MIDDLETOWN — The truck’s load spills out in a soupy mess. Clam shells and corn husks. Lobster shells and lemon rinds. Vegetable peelings float in murky streams that flow around mounds of spent barley used to make beer. The smell is inescapable.
“Lunch is served,” jokes Nat Harris, co-owner of the company that owns the hauling truck.
There’s nothing pleasant about this scene, but there’s a type of alchemy going on here, the transformation of trash into something of value. All of these food scraps will be combined with lawn clippings, horse manure, ground leaves and used straw that microorganisms over time will turn into nutrient-rich compost that could be used to grow more food.
Now in its second year, Healthy Soils, Healthy Seas Rhode Island is a program started by the environmental group Clean Ocean Access that’s aimed at getting people to think about how much waste they produce and how to dispose of it in a more responsible — and, in this case, more productive — manner.
“We thought of composting as a way to stimulate the conversation to be more sustainable and more responsible with the materials that we’re using day to day,” says Dave McLaughlin, executive director and co-founder of the Middletown group.
Clean Ocean Access is probably best known as one of the leaders of the push to prohibit the use of single-use plastic bags in Rhode Island, an effort that started with a ban in Barrington, spread to Aquidneck Island and has continued with ordinances now in more than a dozen communities covering half the state’s population.
The group’s advocacy against plastic bags, as well as against plastic straws and other single-use plastic items, is a clear fit with its mission to clean up ocean waters. A huge amount of plastic debris ends up in the oceans, where it entangles sea turtles and gets consumed by birds and fish.
The composting program has broader goals, but it still has direct connections to ocean health. Compost offers a natural way of adding nitrogen to soil to feed plant growth, doing the same job that manufactured chemical fertilizers do. While fertilizers can be carried by stormwater runoff into rivers and streams and potentially stimulate algae growth that in extreme cases can cause fish kills, compost will largely stay in place.
Compost mixtures are also able to absorb much more stormwater than regular soil and effectively filter out contaminants, so they can help prevent runoff tainted with oils, heavy metals and chemicals from washing into water bodies like Narragansett Bay.
Through Healthy Soils, Healthy Seas, Clean Ocean Access acts as a facilitator to make it easier to compost.
The organization works with two hauling companies, The Compost Plant and Rhodeside Revival, which offer a variety of services, including pickup from restaurants and businesses, collection from drop-off locations and residential curbside service. Participants pay discounted rates subsidized through a $440,000 grant from Newport-based 11th Hour Racing, and everyone receives at least five gallons of finished compost every year to use in their gardens.
When the program started last year, the food scraps were hauled to composting facilities as far as 70 miles away in Massachusetts, because there were no places closer that had capacity. Clean Ocean Access wanted to find a local alternative to reduce the program’s carbon footprint. It would also mean that any compost created by people and restaurants on Aquidneck Island could be used on the island.
McLaughlin connected with Rhode Island Nurseries, which processes all of the leaf and lawn waste from Newport and Middletown, making it the perfect fit for the composting program. To make compost, you need two key ingredients: nitrogen and carbon. When food waste breaks down, it produces lots of nitrogen. Leaves and grass clippings provide the carbon.
Since January, the Compost Plant has been delivering food waste once a week to a block of farmland owned by the nurseries in Middletown. It takes six months or so of mixing, turning and decomposing for it to become compost. Jesse Rodrigues, general manager of the nurseries, will use it to amend the soil on the nearby fields where trees are grown for sale. He plans to eventually start selling some compost to landscaping companies.
On a recent afternoon, as McLaughlin leads a tour of the composting facility, Leo Pollock, co-owner with Harris of the Compost Plant, backs a specially designed truck up to a concrete pad at the nurseries.
“Do you want to dump this first, or should we talk before we make the smell?” Rodrigues asks a group that includes people from Clean Ocean Access, 11th Hour Racing and the state Department of Environmental Management.
Dump it, everyone says. The four-ton load includes 400 gallons of lobster shells from the Newport Lobster Shack. The spent grains come from Taproot Brewery nearby. The odor is bad, mainly because of the seafood, but Rodrigues will soon take care of it by covering all the food stuff with plant matter.
“It’s a clean site,” says Ken Ayars, chief of agriculture at the DEM. “You’re containing it and less slop means less odor, less flies and less chance of complaints.”
Clean Ocean Access isn’t the only organization pushing for more composting in Rhode Island. The DEM is talking to the state Department of Transportation about using compost for construction projects and with others about using compost to cap landfills proposed for solar development.
Meanwhile, many groups have been raising concerns about the Central Landfill, in Johnston, where all of the state’s trash goes and which is expected to reach capacity in the next two decades. At nearly 100,000 tons a year, food scraps represent the single largest waste material that’s disposed of in the landfill. Much of it could be turned into compost.
But doing that on a widespread basis will require a change in attitudes, says Ayars.
“Holistically, we have to recognize that if we’re going to be adding life on to the landfill and handling waste in a different manner, some of the sights and sounds and smells of composting just have to be part of our environment,” he says.
Healthy Soils, Healthy Seas ground to a halt with the coronavirus outbreak and the shutdown of restaurants in the spring. But it is slowly picking up speed again. So far, about 500 homes have signed up, in addition to 23 restaurants (compared with 30 last year). They’ve collectively diverted about 1 million pounds of food scraps from the landfill. The program is set to expand in the fall when 14 schools that have signed on plan to start composting.
McLaughlin is hoping that the initiative will grow in the same way that the plastic bag campaign has, with the initial work in the East Bay and Aquidneck Island inspiring efforts in other parts of the state.
“It’s just a matter of building that momentum,” he says.
For Rodrigues, when asked if anything surprised him about starting to compost food waste, he doesn’t hesitate.
“It didn’t smell as bad as what I thought,” he says. “It’s worked out pretty good.”