start composting at his prep kitchen. “Even if you withdraw the financial barrier for a few months, it makes it so much more attractive to business owners, and just puts it on the top of their to-do lists as opposed to the bottom,” he said, adding, “we’ll keep composting after this for sure.” Macaluso, of CET, pointed to the group’s recent contracts in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, as evidence that a tailored, carrot-and-stick approach to reducing food waste is the way to go, and that other states with food waste bans are learning from Massachusetts. “They are recognizing that this is an important missing ingredient,” he said, “and are making that investment ... to make their policy a success.”
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