Local food is all the rage, but how do you affordably and conveniently get that food from the local farm to the local table? It’s a question a lot of people are asking — and one we at CLF Ventures (CLFV) are working to answer.

CLFV explored some emerging models that seek to connect small local farms to customers and allow these agricultural businesses to flourish. After all, farmers need to earn a living wage in order to keep growing the food we love to eat. We sent a survey to restaurants to better understand the experience of sourcing food directly from small, local farms and learned a lot about the opportunities and barriers for small farm businesses.

Some small farms have created Restaurant Supported Agriculture (RSA) models that mimic existing Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Generally, restaurants receive one box of food per week that contains substantially more food than a standard CSA share. However, the RSA model is not necessarily an ideal solution for small growers that want to sell food to restaurants. The typical restaurant purchasing model doesn’t match well with the typical small farm sales model. Additional insight from CLFV’s survey of local restaurants is shown in the infographic below.

Restaurants can be a great market for small farms because they are local and create steady demand. Innovative farmers and restaurateurs continue to seek ways to collaborate to their mutual benefit. However, the complexities of restaurant purchasing and the differences in menu selection and food preparation between restaurants complicate these contractual relationships.

Without innovative solutions it is likely that farm-to-restaurant partnerships will remain one-off endeavors rather than a stable market for small, local farms. That would inhibit growth in an area that we sincerely hope — for the sake of our environment, and our communities — will grow.

Burying our garbage in landfills is a waste of resources, but it’s also a convenient way to get rid of stuff we don’t need or want. If there were clear alternatives to trashing our resources, would we use them? The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) believes the answer is yes.

The DEP has finalized new rules that provide a permitting pathway for operations that process source separated materials – stuff like food waste or recyclable plastics that are not mixed with other wastes in the general trash stream. Source separated materials are distinguished from “waste”, so qualifying facilities will not be permitted as solid waste facilities. Previously a facility that sought to collect discarded material for recycling or some other reuse was considered a solid waste facility. This created barriers to the productive use of materials like food waste. The new regulations are a good step toward better management of our discarded materials.

Under the new rules, finalized November 23, DEP has created three size-based categories:

1. Small facilities (no permit required)
2. General permit facilities (certain activities permitted by-right)
3. Facilities that will require a new Recycling, Composting, and Conversion (RCC) permit

The good news is that these rules create a permitting pathway for anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities. AD is a process in which organic material, like food waste, is processed in an airtight container to create a gas similar to natural gas (high in methane). AD facilities can use the gas to fuel energy generators to create electricity and heat that can be used onsite or sold in the energy market.

AD facilities, if properly sited and appropriately operated, offer a win-win by managing food waste and generating a renewable gas for energy production. Rather than putting our food waste into a landfill where it does more harm than good, the energy in the food can be efficiency recovered for productive use.

“But what about composting?” you may be asking. DEP’s goals, as stated in the current draft Solid Waste Master Plan, include diverting 350,000 tons of organic waste per year from landfills. Some of this will be accomplished by AD facilities, but some diversion will be accomplished by composting. The new rules clarify which operations are permitted by DEP and which are permitted by the Department of Agricultural Resources (DAR).

Whether we create high quality fertilizers and soil amendments through composting, or energy and fertilizer through AD, we will be diverting organic material from landfill disposal. DEP’s new rules are a step in the right direction to better manage our resources for economic advantage and environmental gain.

Creative Commons image courtesy of BenandAsho on Flickr

We throw away a lot of food. Sometimes the scraps are inedible, like banana peels. Sometimes we forget about things in the refrigerator until we notice the smell. And sometimes our eyes are just bigger than our stomachs. Regardless of the reason, a lot of food scraps end up in our trash and ultimately the landfill. This is a wasted opportunity to realize environmental and economic benefits by using food scraps to improve soil health and generate renewable energy.

By diverting food scraps to other uses, such as generating energy and creating compost, we avoid the need to expand landfills in the state or transport waste long distances to out-of-state facilities. When food scraps and other organic matter decompose in landfills, they produce methane gas, a potent contributor to climate change. So diverting food scraps from landfills also helps us meet the state’s aggressive greenhouse-gas emission reduction goals.

To realize these benefits, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is supporting public and private investment in a new kind of infrastructure for managing organic materials. But for this new infrastructure to succeed, DEP and the project developers that will build and operate this infrastructure need to convince the public that food scraps are not garbage, but something else entirely.

The DEP is currently working on an action plan for managing Massachusetts’s organic waste. The state needs a plan, because it has set lofty goals to divert organic material from landfill disposal to be used in other processes. The state’s draft Solid Waste Master Plan calls for diverting 35% of food waste, estimated to be about 350,000 tons of material per year. This goal is echoed by the Clean Energy Results Program, which sets a further goal of 50 megawatts of installed capacity of renewable energy from aerobic and anaerobic digestion facilities by 2020. And let’s not forget the proposal to ban commercial food waste from Massachusetts landfills in 2014. These are great goals, because diverting organic material out of the solid waste stream provides opportunities for economic development that can improve the environmental impacts of solid waste management, and now DEP is developing the plan to make sure we get there.

The plan aims to ensure that organic “waste” isn’t wasted in a landfill. It calls for a few things:

• Gathering better and more current information about sources of food waste,
• Providing funding and technical assistance to work out the logistics of separating food waste from the actual trash, and
• Working with haulers to move this material to appropriate processing facilities.

There are also provisions for funding and technical assistance to facilitate the construction of additional processing infrastructure, like anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities, and to develop good markets for the resulting products.

Organics diversion presents an economic opportunity for cash-strapped municipalities to save money through reduced trash fees. It also allows developers – municipal or private – to generate revenue by using “waste” organics as inputs for marketable products like compost and other soil amendments and as a source of clean, renewable heat and electricity. At a time when municipal budgets are facing historic shortfalls and municipalities are seeking means of both cutting costs and creating revenue, this is surely a good thing.

DEP’s draft action plan is a progressive, proactive approach to organics management, but it’s missing something very important. It provides much-needed support and direction for people and organizations that are already proponents of better organic material management and will help project proponents navigate the technical and regulatory processes to achieve success. But what about the majority of people who likely have no idea that the DEP is interested in doing something dramatically different with organic waste?

This action plan and DEP efforts to date on this issue do little to address the very real need for public engagement and outreach to help citizens and businesses understand the good reasons for organics diversion. These include:

• Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through improved methane utilization;
• Generating renewable energy from anaerobic digestion; and
• Producing nutrient-rich soil amendments through composting.

The intersection of waste management and energy development is more complex than either of these individual business sectors taken on their own. For instance, energy facilities such as anaerobic digesters, which use “waste” materials as inputs to generate energy, face the siting hurdles typically encountered by both energy and waste facilities. Public concerns with other renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar, have emerged relatively recently, but communities and individuals have been fighting against landfills and transfer stations for a very long time.

Today, forward-thinking people and businesses are beginning to talk about “materials management” rather than “waste management,” and those on the inside know what we mean by that. But most people don’t currently make the distinction, especially when the materials in question are leftover food and other organics that can rot. In the case of a proposed anaerobic digestion facility, the result is often a contested siting process. While AD proponents see facilities that will produce clean energy and environmentally beneficial soil products, opponents are concerned about siting waste incinerators, trash transfer stations, and toxic sludge.

The DEP, along with other state agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy Resources, is pushing to change the way “waste” materials are managed in Massachusetts. This is a good thing for economic development and the environmental performance of our materials-based economy. However, many people will not readily accept the subtle changes in regulatory definitions that distinguish separated materials from mixed solid waste. With these changes, materials that formerly had to be permitted as solid waste (trash) and processed at a permitted solid waste facility are no longer legally considered trash, so they can be processed at a composting or AD facility without a solid waste permit. I’m very happy this distinction is being made for organic material, but I know that many other people will consider this just another form of garbage disposal.

An action plan to encourage better organic materials management through diversion to composting and digestion needs to include significant resources to engage stakeholders around the Commonwealth to have open and honest conversations about the wide-ranging benefits, the potential pitfalls, and what everyone needs to know to avoid problems.

There is no reason to continue to dump organic material into landfills and many reasons to get everyone on board with using this material to generate more economic value and more environmental benefits for Massachusetts. But we can’t just “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” on the permit applications; we have to engage with people and navigate the changes in a collaborative and productive way. Diverting organic material from landfills can lead to a host of economic, environmental, and community benefits, but anyone who thinks changing the system will be as easy as selecting a site, telling the neighbors about the benefits, and awaiting approval and praise is in for a rude awakening. CLF Ventures looks forward to working with communities and project proponents to engage in open, clear discussions of the real impacts and benefits of organics management facilities so that all stakeholders share the same understanding of the issues and speak with the same terminology.

In partnership with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), CLF Ventures recently released Land-based Wind Energy: A Guide to Understanding the Issues and Making Informed Decisions. (PDF, 1.6MB)

Wind energy has the potential to play a significant and beneficial role in an energy economy that seeks to rely less heavily on fossil-fuel based electricity production. For this reason, many communities are currently trying to learn more about wind energy development and determine whether it makes sense in their city or town.  Land-based Wind Energy provides municipal officials and other local decision-makers with clear overviews of wind energy siting issues as well as best practices for community engagement.

Specifically, the guide includes:

• Guidelines for how to assess the quality of available information and how to resolve conflicting points;
• Overviews, contextual information, and recommended reading on important topics like wind turbine sound, shadow flicker, health, property values, and energy project economics; and
• Recommendations on how to structure a robust local review process when siting wind energy projects. By this we mean a process with full participation by relevant stakeholders, transparent decision-making, and durable outcomes with public support.

Download the guide, and learn more about CLF Ventures.

So, what do we do? There’s no simple solution, but in Massachusetts the DEP is close to finalizing the revision for the Solid Waste Master Plan, with the intention of increasing the amount of waste diverted from landfills through more recycling and composting, and better all around materials management. The discussion also included the possibility of lifting a 20-year old moratorium on waste-to-energy facilities.

Today the Patrick Administration signaled a strong commitment to responsible resource management by announcing that the incinerator moratorium will stand and resources will begin to be managed more thoughtfully.

This is exciting news, because there are a lot of good options for responsible resource management that don’t involve traditional waste incineration. These include:

• Developing markets for recycled and reused materials, including building materials and asphalt as well as more traditional materials such as plastics, metals, and paper – a lot of our recyclables are currently bundled and sent to Canada and China rather than being processed and reused locally.
• Establishing state incentive programs to encourage the separation of organic material from the waste stream – organics decay in landfills and generate methane; food discards in particular are a valuable for compost and anaerobic digestion, and should not be equated with waste.
• Expanding organic material processing capacity in the form of properly managed composting operations and/or appropriately-sized anaerobic digestion facilities – Anaerobic digestion can be used for energy generation.
• Developing markets for organic material products, such as compost and other soil amendments – did you know the MWRA uses anaerobic digestion at Deer Island to process Boston area sewage, and subsequently processes the sludge into a fertilizer product?

Resource management solutions will need to protect environmental and human health, as well as be economically viable and socially acceptable.  Thankfully the Commonwealth appears to be on the right track.

Do our readers agree?

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your garbage goes once it gets picked up from your curb. What’s that? You don’t wonder about the final resting place or you trash and recyclables? Well you should, and now, thanks to the MIT SENSEable City lab, you don’t have to wonder at all; you can know.

Trash Track  is a process in which a tiny tracking chip is placed on a specific piece of regular waste. The MIT system can then track the location of the chip as it navigates the waste management system. You can see if that scrap of pressure-treated wood ends up in the landfill on the other side of the state or a barge to South Carolina; you can see if your old battery actually makes it to the proper disposal location; you can see if that yogurt container actually gets sent to the recycling facility. How awesome is that?! Surely I’m not the only person excited by this…

Waste management in the US is “out of sight, out of mind” for most people. But if we continue to generate as much waste as we do now, it is going to become less and less out of sight for more and more people, with myriad social justice implications as well as environmental and human health impacts.

Hopefully Trash Track is just the start of better public information about our waste system; information that will allow all of us to better understand the impact of our “consume and dispose” lifestyle. And like anyone with a background in philosophy and faith in humanity I know that this new knowledge will result in meaningful change…right?

Suppose knowledge is not sufficient to elicit change; what can we do? I’ll share some thoughts in my next post. Feel free to share thoughts of your own in the comments below.

Sage advice from Freddie Mercury.

There may be days when the air quality in urban areas is bad, but the summer is still a great time to get outside and ride a bicycle; to work, to the store, or just for fun. Doing so will also help improve the air quality, assuming you are biking instead of driving a car, and if you can find a decent route you should breeze past the gridlock and thereby avoid sitting in the car traffic, inhaling the exhaust of the vehicles around you. It will only get more pleasant as the temperature begins to cool during the fall months, and if your employer is a member of a Transportation Management Association you could even win prizes for riding your bike to work!

Boston is making a big effort to improve the cycling infrastructure by adding many miles of on-road bike lanes and many new bike racks. This will all serve to make biking safer and more convenient. In addition, the City is poised to rollout a city-wide bike sharing program in the near future. Soon, even if you don’t commute to work from home on a bike, you will still be able to make trips during the day by bike, all over the city.

Parallel to these efforts, MassBike is conducting an online survey regarding the behavior of cyclists and drivers. The results will hopefully help to shed light on issues that result in reasonable frustration as well as misplaced anger. Anyone who rides a bike or drives a vehicle in Massachusetts should take the survey.

When you’re done with the survey, turn off the computer and get outside! This Friday, August 28th, is the final BikeFriday event of the summer. It’s time to stop procrastinating and start enjoying your commute.

As my first post to the CLF Blogosphere I want to offer an alternative perspective on fostering environmental conservation and social justice, and I’m just going to say it: economics.

Allow me to introduce you to CLF Ventures, Inc., the non-profit consulting affiliate of the Conservation Law Foundation. CLF started Ventures in 1997 to foster creative, client-centered environmental solutions. At that time, CLF recognized that the challenges facing the environment could not be overcome through litigation and advocacy tools alone. This happened relatively early in the game, and was a pretty progressive move for an established environmental advocacy organization with the history and grassroots credibility of CLF.

Today, CLF Ventures provides a unique model for advancing environmental change—by implementing projects that have demonstrable environmental gain as well as economic advantage—and that complement the work of our advocacy colleagues. We use a unique combination of environmental, non-profit and community insights to help private and public organizations become more sustainable through the creation of effective risk assessment and collaborative stakeholder engagement strategies.  Our distinct value to clients is our ability to gain stakeholder and regulatory insights that are impossible for clients to collect on their own due to poor existing community relationships. Our value to the stakeholder community is our ability to bring our clients to the table under circumstances conducive to collaboration. We have a demonstrated record of successful outcomes wherein our clients and the community come to better understand each other’s values and needs.

This may sound like boilerplate consulting mumbo jumbo, but the point is critically valid: the world is complex and the world of environmental advocacy is more complex still. Very rarely are the issues black and white. While the best option to secure needed social and environmental protections may be legal advocacy, it is not the only option. Put another way, litigation is a hammer, and it’s a very effective tool for driving nails, but not every environmental problem is a nail. When an organization is making real changes to improve impacts on the surrounding community and environment, CLF Ventures will leave the hammer at home and load up the toolbox with other job-appropriate tools to help them succeed.

Let me step away from the confusion of a not-so-clever metaphor and be perfectly clear: before many others, CLF recognized that market-driven solutions can complement environmental advocacy. Twelve years on, CLF Ventures has successfully demonstrated that business interests are not incompatible with social and environmental interests, and that when given a chance, and proper guidance, partnerships with the private sector can provide leadership and innovation that benefits our economy, our community, and our environment.

There may always be a need for litigation and legal advocacy, but we at CLFV are grateful that CLF understands and supports our efforts to influence environmental change through markets and bottom lines as an alternative means to the same end.

Visit CLF Ventures online to learn more: www.clfventures.org