It’s a Friday afternoon and the blue compost bucket at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School is filled with scraps of lunch, a slurry of potatoes, scrambled eggs and salad that will soon feel and smell like soil.
This spring, the charter school installed a food waste recycler, a machine that processes food scraps into a soil additive. Other institutions are close behind them, including multiple schools and four Island towns.
At the Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah town meetings in April and May, residents overwhelmingly approved funding for municipal food waste recyclers which will soon be installed at town transfer stations and local drop offs. Edgartown is also applying for a state-grant to install a recycler at its transfer station.
While dozens of other municipalities in Massachusetts have composting programs, the Island’s towns are among the first in the state to vote for municipally-owned and operated food waste recyclers, helping to fill the vacuum of food waste management in the absence of large-scale, permanent composting solutions on the Island.
“It’s no secret that we need this,” said Sakiko Isomichi, the climate resilience planner at the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
Food waste makes up 34 per cent of all waste produced on the Vineyard, and some estimates put that number even higher, according to a 2017 study on Island food waste management commissioned by the MV Vision Fellowship, a Vineyard nonprofit that funds environmental and social sustainability initiatives.
With no current Island composting program, food waste is shipped off Island where it is buried or incinerated with other trash. Food decays much faster than other waste, releasing methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — often before gas collection systems are in place to mitigate impacts.
After carrying waste off Island, trucks return with compost, which is in high demand from local farms. The on/off Island food waste exchange has prompted those involved to pose the question for years: Why can’t food waste be processed locally?
“Why are we paying to ship it off and have it taken care of?” said Woody Filley, former director of the MV Organics Recovery Committee.
The committee piloted a composting program at Island Grown Initiative (IGI) in 2018, where residents and businesses could drop off their food waste to be composted and put back into the soil. The program, which ended in September 2024, was designed as a pilot with the hopes that other entities would centralize food waste management and allow IGI to return to other activities, said Sophie Mazza, community food waste director at IGI. But once the program shut down, the demand for food waste management efforts continued.
“We just received call after call from people in every town on the Island, being like, ‘Where can I bring my food waste now?’” Ms. Mazza said.
The recyclers are “a nice sort of replacement of what IGI was running,” said Ms. Isomichi. “At least for residential [food waste] it brings one solution, rather than none.”
Town administrators are in the beginning of the process of purchasing the food waste recyclers, which will cost anywhere from $40,000 to $75,000 apiece, and it will be months before the machines start running. Towns must first put the machines out to bid and then wait for them to be shipped here. Chilmark can’t start that process until the fiscal year begins in July, town officials told the Gazette.
It took the charter school over a year to receive and install its machine, which included pouring a slab of concrete, hooking up the electric and constructing a three-season structure around it (the last item has yet to happen).
The electricity to run and maintain the machines is expected to cost about as much as it does to currently ship food waste off-Island, and multiple local drop-offs use solar energy to power their facilities, Ms. Mazza said at the town meetings.
Once installed at local drop-offs and transfer stations, residents will be able to drop off their food scraps.
The machines will then cycle the food waste, dehydrating it with heat and breaking it down with heat-resistant microbes, processing the material into a soil additive that can then be distributed to residents or businesses.
It’s a process that has already been underway at the charter school since March. Every day after school, the two student “compost coordinators” weigh and record the material, then cart the blue buckets filled with food scraps in a wagon to the recycler around the side of the school.
The students, senior Augie Warner and junior Christian Hayes, dump the remains of lunch into the top of the machine and press a button, turning it on to mix for 10 minutes.
“It’s not that fragile,” said kitchen coordinator Betsy Carnie, who has been facilitating composting efforts at the school for years. Whole chicken carcasses have been processed in the machine, and anything that doesn’t break down — like mango pits or beef bones — simply comes out the other side.
“The convenience factor which makes it doable is amazing,” she said. “It’s super easy to use — the students are running it.”
For every 100 pounds of food waste, the students run the machine for 24 hours, processing the waste and reducing its volume. Once enough product accumulates inside the machine, the students extract it.
A month of running the machine, loading it with about 40 pounds of food waste every day, has produced three buckets of the dry, soil-like product, dark brown with a rich, chocolatey coffee-like smell.
The additive is currently curing in the school’s greenhouse, where it will remain for three weeks. Then, it can be combined with soil in a one-to-four ratio as a nutrient-rich amendment or supplement. The charter school’s output will go into its garden and food forest, and any extra can go to farms or to students’ families.
Staff and community members may eventually be able to drop off their own food waste as well. The school intentionally purchased a machine large enough to handle double the charter school’s food waste.
“The only question I do have is, is it enough?” said Ms. Carnie of the recyclers’ installation across the Island. “Is it enough for the demand? Can we accommodate all of the food waste? And if not, what’s the answer to that?”
Affiliates of the MV Vision Fellowship and the MVC are still hoping to build a large, indoor composting system that would handle thousands of tons of food waste a year. This would be a key component of the Island’s food waste initiatives as a state-wide deadline for commercial food waste reduction approaches.
In Massachusetts, restaurants and businesses with more than one half ton of organic waste a week are required to reuse, recycle or compost that output. By 2030, that threshold will likely be reduced, tightening the limits on commercial food waste disposal.
A large-scale composting facility would require a three- to five-acre site along a fairly major route on the Island, and would have to jump through the municipal hoops of zoning and public approval, said Mr. Filley.
“Our biggest challenge, and it has been for quite a while, is to find a site to house something like this,” he said.
“It just, sadly, hasn’t come far along when it comes to commercial [composting],” said Ms. Isomichi.
Ms. Mazza pointed out that large-scale, commercial composting is still only one part of the puzzle, “as is redirecting food waste to people, to animals and reducing food waste overall,” she said.
“These recyclers just seemed like a good fit for the transfer stations and for residents to be able to come and process food waste at that scale,” said Ms. Mazza. “They’re compact, they’re very low labor, they don’t have the carbon inputs that are required for more traditional composting.”
The regional high school and Chilmark school recently installed food waste recyclers and will soon be following the lead set by the charter school, and Ms. Mazza is working wi
th the remaining schools on similar projects. She will also support the towns as they work towards installing their own food waste recyclers.
For Ms. Carnie, the question remains whether the recyclers will encourage future food waste management efforts such as waste reduction, diversion and composting.
“Will this build awareness and momentum to bring us to the next, bigger answer that we do still need?” said Ms. Carnie over the hum of the charter school’s machine. “Or will it detract us from striving for a bigger, better, more complete answer? I don’t know.”
Ms. Isomichi said this may depend on how well nonprofits work with public entities.
“Unless they really collaborate well, things like waste management falls to the wayside,” she said. “Towns are under-resourced. How do we want to manage things that we need?”
As far as food waste management goes, for Ms. Carnie it is a matter of recognizing when “perfect prevents good,” she said.
“This is a good solution,” said Ms. Carnie. “And maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but if we’re holding out for perfect, and in the meantime throwing…our waste into the trash, we can do better than that.”
This article appears in May 22, 2026.
Provide or show how to bring food waste with garbage…. Most people do a run once a week help them know how to bring food waste easily with no mess…. What will happen to the great compost soil? Can it be bought for our gardens at our home or send it home free if you bring in your food waste?
Looks like we’re going full circle as when I grew up, we had a hole in the ground with a metal bucket in it that we threw all our food waste in and once a week, the pig farmers came by and took all that food. I’m sure that whole program ended because of some government health agent or other bureaucratic reasons. But that worked for a long time.
This is certainly done with good intentions. If your tease out the cost of the machines, the time related the infrastructure required as well as utility cost. This is just another shiny example of why it’s so expensive to live here. Not to mention expert testimony at the MV Commission by the field fund has told us very clearly septic tanks and compost two of the largest places to find PFAS.