9/24 Say NO to corporate control over food waste streams!
New solid waste rules on how Vermont regulates food scrap separation - there’s still time to raise your voice!
For more than a decade, Rural Vermont has worked to ensure Vermont recognizes food scraps as a valuable resource—not garbage. We will stay deeply involved in implementing Vermont's 2014 Universal Recycling Law, which requires everyone who generates food scraps to keep them separate from trash and recycling where they are created. In law, this is known as the source separation requirement.
Vermont law also establishes a statutory organics management hierarchy that prioritizes using food scraps to feed people, then livestock, and finally to produce compost and other soil-building products over other management options. These priorities were hard-won and recognize that food scraps have economic and environmental value when managed close to where they are produced.
Despite these legal priorities, Vermont's waste system does not currently prevent large waste companies such as Casella Waste Systems from collecting mixed and separated wastes and using mechanical depackaging or “depack” technology, the industrial equipment that mechanically separates organic material from outer containers, to separate food scraps at centralized facilities instead of supporting on-farm composting and livestock feed systems.
In 2022, Rural Vermont - as part of the Protect Our Soils Coalition - helped pass Act 170, Section 27, directing the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) to undertake rulemaking for depackaging facilities. This rulemaking gives ANR the authority to set requirements and restrictions for facilities like Casella's Williston operation, including limiting the processing of source-separated food scraps so those materials can be managed under Vermont's organics management hierarchy and remain available to farmers and composting operations.
ANR is expected to release its proposed rule for public comment soon. Before an agency publishes a draft rule for public comment, it always consults with relevant stakeholders about their priorities for the rule. ANR published its draft solid waste management rule earlier this year, and our coalition provided public comments expressing appreciation for ANR’s direction in the draft rule to ensure the existing statutory requirements of source separation and the organics management hierarchy are implemented. The public comments Casella submitted are also online, and seek to remove key provisions from ANR’s draft rule - those that had been included to specifically protect farmers' and composters’ access to food waste. Now, the 2026 Solid Waste Management rule is in jeopardy and possibly will no longer restrict centralized corporate waste management when it’s final, undoing relevant provisions in the law as well as the work of a multi-year stakeholder input process. The Protect Our Soils Coalition is working to ensure that neither diversified farms nor municipal and community composting operations continue to be disadvantaged by market consolidation, and that the existing law is implemented successfully.
Research shows that:
“Depack” facilities are likely contributing to the significant microplastic and PFAS compost contamination we’re already seeing. More in a UVM study on microplastics in food waste streams here.
“Depack” facilities already significantly shift Vermont’s organic waste market away from composting operations, causing major contract losses and revenue declines for existing local operations.
Did you know? Farming nationwide generates twice the gross domestic product of the waste industry, but its revenue is split across over two million independent farms, while the corporate waste management sector concentrates the industry's value in a tight nationwide oligopoly and regional monopolies (WasteDive; USDA Economic Research Service). Expanding opportunities for farms to compost pre- and post-consumer food scraps and responsibly feed suitable scraps to poultry can diversify farm income, improve soil health, and strengthen Vermont's agricultural future. Support matters for businesses like Black Dirt Farm, Sunrise Farm, Vermont Compost Company, and many other community composters who help close nutrient loops and build healthy soils.
Stay tuned for upcoming action alerts on this issue!
Want to learn more and get involved? Contact caroline@ruralvermont.org