A Win All Around

The closure of the Brookhaven Town landfill in North Bellport within the next couple of years is poised to make throwing things away on the South Fork much more expensive. Anything the town can do to reduce the volume of trash being sent away from its transfer stations will go a long way toward controlling costs — and it has the added benefit of being better for the environment, the importance of which can’t be understated.

The recent introduction of food scrap drop-off bins at the Hampton Bays and North Sea transfer stations — Sag Harbor and Westhampton will also enjoy this amenity soon — has the potential to help households divert as much as 20 to 25 percent of their trash. This can save families hundreds of dollars annually on the “green bags they must buy to dispose of garbage at the town transfer stations.

Food scraps in the municipal solid waste stream typically end up at a polluting waste-to-energy plant, where they will be burned, or they may be sent directly to a landfill, where the organic matter will rot in an oxygen-deficient environment and emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Food scraps — such as vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds, stale bread, apple cores and banana peels — deposited at the new drop-off sites will instead be mixed with yard waste to produce nutrient-rich compost, which town residents may take for free to spread in their gardens, making Southampton even greener.

The food scrap composting program is a win-win-win. And residents who are not trash self-haulers can get in on the action, too, by composting their food scraps and yard waste at home.