Sign up for the Today newsletter
Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.
New Hampshire
Solving New Hampshire’s food waste problem one step at a time | Manchester Ink Link
Story Produced by
RELATED STORY: What the science says about food waste
Joan Cudworth had a burst of show-and-tell inspiration in the summer of 2018.
Cudworth, who was then solid waste supervisor for the town of Hollis, came to the select board meeting with a partial solution to tackle the rising costs of trash disposal. She wanted town leaders to fast-track a pilot program to cut down on the amount of food waste being sent to landfills.
“We were looking to reduce trash and taxes,” Cudworth said. “I knew it was a small step. but it was important to get buy-in from the select board.” Cudworth composed at her home and learned how little trash remained after the composting and recycling. She came to the meeting with a transparent, medium-sized bowl containing a week’s worth of food scraps from her house – lettuce, strawberry and radish tops, fruit scrapes, rice, egg shells, cucumber and potato peels. The show-and-tell worked.
“I remember people were fascinated by the possibilities,” Cudworth said. The select board immediately approved money for two Department of Public Works employees to attend the Maine Compost School. By 2019, the pilot program was up and running and collecting around 50 pounds of food waste a week (local schools were already running their own compost programs) at the transfer station. Residents who stopped by were greeted by a composting mascot named “Packalina.”
Cudworth, who became the public works director in 2020, says the total of food waste collected now tops 200 pounds weekly. That may not seem like a lot but, like compound interest, it adds up – to 10,400 pounds annually, which means that the town of about 8,000 residents has diverted more than five tons of food waste from landfills while decreasing climate-harming methane production from food waste fermenting in landfills.
“We are still experimenting and still learning. We don’t know how many are coming to the transfer station or how many residents know about the program,” Cudworth said.
Food waste a state priority
Paige Wilson, waste reduction and diversion planner at the NH Department of Environmental Services, has been busier than normal since the state passed its first food waste ban last summer. The law will go into effect on Feb. 1, 2025. It is focused on entities that generate as much as one ton of food waste a week. That food waste will be prohibited from being sent to landfills. Over the past decade, lawmakers in the nearby states of Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut have enacted varying levels of food waste disposal bans.
“Food waste is something we all have in common, and composting is a low-hanging-fruit solution,” Wilson said.
It’s also a solution that needs a major expansion of infrastructure. Wilson is the education outreach and planning person, and her job is to assist commercial and municipal organizations, so she sees firsthand that food waste diversion in New Hampshire needs a major expansion of public and private infrastructure for a more sustainable path.
“There are a lot of factors that go into a sustainable (food waste diversion) program: budgeting, staffing, feasible space” for larger-scale composting, she said.
Another issue will be addressed in the coming year. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that state residents put more than 180,000 tons of food waste into landfills — about 24 percent of all waste. But no on-ground studies have been done to better approximate the actual amount. Wilson said more comprehensive studies have been funded and will be launched – by literally sorting through trash.
“We’ve never had a state (food waste) characterization study on the amount of food. We will do one now by literally hand-sorting through 250 pounds of waste to get data,” Wilson said. Because the state has made food waste a priority, a diverse constituency of summer camps, municipalities, hospitals, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and any organizations that generate food waste has heard the call and reached out to find out what they can do.
“What you are seeing is a huge resurgence of interest in solid waste and recycling,” said Rep. Karen Ebel, D-New London, the prime sponsor of the bipartisan food waste ban legislation and chair of the state’s Solid Waste Working Group. “I feel like we are making progress.”
In particular, she said, it was a positive step that 50 percent ($500,000) of the state’s Solid Waste Municipal Fund appropriated by the legislature to food diversion efforts will include staffing and grants.
The cost of infrastructure
It’s not easy to come up with a solid estimate on the cost of building out a food waste recovery infrastructure.
According to Paige Wilson, “New Hampshire will need infrastructure investments all along the food recovery chain, but the costs vary so much depending on where you’re at in the chain. The price tag for buying a refrigerator at a food bank looks different than the costs of purchasing equipment at a composting facility. I’d say it’s going to take millions of dollars to build the needed infrastructure across New Hampshire, in order to reach our disposal reduction goals set in statute (25 percent reduction in landfill solid waste by 2030 and 45 percent reduction by 2050).”
Reagan Bissonnette, executive director of the Northeast Resource Recovery Association, agreed that it will cost millions, but patience, innovation and more legal requirements will be needed.
“Infrastructure money is not enough. Other states have found that without a landfill ban on some food waste in place, it’s difficult to have enough food waste supply to make an investment in infrastructure financially viable in the long term,” she said. “An example is the Waste Management Core facility in Massachusetts. Even with a statewide food waste ban in place, it took longer than they expected to get enough supply from businesses and others to get the facility operating at capacity.”
Vermont, said Wilson, is “a New England state to learn from because they’re in a territory right now that is unknown to the rest of us. A statewide food waste disposal ban that applies to everyone comes with a lot of learning curves, new systems, and innovation.”
Over the years, said Bissonnette, Vermont has implemented tiered food waste disposal bans over time. They started with banning disposal of food waste from large generators of waste (like hospitals and universities), then slowly lowered the generation amount until all food waste, even from residential homes, cannot be landfilled.”
Making composting work
At its Kingman Farm research facility, the University of New Hampshire in Durham has one of the largest compost-creating operations in the state, and it has been operating since the mid-1990s. Colleen Stewart at the New Hampshire Food Alliance (which is part of the UNH Sustainability Institute), said UNH had one of the first campus compost programs in the country. In 2023, UNH dining halls sent 386,260 pounds of food pulp to Kingman Farm composting rows, which creates nutrient-rich soil. That soil is used by students to create crops for some of the produce served at UNH dining halls.
In a June 2023 UNH Today article detailing the composting program, Anton Bekkerman, director of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station at Kingman Farm, said, “the program here at UNH really highlights that even without large investments into infrastructure and labor that a composting program can be implemented by the Granite State’s smallest towns and village to ultimately reduce waste and provide a nutrient-rich additive to gardens and farms.”
The topic of food waste diversion was front and center during two days of workshops in April hosted by the Northeast Resource Recovery Association. Bissonnette said her Epsom-based organization has been targeting food waste diversion for the past five years, in addition to more than four decades of recycling educational efforts. She said about 50 people from municipalities and businesses from across the state attended the four workshops, which were co-hosted by the N.H. Department of Environmental Services and the Maine Compost School.
Bissonnette said among the many points covered at the workshops – which were free, courtesy of a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant – participants learned a few surprising truths about food waste:
- Most wasted food is generated by households (almost 43 percent), not manufacturers or retailers.
- In 2022, roughly 38 percent of the U.S. food supply went unsold or uneaten.
- Preventing wasted food has a bigger positive environmental impact than composting wasted food.
“One town concluded that they need to send a mailer to their entire town to effectively get out the word about their existing composting program,” she said.
The topic of food waste diversion will be the focus of a keynote panel at the NRRA annual conference in Concord in June. Later this year, she said, NRRA will conduct its first bus tour focused on waste diversion programs at various landfills and transfer stations.
Citizen involvement
Not unlike Joan Cudworth in Hollis, Paul Karpawich was inspired to do something positive to tackle the climate change crisis as a lone citizen.
“I feel that people can be overwhelmed about climate change,” said Karpawich, who had migrated north from Massachusetts and was living in the southern New Hampshire town of Brookline when he began looking at the bigger picture of long-term sustainability. The veteran of the high-tech industry said he “kind of gravitated” to food waste diversion in part because “food waste is so prevalent in our society,” and it was something everybody could do.
Karpawich had no title and few contacts, but he persevered, and in 2022 created the New Hampshire Food Waste Diversion and Sharing Initiative with the help of small grants from the World Wildlife Fund and U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program is a collaborative effort between individuals, schools and towns to develop best practices that reduce food waste and prevent it from going to landfills.
More importantly, he focused on elementary and secondary school students to get them involved early. “By taking small concentrated steps this can be a catalyst for students, schools and towns to create a long-lasting paradigm shift for a transition to a more sustainable future,” he said. He has seen the impact of schools institutionalizing their efforts, with a few school boards allocating budget funds for the pickup of composting loads.
The initial success of the program has led to more grants and increased ability to jump-start food waste diversion programs at schools. The initiative has spread from the elementary school in Hollis, the first participant, to schools in Northwood, Bethlehem, Hopkinton (where Karpawich now lives) and others. He said the educational aspects of the program (math, science and environmental awareness) have been matched by a remarkable level of dedication by students who get involved.
“When kids do this, they are very present, not looking at their phones. I have seen at the elementary and high school levels that they become very passionate and take ownership of the programs at their schools,” he said.
Find out more: NRRA offers a Waste Reduction and Diversion Toolkit, a list and links to almost 20 municipalities offering food diversion and composting programs, and a list of farms and pick-up services serving New Hampshire.
The EPA is awarding between $10 million and $20 million in Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change grants for multi-faceted projects addressing a range of pollution, climate change, and other priority issues, including food waste diversion. This application period goes through November.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
New Hampshire
Possible 2028 Democratic White House contenders weigh in on Iran with New Hampshire voters
As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran overtakes the foreign policy debate in Washington, two Democratic governors with potential 2028 presidential aspirations — Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear — recently traveled to New Hampshire, introducing themselves to the state’s famously engaged voters. The two weighed in on the war and both criticized and questioned President Trump’s strategy and endgame.
“If a president is going to take a country into war, and risk the lives of American troops and Americans in the region, he has to have a real justification and not one that seems to change every five to 10 hours,” Beshear told CBS News after a Democratic fundraiser in Keene.
“This President seems to use force before ever trying diplomacy, and he has a duty to sell it to the American people and to address Congress with it,” Beshear continued. “He hasn’t done any of that. In fact, it appears there isn’t even a plan for what success looks like. He’s gone from regime change to strategic objectives and now is talking about unconditional surrender, which isn’t realistic where he is.”
Beshear also said he thought that Congress should have reined in Mr. Trump’s war powers.
“He is trying to ignore Congress. He’s trying to even ignore the American people,” Beshear said.
He went on to note that the president’s State of the Union address took place “three — four days before he launched this attack,” and Mr. Trump “didn’t even have the respect to tell the American people the threat that he thought Iran posed to us.”
Last week, both the House and the Senate failed to pass resolutions to limit Mr. Trump’s war powers and stop him from taking further military action against Iran without congressional support.
For Newsom, the war with Iran constitutes part of a broader criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At an event last Tuesday in Los Angeles, Newsom had compared Israel to an “apartheid state.” Later, in New Hampshire, he sought to clarify his comment.
“I was specifically referring to a Tom Friedman [New York Times] column last week, where Tom used that word of apartheid as it relates to the direction Bibi is going, particularly on the annexation of the West Bank,” Newsom explained during a book tour event Thursday night in Portsmouth. “I’m very angry, with what he is doing and why he’s doing it, what he’s going to ultimately try to do to the Supreme Court there, what he’s trying to do to save his own political career.”
Friedman wrote that at the same time that the U.S. and Israel are prosecuting a war in Iran, within Israel, Netanyahu’s government has undertaken efforts to annex the West Bank, driving Palestinians from their homes; fire the attorney general who is leading the prosecution against Netanyahu for corruption; and block the government’s attempt to establish a commission to examine the failures that led up to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews by Hamas.
CBS News has reached out to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment.
On Iran, Newsom said, “I’m very angry about this war, with all due respect, you know, not because I’m angry the supreme leader is dead. Quite the contrary. I’m not naive about the last 37 years of his reign. Forty-seven years since ’79 — the revolution,” Newsom said. “But I’m also mindful that you have a president who still is inarticulate and incapable of giving us the rationale of why? Why now? What’s the endgame?”
Many attendees at Newsom’s book event said that the situation in Iran is a top-of-mind issue for them, too. Some said they’re “horrified” by what is happening.
29-year-old Alicia Marr told CBS News she decided to attend Newsom’s event because of his social media response to the war with Iran.
“There was one spot left, and I decided to pick it up, and it was due to his response to the war, that it is just unacceptable, and I would agree with that,” Marr said.
While some voters like Marr are eager to hear about where potential candidates stand on foreign policy, many at Newsom’s event said they care most about how potential candidates plan to address domestic issues.
“I’m more focused on getting the middle class back on track and fighting the oligarchy, and I’m less invested in international issues,” said Anita Alden, who also attended Newsom’s event,
“I wouldn’t call myself America first, but we have so many problems at home that are my priority,” she told CBS News.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who may also be weighing another White House bid, told Fox 2 Detroit last week that she “unequivocally opposes” the Trump administration’s military action in Iran and urged Congress to take action.
“If we want to stop Donald Trump with this random decision that he has arrived at, then Congress must act, and Congress must act immediately. The American people do not want our sons and daughters to go into this unauthorized war of choice,” Harris said.
Mr. Trump has lashed out against Democrats who have pushed back on his Iran strategy, calling them “losers” last week and arguing that they would criticize any decision he made on Iran.
“If I did it, it’s no good. If I didn’t do it, they would have said the opposite, that you should have done this,” the president said.
Local News
Police say the Attleboro man was driving 104 mph in a 55 mph zone on Route 202 near in Rindge, New Hampshire.
A Massachusetts man was arrested late Wednesday night after police say he was driving more than 100 mph on a New Hampshire roadway.
Officers with the Rindge Police Department stopped a vehicle shortly after 11 p.m. on Route 202 near Sears Drive in Rindge following a report of a car traveling at excessive speed, according to a statement from Chief Rachel Malynowski.
The vehicle, a 2020 Kia Stinger, was spotted traveling at 104 mph in a posted 55 mph zone, Malynowski said.
The driver, a 21-year-old man from Attleboro, was arrested and charged with reckless operation of a motor vehicle, according to police.
He is scheduled to be arraigned April 5. If convicted, the man faces a fine of at least $750, in addition to the court’s penalty assessment, and a 90-day license suspension, Malynowski said.
Idaho5 minutes ago
Grocery Outlets to close in Idaho Falls, Pocatello after company announces poor earnings – East Idaho News
Illinois12 minutes ago
Central Illinois could see tornadoes tonight. How to sign up for alerts
Indiana17 minutes ago
Severe storm risk into tonight through early Wednesday morning
Iowa24 minutes ago
NCAA Wrestling Championships at-large bids announced
Kentucky36 minutes ago
Glendale, KY, residents mourn death of solider killed in Iran conflict
Florida1 year ago
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Connecticut2 years ago
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
Oregon2 years ago
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
Virginia2 years ago
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana2 years ago
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
News5 hours ago
Map: 2.3-Magnitude Earthquake Reported North of New York City
Politics6 hours ago
Trump stirs GOP primary drama with visit to Massie’s Kentucky home turf
World7 hours ago
Israeli air strike targets building in south Lebanon
News7 hours ago
Ed Martin, outspoken Justice Department lawyer, is formally accused of ethical violations | CNN Politics
Politics18 hours ago
Trump reveals top issues GOP should focus on to secure midterms victory: ‘I’ve never been more confident’
-
Wisconsin1 week agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
-
Massachusetts1 week agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
-
Maryland1 week agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Pennsylvania5 days agoPa. man found guilty of raping teen girl who he took to Mexico
-
Florida1 week agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Sports6 days agoKeith Olbermann under fire for calling Lou Holtz a ‘scumbag’ after legendary coach’s death
-
Detroit, MI4 days agoU.S. Postal Service could run out of money within a year
-
Miami, FL6 days agoCity of Miami celebrates reopening of Flagler Street as part of beautification project