It’s hard to see all the way inside the large barn at New Milford Farms. On this cloudy Monday, not much light made it in through the plastic roofing, and the air was filled with rising steam. I followed the steam down to its source: five rows of rotting food, made up of black piles several yards high and a couple football fields long, filling the huge room with clouds of a pungent, almost sweet smell.
I had been warned not to wear clothes that I liked, to avoid ruining them with the smell. But Rod Thibodeau, New Milford Farms’ compost operations manager, gloveless and with nothing to cover his mouth, seemed unfazed. “That’s why they let me stay,” he joked as we walked in between the mountains of rot, stopping occasionally for him to pick at it with his pitchfork.
New Milford Farms is a compost facility located about an hour and fifteen minutes from Yale’s campus, in New Milford, CT. Opened in 2007, they produce 7500 to 8000 cubic yards of compost per year from food waste. They are the only licensed food residue composting facility in Connecticut, and are permitted to process 58,000 tons of waste every year. From the composted food waste, they produce any number of blends of soil and fertilizer. Those blends are mostly sold commercially, as bags to home improvement and big box stores, or as bulk to landscaping companies and nurseries that will use the product themselves.
Just outside of downtown New Milford, tucked behind baseball fields next to a hill, this place is almost invisible. But despite its remove, this nondescript, corrugated metal barn is intimately linked to Yale’s elegant dining halls: every day, a truck brings Yale Dining’s food waste all the way from New Haven to this facility. Every uneaten chicken tender, every tea bag, everything students put into those brown bins in the dining hall ends up here. Out of sight and out of mind, it’s easy for Yale students to forget what happens to their waste. But even though it’s trucked away from Cross Campus, Yale’s apple cores and old Yankee Pot Roast actually go somewhere and, through real people’s work, becomes something else.
Describing himself as the “mixologist” of the compost, Thibodeau gleefully presides over the operation. After growing up on a farm and working in his grandfather’s construction business, he came to New Milford Farms three years ago as a seasonal worker and never left. Without formal training in the art of composting, he learned everything he needed to know on the job. While he is sometimes fuzzy on the finer details of the science, he can boil down his job into a basic formula: “I have to figure out how to mix it in to get the right levels of carbon-nitrogen.”
The delicate chemical balance needed to produce marketable compost requires a finesse that borders on a sixth sense. Thibodeau can’t really describe what he does or how he does it, but he is always looking ahead to what the huge piles will become next. We walked past progressively more decomposed material—to my uninitiated eye, it all seems to be just varying shades of black, but he can read it, jabbing in his pitchfork to show how far along his compost cocktail is in its fermentation.
The road from initial waste to final soil, however, is long. The ten-minute walk down the almost 200 hundred yards had taken us from food waste to almost completed compost. “This doesn’t just happen like this,” said Thibodeau, snapping his fingers. “If you screw something up down there, it’ll come down the whole process.” He looked back towards the other end of the barn, where that day’s fresh food waste was sitting. Unfortunately, something down there is quite often screwed up. By and large, the food waste dropped off at New Milford Farms contains a number of non-biodegradable materials. “It’s contaminated every day,” said Thibodeau.
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The contamination is most visible in the “spread,” the big pile of fresh waste that gets dumped at the entrance to the barn. Sitting in a pile was Yale’s delivery from Saturday. A mound about twenty feet wide and a foot thick, it was easily recognizable as coming from Yale. The scraps of food spilling out of the green compostable bags were not exactly recognizable, and even the plastic bottles and Styrofoam boxes could have come from anywhere. But peeking out of the pile was a smoking gun: an empty plastic bottle of Kedem Grape Juice, fresh from Shabbat Dinner at Slifka.
Sitting between the spread and one of the long rows of compost was a collection of metal forks and plastic cups, different mementos found by the workers who go through the food waste each day. Everything in the bin was covered in dirt, but Thibodeau picked one of the pieces up and dusted it off: it was unmistakably a Yale dining hall fork. Looking closer at the plastic cups, I noticed the distinctive texture of Yale’s cups. Almost everything in the bin was from Yale.
“On average, one out of every eight yards is contaminated,” said Thibodeau. Despite the meticulous logs he keeps of temperature, moisture, and other metrics, his eye does most of his measurements. The contamination comes in all shapes and sizes, from little fruit stickers to bottles to kitchen knives. “I’ve pulled out knives like this,” he said, holding his hands torso-width apart. “Big steak knives.”
It’s no surprise that so much of the contamination can be traced back to Yale: Thibodeau and Rafi Moura, the assistant plant manager at New Milford Farms, estimated that about a quarter of the waste the facility processes comes From trash to from the University. With that much coming from just one source, what gets thrown into Yale’s compost bins ends up having a noticeable impact on the final product coming out of New Milford Farms.
The actual impacts of scraping food (or, too often, non-food waste) into the compost bins are surprisingly complex. “I think a lot of people understand sustainability as very environmentally focused and limited to the recycling bin,” said Amber Garrard, the outreach coordinator for Yale’s Office of Sustainability. “It’s really so much more than that… it’s really about looking at the social, financial, and environmental impacts of what we’re doing in an interconnected way.”
One of those interconnected impacts ist the real environmental effects of Yale’s compost stream. The food students throw out must be brought to New Milford, a process that emits carbon dioxide from the truck exhaust. Once at the facility, real people have to pick through the compost to take out any contamination. And the final product not only returns nutrients to the soil, but enriches people’s lives by being used in gardens and landscaping.
The biggest unseen consequence of contamination is the effect on the people who work there. “We’re not robots,” said Thibodeau. New Milford Farms’ composting process is, on the whole, surprisingly unmechanized. There are no conveyor belts, laser sensors, or machines other than trucks and front-loaders.
But this human involvement in the processing and use of food waste elevates contaminants from simple nuisances to something more sinister. “They’re dangerous. They’re weapons,” said Thibodeau about some of the things, like glass and cutlery, that he’s pulled out of the compost. If something dangerous comes in with the food scraps, it can threaten both workers in the facility and the ultimate users of the compost.
“Picture this little piece of glass,” said Thibodeau. “It gets all the way through [the screening process], and when your mom opens her bag of compost in her garden, she cuts her finger… [The compost] gets in there, and they have to cut off the finger. That’s a lawsuit.” To Thibodeau, protecting the consumer is the most important part of making sure the compost is contaminant-free, even while he acknowledges that clean compost is “better for the planet and all that stuff.”
The first line of defense for consumers are workers like Julia Tenempaguay. She picks through the spread at the beginning of each day, before Thibodeau uses his front-loader truck to mix the fresh delivery of waste with the carbonrich plant material. Tenempaguay, who has worked at New Milford Farms for about a year, still wears a gas mask as she uses a pitchfork to open up the bags of new compost and look for contamination. She started this job after working for seven years in a scrap junkyard. I asked her if she liked sorting compost more. “They’re about the same,” she offered, then got to back to work, pulling pieces of plastic and glass out of the steaming piles.
The human labor that goes into producing pure, marketable compost is easily forgotten, and Jeff Jalbert, the outside plant manager for the facility, thinks that contributes to people’s carelessness in throwing non-compostable material in with their food scraps. “If they had any idea how nasty a job that can be, I think they’d be a lot more careful,” he said. “It’s a really nasty job.” The labor is difficult and takes time and money away from other tasks at the facility. And the spread is the most unpleasant looking part of the whole process, and certainly the smelliest. “Other workers in the facility, from the bagging end of something like that, come in for lunch… and they go, ‘no, I’m not eating my lunch next to you,’” said Jalbert of the workers who pick through the spread.
Sophie Freeman, ES ’18, a student worker with the Office of Sustainability’s Sustainability Service Corps (SSC), echoed the sentiment that, perhaps, if students were more aware of the human effects of improper composting, they might be more careful. “I think if… [people] see what’s happening there to the things they put as contamination into the compost, I think that would change their behavior. I really do,” she said.
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Preventing contamination is, according to John Gundlach, vice president of New Milford Farms’ parent company, Garick, “a matter of connection between the collection system and the education.” Compared to the other businesses that bring their waste to New Milford Farms (Whole Foods is another large contributor), Yale faces some of the biggest challenges in making that connection. While food manufacturers and grocery stores have a limited number of employees actually putting material into their bins and so can properly train them, Yale serves thousands of students, faculty, and staff breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.“That’s the challenge, especially with what Yale has. There’s so many people… it’s hard, it’s really hard,” said Gundlach.
In order to encourage a clean stream of organic material, New Milford Farms fines suppliers of food waste based on a visual assessment of how contaminated it is coming in. Yale has been facing these fines for a while, and currently pays $60/ton to send their waste to the facility. It would pay $87.50/ ton to send it to the New Haven Transfer Station, which handles municipal solid waste. The administration has a financial and public relations incentive to continue sending clean food waste to the facility, but they are not ultimately the ones putting things into the bins.
“I think it’s more the students,” said Thibodeau. “Just tell the kids to keep track of their stuff.” In light of the consistent fees and complaints from New Milford Farms for delivering contaminated compost, Yale’s Office of Sustainability tried to do just that. In the two weeks following spring break, the office had students monitor compost stations in each dining hall to make sure that students were properly disposing of their food waste and not putting trash or recycling into the compost bins. Freeman, who is the sustainability coordinator for Ezra Stiles, was one of the students who staffed the monitoring stations to engage with their peers about what composting is and how to do it properly.
“You’re going to get a lot of Yale students who say ‘Sure, I get climate change…’ But [from the clean compost campaign] it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares what they’re doing,” said Freeman. This disconnect between students’ understanding of larger issues and the real impacts of their actions perhaps isn’t that surprising. “A ton of people had no idea that they’re doing it for—or that it was for—any environmental reason,” said Freeman. “It just said ‘Take your food and put it in this bin,’ so they did.”
Kamya Jagadish, SM ’16, who works for the Office of Sustainability as the team leader for the college sustainability coordinators, was even more cynical in her analysis. “I think ultimately there is still that kind of divide between people who actually care and people who don’t.” For her, the key to addressing contamination in Yale’s compost lies not in broadening people’s understanding of larger environmental impacts but in making the task as simple as possible for people to follow. “It’s still going to just be following a task. Very few people are going to be actually thinking about the effects.”
Garrard, however, emphasized the power of connecting the issues to things people care about. “Helping people figure out why this is important in ways that relates to them, and what they think is important and valuable, is really key to having that effectiveness in messaging,” she said.
Regardless of whether the focus is on teaching students what to do while disposing of waste or how their actions tie into larger issues, it will have to be a sustained effort. “I think if it was a sustained campaign, then people would absolutely change their behavior,” said Freeman. “But if you do it once or twice and then leave… the vast majority of people will forget.”
Outside of that specific campaign, the Office of Sustainability aims to tackle these challenges through permanent signage in dining halls and on receptacles all over campus about what is recyclable, compostable, or trash. One of the most important aspects of producing material like this is finding the balance between messaging about how to dispose of waste sustainably and why it’s important. Garrard has had to deal with this issue in many different campaigns, from compost to recycling to dual-flush toilets. Any message delivered by the Office “has to be effective enough to tell you what to do, but also more importantly, why that’s important,” said Garrard.
This work is complimented by Yale Dining’s own initiatives. Arabelle Schoenberg, PC ’19, was part of Yale College Council’s Dining Hall Task force last semester. The group of six undergraduates spent the fall semester researching and compiling data on Yale’s dining halls in comparison to those of peer institutions. Schoenberg authored the section on Yale Dining’s sustainability initiatives. The report overall found that, while Yale Dining does highlight sustainability, there is still room for growth.
Sustainability at Yale Dining covers the whole food cycle, from sourcing to disposal. Yale prides itself on purchasing its food from sources that are sustainable, as defined by meeting one of four criteria listed on its website: “environmentally sensitive, humane, fair, and regional/local.” In the 2014-15 academic year, 39% of purchases met one of those criteria, and at least 18% met more than one; 60% of animal proteins could be classified as sustainable under those metrics. On the other end of the process, in 2013, Yale sent 1,200 tons of food waste to be composted at New Milford Farms, making up 16% of the total weight of the University’s waste stream. According to the Yale Dining website, over 95% of waste from the university’s dining halls and food service operations gets composted.
While these numbers are encouraging, Schoenberg is hesitant to declare victory. “The language they use is pretty vague,” she said. “Whether or not they’re really doing a good job, they’re spinning it to make it look better.” The report focused on the sourcing side of sustainability, but Schoenberg and the task force also looked into the disposal side of the operation. “We found that… there’s been big problems with the sorting of recycling and compost and trash.”
In their final report, the task force pointed out that “the configuration of waste receptacles in some dining halls creates confusion,” and called for “clear, organized waste management.” In an interview, Schoenberg reiterated how important that is: “I think student awareness could be a first step… making students aware of the resources that are set up…and making sure people are using them properly.”
It’s not just Yale that can feel the economic effects of contaminated compost. While New Milford Farms and its parent company Garick are, in one sense, a waste disposal operation, they are also “a manufacturing facility that’s making products for sale to customers,” said Gundlach, whose position forces him to think at a larger scale than Thibodeau and other workers at each specific facility. “We’re trying to run a business and that’s what makes it hard,” he said. “It makes it hard to run a business if your raw materials can be contaminated.” Even though the tipping fees help cover the extra labor costs associated with cleaning up the waste, any contamination that makes it past the workers can get into the final product and hurt the business.
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“There might be rats and cats here,” said Thibodeau, smiling at his fearlessness and my discomfort. We had entered the second barn, noticeably thinner and shorter, filled with only one row. Even as I looked around my feet for furry scavengers, there was something more pleasant about this barn. It hit me that I was breathing deeper; the smell of rotting food had gone and was replaced by that earthy scent that fills Home Depot’s Garden Center.
The barn we were in is the barrel room for New Milford Farm’s vintage of rotted food. After spending 30 days in the larger barn, the compost is sifted through a large machine that Thibodeau could only describe as an industrial-sized version of “that thing from baking class.” Once the sieve separates out the pieces of wood and any large contaminants that made it that far, the compost that passed through is transferred to this smaller barn, where it sits for about 90 days.
The floor is grooved, and vents in the grooves blow air through the compost pile to dry it out and stop the decomposition. This barn was cooler than the first, and there was no more dripping from the ceiling. Here, the compost dries, cools, and waits to be mixed with other soils and fertilizers and sold.
Thibodeau walked right up to the pile and, for the first time, set down his pitchfork. He walked right up and shoved his gloveless hand into the black slope, still dotted with those tenacious little fruit stickers. He fiddled with the compost as it fell through his fingers, the way a kid would with sand at the beach. I got closer to the pile and started to put my hand out. But I couldn’t do it. I looked at a pile of garden fertilizer, but all I could see was chicken tenders, roasted cauliflower, and the mashed potatoes I couldn’t finish at Sunday dinner. I pulled back my hand and instead leaned in to smell the pile of dirt Thibodeau was holding out to me.
It’s here that Gundlach’s grand view of the broader implications of composting can really be seen. “We have an environmental mission, and we also have a quality of life mission,” he said, referencing the company’s motto: “Enhancing people’s’ lives and the environment.” The soil and fertilizer mixes sitting in front of me prevent food waste from rotting and leaking methane in landfills, but their most visible effect is the flowers, grass, and trees that will grow from the nutrients its process recovers. “We are making products that are good for the environment, but it’s also for people,” said Gundlach. “We’re enhancing people’s lives because… they can improve what they see and live.”
It takes a lot for a plate of unfinished dining hall food to make it to someone’s garden and nourish a flower. There are 120 days, 40 miles, and a group of real people needed to complete the cycle and return Yale’s food to the earth. In the scheme of things, the few extra seconds it takes to throw the right things in the compost bins begin to seem pretty insignificant.