West Hartford is ending its unit-based pricing and food scrap diversion pilot program that one neighborhood has been testing since last May. In a letter to the community, the town’s public works director said the program had been “successfully” concluded with the participating homes combining to聽divert 160,000 pounds of food scraps from the waste stream. Food scraps were picked up by Blue Earth Compost and brought to Quantum Biopower in Southington for processing into renewable energy.
“The success of the pilot program provides valuable insights at a critical time when Connecticut faces a waste crisis, with 40 percent of its waste being trucked as far away as Virginia and Pennsylvania,” Phillips said in his letter. Despite that success, the Town Council last week decided not to move forward with bringing a similar mandatory pilot program to the entire town, citing concerns over added costs to taxpayers and enforcement.
Phillips said he was still a believer in a unit-based pricing model 鈥� which encourages residents to be more thoughtful about what’s going into their garbage cans 鈥� as being able to reduce the town’s waste, but understood that it would be a major change for the town.