New Haven celebrated a new grant from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to establish a composting and food scrap diversion facility, as a part of “the state’s largest investment in local and regional waste management infrastructure,” on Thursday.

The city was awarded $3.3 million to build a modern food scrap diversion sorting facility at the New Haven Transfer Station, with the intention of creating the infrastructure needed to support a citywide residential curbside composting and food scrap diversion program.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Mayor Justin Elicker said at a press conference announcing the grant’s reception. “One person’s compost could become another person’s opportunity to grow new food. One person’s trash could become another person’s opportunity to have biogas to heat their homes.”

This program, he said, will reduce carbon-polluting methane gas and the amount of trash that goes into landfills, improve local air quality, create “nutrient-rich” compost and capture biogas — a renewable fuel produced by the breakdown of organic matter, such as food waste, manure, and sewage.

According to Mayor Justin Elicker, the cost of processing waste has been rising over time, while the city’s capacity to manage waste has remained stagnant. Five years ago, Connecticut sent about 17 percent of its trash out of state, he said, and it is currently sending 40 percent.

Most of New Haven’s trash, specifically, goes to Bridgeport to be burned, the mayor said, which is “clearly not the best solution for compostables that could be used for such better purposes.”

“Connecticut is facing a solid waste disposal crisis,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said. “As we have fewer places to dispose of waste here within our state borders, we’re increasingly relying on communities farther to the west of us to accept our garbage, and that comes with uncertainties in the long term as well as the prospect of increasing costs for disposing of waste.”

According to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, his office plans to finish designing the facility this year, to commence construction in 2026. 

Once the new composting facility is built, residents will receive information about composting and disposing of food waste in color-coded bags. The sorting process should be “easy” for residents because food scraps will go in green bags, while trash will go in other bags.

The city plans to provide the green bags for food collection, although it is still deciding whether or not to standardize bags for standard trash. Both will go in the same municipal curbside garbage bin residents already use, and they will be separated upon arrival to the New Haven transfer station.

Trash will continue to be transferred to another facility for processing, and food scraps sorted at New Haven’s new facility will be taken to Southington to be made into biogas or usable compost soil. The cost of transferring compostable material to the Southington facility is about half the cost of disposing of trash, officials said.

Ideally, the collection and sorting process will begin in 2027, Steve Winter, New Haven’s director of climate and sustainability, added.

DEEP tested the co-collection approach of putting both food scraps and garbage in the same curbside container as a part of its three-year composting pilot program in 15 different municipalities. The communities that tested this program were able to reduce the tonnage of trash burned or shipped to another state by 14 percent, Dykes said, while recovering about 20 percent of the organics in their waste.

She expects New Haven to meet or even exceed these figures when it begins its similar program.

“Phoenix-like, we’re rising from the foundation of the former incinerator site, but instead of burning waste, we’re going to be putting in a big conveyor belt that will allow us to pull out those green bags and divert them from the incinerator in Bridgeport,” Winter said. 

This grant is one of nine announced Thursday by DEEP’s Materials Management Infrastructure program, which will provide $15 million total to support Connecticut municipalities and regional organizations for waste management infrastructure.

Dykes described the competition for this grant as “fierce,” with more than 20 municipalities or organizations submitting applications and requesting a total of more than $30 million in funding, which “goes to show” just how many communities are committed to developing sustainability solutions.

“Everyone works really hard to make New Haven a leader in these types of initiatives,” Ward 10 Alder Anna Festa, who chairs the City Services and Environmental Policy Committee, said. “It’s all of our responsibilities to do the right thing for our environment and recycling properly so we can reuse things that we’ve used.”

Coventry, Greenwich, Manchester, Mansfield and Stratford also received money from the Materials Management Infrastructure grant fund, as did the Housatonic Resources Regional Authority, Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Authority and Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments.

New Haven received the third largest grant — Manchester was awarded $4.7 million and the Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Authority got $4.5 million.

Elicker commended state leaders for their commitment to preserving the environment while the country’s “national leadership is actively fighting against any environmental initiative.” Last week, New Haven joined a multi-city lawsuit against the Trump Administration for its termination of environmental grants.

Food scraps make up 20 to 25 percent of the waste stream.