Coming Back for Seconds: Massachusetts’s Waste Ban Could Be Left to Rot Without Enforcement

State mandates are not sufficient to save residents from consequences of consumption

Ellie Bloom

With more than one million tons of organic waste tossed into Massachusetts landfills each year, rotting food has become a major source of greenhouse gas. Food waste releases methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. 

It’s not just polluting the environment; food waste is also taking up a lot of space in the state’s landfills, comprising 25 percent of all garbage. 

As landfills fill up at an alarming rate, a new food waste ban, passed by the MA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in November, was designed to divert organic waste to feed people and animals, or turn into compost. 

The ban is part of DEP’s 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan to reduce waste statewide by 30 percent by the end of the decade, and 90 percent by 2050. When it was passed, Zero Waste Massachusetts heralded it as “an important step towards reducing waste in the Commonwealth.”

But the DEP has failed to enforce its own recommendations, leading to a high rate of noncompliance. 

Considering that 40 percent of materials that end up in landfills have already been banned from disposal, the DEP could go a long way in achieving its waste reduction goals by simply enforcing the bans already in place–more than 2.2 million tons per year. As an astounding amount of food continues to head for landfills, will policymakers be able to enforce the ban before residents drown in their own garbage?

The new ban 

The DEP responded to the state’s landfill issues by implementing a waste ban in tiers, the first of which affected large institutions such as hospitals, universities, and hotels, in 2014. To comply with the ban, these entities had to reduce their excess supply by donating unused food to food banks or to farms for use as animal feed or compost. Businesses could also contract with a hauler to have it transported to an anaerobic digester facility, which uses the waste to produce fertilizer or generate renewable energy.

The 2022 DEP ban cut the allowable waste in half, mandating that businesses dispose of no more than a half-ton of organic waste per week, affecting more than 2,000 additional businesses–largely restaurants.

Concerned that few would comply without enforcement, environmental groups, including the Clean Water Fund, MASSPIRG Education Fund Policy, and the Conservation Law Foundation, formed the Zero Waste Massachusetts Coalition which produced the report, Need to Enforce: Waste Bans in Massachusetts. 

According to the report, from 2014 to 2019, the DEP supervised an average of 164 inspections per year, a tiny fraction of the 1,700 businesses subject to the ban. Even with sparse inspections, the DEP discovered a high rate of noncompliance. Inspectors issued 39 notices and just three fines amounting to less than $5,000.

Janet Domenitz, MASSPIRG’s executive director, who works on zero waste issues and sits on the Solid Waste Advisory Committee of the DEP and is part of the Zero Waste Massachusetts Coalition, says that the history of enforcement has been “pretty thin.” A lack of enforcement sends a contradictory message to businesses the law was designed to regulate. 

That’s by design, says John Fischer, the branch chief for Commercial Waste Reduction and Waste Planning at MassDEP, who explains that the DEP is deliberately avoiding taking a punitive approach. “With a waste ban like this we don't expect to get to 100% compliance on day one,” Fischer says. Instead, he says that they’re focusing on educating businesses “over the coming weeks and months to make sure they know about the waste ban and then make sure they have the assistance and information they need to set up programs to comply.”

For example, Fischer notes, the DEP funds RecyclingWorks, a recycling assistance program designed to help businesses reduce their waste disposal. He explains that through this program, “we are saying [to businesses] that there are a lot of different ways you can comply, and we'll work with you to try to figure out what's the most cost-effective solution for you.”

But systemic problems will always prevent compliance, says Matthew Lillie, Marketing Communications Associate at Vanguard Renewables, an anaerobic digester facility. He says that while “food waste has the potential to do a lot of good,” Massachusetts does not have the infrastructure in place to tackle the logistics of waste disposal. Instead, the state needs proper waste receptacles to collect food waste and a better system of waste transport by haulers. 

Restaurant waste is particularly problematic, Lillie adds, because it needs to be separated from contamination. “You have to bring it to a facility, like our de-packaging facility, in order to make sure that you're not then putting a bunch of plastic into an anaerobic digester or bio compost.”

An even bigger obstacle to compliance, Lillie points out, is that “restaurants have no idea whether they fall under [the ban].” And even if they do, he says, they don’t take the law seriously. “They made it seem like they did not care.”

The problem may be financial. Restaurants often operate on razor-thin margins, which makes voluntary compliance a tough sell. Stephen Hopkins, owner of Blue Jeans Pizza ​​in Worcester, told the Worcester Telegram, “As a businessman, I hate [the ban] because it will create added cost.” 

But Lillie has heard that before. “I don't think restaurants are going to feel compelled to comply until they are really mandated to pay extra for lack of compliance,” he says.

The consequences of trashed food

When food waste is mismanaged it is a major polluter. Incinerators emit more carbon dioxide and toxic pollution per unit of electricity than coal-fired power plants. 

Domenitz explains that incinerating food is “the dirtiest, most expensive, inefficient way to make energy.” She says the DEP needs to work with lawmakers to implement infrastructure for collection bins and hauling. “Like anything else,” she says, “unless there's infrastructure, then it's set up to fail.”

Lillie agrees: “It's very easy to point criticism towards the lack of enforcement, but enforcing this is really hard and it would require a lot of hands on deck and a lot of money. And those are things that I don't believe MassDEP has at its disposal for this.”

While the finger-pointing continues, the clock is ticking as landfill space disappears. In 2012, the state’s landfills had about 2.1 million tons of capacity; by the end of 2022, environmental officials predict that just 500,000 tons remain. Once Massachusetts runs out of space, hauling garbage out of state to Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio will cost taxpayers a fortune.