Could Massachusetts food waste ban be a road map for the rest of the country?

By Jacob Axelrad, The Christian Monitor
November 19, 2014

BOSTON — On a Monday morning in the Boston University food court, students toss plates of food in bins with multicolored labels: green for recycling, black for landfill, and yellow for compostables.

“We capture as much food waste and organic material as we can,” says Sabrina Pashtan, Sustainability Coordinator at Boston University Dining Services. “That spans everything from scraps in the dining hall to leftover food and napkins in student meals to compostable plates in the food court to catered dinner for 500 people.”

All told, the university diverts around 800 tons of food waste each year, averaging out to about 15 tons of food waste per week, Ms. Pashtan says.

That came in handy when Massachusetts implemented a new law in October saying that any institution that produces at least one ton of food waste per week cannot put it in a landfill.

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