The College Park City Council voted last month to continue the city’s curbside food scrap collection program for another two years.
The vote extends the city’s contract with Compost Crew, a food scrap collection company based in Maryland, and will help the city attain its sustainability goals.
“We certainly are excited about helping as many municipalities as we can to give their residents good options to compost their food scraps and keep them out of the trash and out of incinerators,” said Dan Israel, the company’s senior vice president of municipal programs.
College Park began a food scrap dropoff program in 2019 where citizens could leave their scraps at the public works yard.
The city was surprised by how many residents participated in this program, according to Robert Marsili Jr., the city’s public works director. From 2019 to 2020, the city collected a total of 31 tons of food scraps, Marsili said.
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In 2022, the mayor and council approved the start of the curbside collection program and began a contract with Compost Crew, Marsili said.
This program allows residents to buy totes or buckets to store their food scraps at their homes and businesses. The Compost Crew picks up these scraps every Tuesday and later turns them into compost.
As food scraps make up a large portion of the material that gets thrown in the trash, composting reduces the amount of trash that goes to the landfill, according to Israel. These food scraps produce methane gas, which contributes to climate change.
“When you keep it out of the landfill, you turn it into compost, it significantly reduces that methane production,” Israel said.
District 4 council member Maria Mackie said she composted her own vegetable scraps for years with a composter in her backyard. She used the compost for her vegetable and flower gardens.
But the city’s curbside collection program has made the whole composting process a lot more convenient, she said.
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Mackie said the College Park City Council is often very supportive of initiatives to make the city more environmentally friendly, as they strive to be a sustainable example for surrounding municipalities.
“We want our city to be environmentally friendly and we have a responsibility to look out for the environment,” Mackie said.
There are currently about 485 program participants, but Marsili said the city is hoping to get more citizens involved with the program.
Some people are wary about keeping their food scraps because of concerns about the smell and sanitation, Mackie said, but she has never had any issues with the process. Marsili agreed that residents should not have any problems as long as they have the proper containers and understand how to store the scraps.
The city wants to get more off-campus students involved with the program and has been trying to promote it to University of Maryland students, Marsili said.
