Put Your Food to Work in Keene, NH!

Put Your Food to Work! 

With the cost of garbage going up, up, up, what is one of the best ways to keep the weight out of your waste and help your town recycling facility? It turns out for every five bags of groceries you buy, the equivalent of two of them gets thrown out because 40% of food is wasted all along the food supply chain (USDA). In a waste audit at Fuller School in Keene, 62% of the weight of their trash was food scraps (NRRA).

The City of Keene approached the Northeast Resource Recovery Association (NRRA) because the City is interested in how to decrease tonnage sent to the landfill and educate the public on the value of composting.  NRRA is a recycling and waste reduction nonprofit that enables communities to manage their own recycling programs.  We work with recycling facility members to evaluate their programs. We reach out on social media to educate the public. And we spark students with ways to be involved in recycling in their community. If you work with a Keene school, restaurant, or organization and would like to participate in a grant program to set up your own food waste compost system on-site for next spring, contact Heather Herring, NRRA Education Manager, at hherring@nrrarecycles.org to learn more. NRRA may be able to provide you with either a food scrap outdoor composting system using worms called the Subpod, or a solar digester called a Green Cone—and you can help us collect data as part of this exciting new pilot project. Our goal is to normalize composting and reduce the number of trucks that send Keene’s waste away to Rochester, NH’s landfill. Get your students, kitchen staff, housemates, and grandparents involved today right here in Keene!