Care About Food Waste? In Massachusetts, You Can Be a Compost Consultant.
Posted on: Mar 26, 2025 06:47 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
50 States, 50 Fixes
50 States, 50 Fixes
Heather Billings, food waste reduction consultant. Credit...
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America has a food waste problem: Rotten tomatoes and pizza boxes end up in trash dumps and produce a potent planet-heating gas called methane.
Massachusetts has a fix: A state regulation requires businesses to keep food out of dumpsters. To help them comply, the state offers a carrot, in the form of a chatty, practical, 63-year-old hand-holding food-waste-reduction consultant named Heather Billings.
Which is how, on a frigid Wednesday morning, Ms. Billings found herself poking around the narrow kitchen of the Port Tavern, a sports bar in Newburyport, Mass.
An owner of the Port Tavern, Abbie Hannan, left, invited Ms. Billings to look at how the restaurant managed its waste.
She quickly spotted a very solvable problem at the prep cook’s station: a 23-gallon trash can into which went tomato tops and other food scraps.
Then came the dumpster inspection. Could anything in there go to compost?
Ms. Billings, a consultant contracted by the state government, took notes, snapped pictures and peered behind the bar to assess where the lemon wedges and plastic olive skewers ended up.
She had some easy fixes for Port Tavern’s co-owner Abbie Hannan. She proposed inexpensive, four-gallon plastic buckets to nest inside the bigger trash bins to collect food scraps. She connected Ms. Hannan to compost haulers and a charity that could pick up leftover edible food.
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