KENT, Conn. — Inevitably, with any holiday comes waste.
Christmas is now the major time for producing trash in the American calendar. An estimated one million tons of waste is produced each week of the Advent season.
But Halloween, now the second-highest sales producing holiday in the American calendar, has its fair share of material that end up the transfer station.
The Kent Transfer Station is collecting clean pumpkins, squash, gourds, corn and the like. It cannot accept pumpkins with candles, paint or decorations.
About 1.3 billion pumpkins and gourds end up in landfills nationwide each year.
The decomposition of every 100 pounds of pumpkin waste in a landfill produces about 8.3 pounds of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere.
This is because landfills pack pumpkins in a way that doesn’t allow oxygen during decomposition, causing them to release methane.
The EPA estimates that food waste, including pumpkins, is responsible for 58 percent of fugitive methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfill.
Enter the local transfer station and its new food scraps program that separates food scraps and sends them off to the Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority to be composted.
Eventually, the compost is returned to the town where it can be collected by residents for use on their own gardens.
