Greenway Environmental Services, which since 2022 has helped steer the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival through a Zero Waste Initiative, is hoping to convince the Town of Saugerties to do the same.
“They’ve used it three years in a row,” said Saugerties Town Supervisor Fred Costello of the Kiwanis-sponsored Garlic Festival’s initiative. “We’ve been able to capture more than 80 percent of the solid waste at those festivals. That has gotten quite a bit of attention, and there are other festivals that are trying to emulate success that Kiwanis has enjoyed and we have shared it.”
Greenway principals Shabazz Jackson and Josephine Papagni TK during the Wednesday, April 16 meeting of the Town Board, even as they continued their plans for the 2025 Garlic Festival, scheduled for September 27 and 28 at Cantine Field.
Papagni said the level of success at the Garlic Festival can also be scaled appropriately for colleges, retail supermarkets, and hospitality services, along with both individual backyard and shared community composters. And critically, it can also work at the municipal level. Greenway helped shape a program currently running in the Town of Hurley, and in January 2023 they submitted an unsolicited proposal to the Town of Saugerties, detailing the steps the community could take to become zero waste.
“When it comes to zero waste in a community, your community is as unique as all the people,” said Papagni. “So what’s going to work down in New Paltz, it’s not going to be a cookie cutter fit up here in Saugerties. So we’ve looked at it like peeling the onion…You have to go through it layer by layer and figure out what is the best fit. Because not everybody is going to want a backyard compost, not everybody’s going to want to bring their waste out to the curb, and not everyone’s going to want to drive to the place and drop off.”
Though each community’s needs are different, there are certain boilerplate elements to a zero waste initiative. The Town of Hurley’s project, including its unique public/private partnership contract, is available at: www.townofhurley.org/zerowaste.
“I think that’s important to be able to look at that and find and know this is the kind of agreement that we give when we work with the town,” Papagni said.
Shabazz added that Greenway’s role in aiding a municipality, including grant writing, can be seen in the Hurley contract. There is also a cost/benefit analysis of 2023, the first full year of the initiative. The income at the Hurley transfer station, for example, was $321,214 during that year, with just $98,425 in disposal expenses.
How that would translate in the Town of Saugerties remains to be seen. First, municipal leaders would have to pass a resolution for an RFP for a zero waste system, and that would be shaped by the various disposal options and how they would scale to the community. Part of that, Papagni said, is to find early adopters, people who are willing to try separating food waste from total waste, including a free intensive home audit. In Hurley, the early adopters saw the average recovery rate for food waste by composting rise to 80 percent, compared to just 24 percent when food waste was not separated.
“I know you have a pretty busy transfer station, and people bring their bags of garbage and they bring their recycling,” said Papagni. “Well, those bags of garbage, three quarters of that is probably food waste. So the difference tipping that out versus tipping food waste, I could say that maybe you’re tipping that at $105, but you would tip (separated) food waste at 40 bucks. Just that itself is an enormous savings.”
After passing an RFP, Saugerties could then review its sealed bids.
“And the beauty of that is you don’t have to accept anything,” said Papagni, noting that there is still no commitment unless a bid is accepted. “You would say none of these mean anything to us or these are way out of whack, whatever it is.”
Papagni said designing a system for Saugerties would be a conversation to ensure it works for the community.
“We want to offer systems that make it feasible for everybody, we just don’t want it to be us old tree-huggers, she said. “And we don’t really have a preconceived notion of like, this is exactly what Saugerties needs.”
Whether the Town of Saugerties moves forward with the concept of a Zero Waste Initiative remains to be seen. Greenway Environmental Services said they are ready to roll if they do.
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