The Martha’s Vineyard Commission is looking to start an Island-wide task force to find a better way to handle waste on Martha’s Vineyard. 

The push for the task force comes in tandem with a report released by the commission outlining the current state of trash and recycling on the Island. Commission staff have been presenting the report to Island select boards in recent weeks, raising questions about how to reduce waste, save money and find better ways to recycle. 

“The world is changing,” Adam Turner, the commission’s executive director, told the Oak Bluffs select board at its Sept. 24 meeting. “We would like the towns to get ahead of it, so we’re not faced with choices we won’t necessarily want to make.”

Mr. Turner, Kate Warner, the commission’s regional energy planner who prepared the report, and Woody Filley, who contributed to the project, have visited every town except West Tisbury, which Ms. Warner says they plan to visit in the near future. 

Island Grown Initiative has stopped its composting program, potentially leading to more food waste going off-Island. — Ray Ewing

At the meetings, they explained the state of waste and recycling on the Vineyard and sought endorsements for the task force.

Solid waste is handled by two entities on the Island: the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District for Aquinnah, Chilmark, Edgartown and West Tisbury, and the two-town district for Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven.

According to the commission, an estimated 2,110 trucks full of waste— garbage, recyclables and construction waste— were taken off-Island last year. That's enough to take the space of 260 freight boats. 

Municipal solid waste, the regular garbage that gets thrown away at the dump, makes up the largest portion of waste going off-Island. By weight, municipal solid waste makes up about 60 per cent of last year’s waste stream. The commission estimated about 852 trucks of municipal solid waste left last year.

In addition to solid waste, the Steamship Authority said that 794 trucks full of recyclables left the Island, as well as an estimated 464 trucks of construction and demolition waste. Mr. Filley said that 216 truckloads of food waste were shipped off Island every year.

Municipal solid waste is normally taken to a facility in Wareham where it is incinerated. Ms. Warner emphasized both the financial and environmental impacts of shipping waste off-Island. According to the commission, waste is more often being shipped farther south and west, which will increase transportation costs.

“Solid waste and the shipping of trash both contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and shipping trash off-Island is expensive and not popular with our neighbors,” Ms. Warner told the Oak Bluffs select board.

The report also examined how the Island recycles, and the gaps in the current system. 

Both the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District and the two-town district collect recycling. The two-town district separates mixed paper and cardboard from the rest of the stream, takes them to other facilities and is able to get a higher value for them.

Ms. Warner wondered if there was a better way to handle the process, given the limited space on the Island. 

“How can we better handle the separating of materials? We have limited land area with which to process waste, whether for composting or separating various aspects of the waste stream to make it more valuable,” she told the Oak Bluffs select board.

One of the large looming questions is how the Island will handle food waste. Food scraps amount to about 6,500 tons of waste every year, and the Vineyard’s only composting program, run by Island Grown Initiative, closed in September after an eight-year run.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection says that commercial food waste cannot be thrown out by groceries and restaurants that produce a half ton or more food waste each week, and instead must be composted, recycled or otherwise reused or recycled. Melissa Hackney, the executive director of the Martha's Vineyard Vision Fellowship, told the Gazette this summer that local establishments will be exempt from the rule due to the lack of a centralized facility. Mr. Filley told the Oak Bluffs select board that creating a composting program makes sense for the Island because there is a demand from landscapers, farmers and gardeners for compost on-Island.

The commission highlighted several ways to reduce the waste produced by the Island, including composting and crushing and tumbling glass waste for re-use on sub-roadways, a process underway in the Cape Cod town of Dennis. At the presentation before the Oak Bluffs select board meeting, Mr. Filley suggested that hiring a waste consultant could help the Island discover the best practices moving forward.

“We can get all of the stakeholders together for handling waste on the Island,” he said. “That group could also then select a consultant and get us ready for the future.” 

The full report on Martha’s Vineyard solid waste can be found on the commission’s website.