Next month, residents of Bristol and Barrington will be able to wheel a new bin to the curb, not for their household trash, but for their food scraps. A new curbside composting pilot venture led by the Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District is set to launch Sept. 18, offering residents in those towns a weekly compost pickup service at a subsidized rate.

The Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District (ERICD), a state-established agency founded in 1944, works with landowners to address natural resource concerns such as soil health, water purity, and air quality. The organization serves Bristol and Newport counties and also oversees the Portsmouth AgInnovation Farm, a 5-acre, youth-led learning space that first introduced composting as a means to manage agricultural waste.

“It’s a student-driven farm, meaning students come up with the ideas for what happens,” said Sara Churgin, ERICD’s district manager. “It’s really an example of authentic learning — we don’t give the answers, we ask questions, and when their idea seems applicable, we find the funding.”

One of those ideas served as the driving force behind the new composting pilot program. As the Portsmouth AgInnovation Farm gradually faced mounting piles of organic waste from the farm’s after-school and summer programs, as well as daily farming maintenance, their students proposed turning those scraps into fertilizer with an on-farm composting system.

“What started as a small, on-site solution quickly outgrew the farm’s capacity,” said Churgin, “and that really sparked conversations with regional haulers and community-scale pickup programs.”

Initially applying for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant in partnership with the towns of Bristol and Barrington, ERICD’s proposal was ultimately denied. Still, the idea gained traction, and when 11th Hour Racing offered to fund the project, the program moved forward.

The two-year curbside composting pilot program is set to launch in both Bristol and Barrington, where residents will receive a compost bin and a scheduled weekly food scrap pickup service through Black Earth Compost, a commercial composting company serving dozens of communities across Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

“We’ve been talking with Black Earth Compost for years, but this is the first program we’ve actually been able to get off the ground in the three years that we’ve been planning,” Churgin said.

While this pilot program is the first municipal curbside composting initiative in the state, it’s not the only composting resource in these communities. The Barrington Farm School, founded in 2018 on a few acres of preserved land in central Barrington, operates as a nonprofit educational center with crop beds, an outdoor classroom, and, most notably, a compost drop-off site.

Starting out as a team of local parents collecting food scrap from the cafeterias of local schools, composting expanded over time as the group built on-site compost bins across the public school district. As the volume of scraps grew, one parent, Tim Faulkner, co-founder of the Barrington Farm School, helped secure a permanent location for the compost collection site on its grounds.

“Every year, we’re increasing our capacity,” Faulkner said. “We’re doing about 60,000 pounds of scraps per year that we’re making into compost with three drop-off sites — one at the farm stand and two others in town.”

With the launch of the new curbside composting program, the Barrington Farm School’s mounting food scrap intake may see some relief. Now, residents will have an additional outlet to divert their waste directly from home.

“What really matters is getting more people involved in the process and understanding where their food waste goes,” Faulkner said. “There’s a real community value in that, turning waste into something productive, no matter what the outlet.”

While other compost pickup programs can cost upwards of $110 to $140 per year, this two-year pilot program is heavily subsidized. For the first year, participants will pay 33% of the original cost of pickup for Black Earth Compost, discounted at $66.66 a year in Barrington and $50 a year in Bristol. That share increases to 66% in the second year of the program, with a goal of reaching a long-term funding model supported by both residents and municipalities.

“This pilot program is able to secure a discounted rate, but each town must get 500 residents to sign up,” Churgin said. “We’re really pushing outreach to hit that number and keep this program as a viable option for the community.”

If the program reaches its participation goals, ERICD hopes it will continue beyond the pilot phase and could serve as a model for other Rhode Island municipalities. Organizers say the effort has the potential to divert hundreds of thousands of pounds of food scrap from the Central Landfill over two years, cutting methane emissions and producing nutrient-rich compost for local farms and gardens.

This story is part of a series “Black Gold Rush: The Race to Reduce Food Waste and Save Soil.” The series is sponsored by 11th Hour Racing.