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Tyler Skrzypiec empties a filled food waste basket for a resident customer. Blue Earth Compost was started in 2013 in West Hartford with a goal to recycle food waste into soil that can fertilize plants, as opposed to throwing away in a landfill or incinerator. (Cloe Poisson, CTMirror.org) Food waste is a fact of life. Also a fact is that it’s smelly, wet and heavy. It makes a mess out of the rest of the trash and is generally nasty. Getting food waste out of the trash may also provide the key to how Connecticut repairs the dated, expensive, fragmented and environmentally fraught waste systems in the state. But the question is whether it makes more sense to get the food out of the waste stream first or whether other parts of the system get fixed first so the food part follows. ....
Steam billows from a tall stack near the power block facility at the MIRA trash-to-energy facility in Hartford’s South Meadows. (Cloe Poisson, CTMirror.org) The Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority plant is a hulking presence on the Connecticut River along Hartford’s southeast flank – a sprawling complex of buildings and emissions stacks that was constructed for another time and use. It shows. In the winding corridors and rooms of this fortress-like structure which originally burned coal to make electricity and now burns trash to generate a small portion of the state’s power ceiling tiles are stained and warped after years of absorbing explosions from objects like gas canisters that mistakenly wind up in the waste stream. It’s noisy and it smells, though given the nearly 3,000 tons of trash cycled daily through cavernous holding areas across what seems like miles of conveyors and into the incinerator next door, logic says it ought to smell worse. ....
Food waste is a fact of life. Also a fact is that it’s smelly, wet and heavy. It makes a mess out of the rest of the trash and is generally nasty. Getting food waste out of the trash may also provide the key to how Connecticut repairs the dated, expensive, fragmented and environmentally fraught waste systems in the state. But the question is whether it makes more sense to get the food out of the waste stream first or whether other parts of the system get fixed first so the food part follows. It’s a chicken-egg problem, and which comes first isn’t clear. What is clear, officials say, is that food waste cannot be ignored any longer. ....