The URL is the Universal Recycling Law. It was passed in 2012 in an effort to reduce Vermont’s waste and more effectively manage its resources. Generally its overarching objective was to achieve recycling of roughly 85% of the ‘waste stream’. It has served as a model and a catalyst for similarly progressive resource management laws throughout the US.

“Food residuals” is a term used to describe discarded food. Other terms that are often used interchangeably include food waste and ‘organics’.

This is the material that you might otherwise put in your compost bucket - peels and coffee grounds, plate scrapings and moldy bread.

According to the URL, Sec. 1. 10 V.S.A. § 6602 (31) defines “Food residual” as ‘source separated and uncontaminated material that is derived from processing or discarding of food and that is recyclable, in a manner consistent with section 6605k of this title. Food residual may include pre-consumer and post-consumer food scraps. “Food residual” does not mean meat and meat-related products when the food residuals are composted by a resident on site.’

Source separation is a term in the recycling and composting industries that describes the separation of materials, by material type, at the point of their generation as a byproduct or “waste”.

This is important because In order for most materials to be recycled they need to be segregated by material type. Plastic is separated from glass and the two are then processed in different ways that are specific to their material characteristics.

The more this separation is refined, generally the more effective the recycling process can be and the better the resulting product will be.

Source separation is an important aspect of the URL. Sec. 1. 10 V.S.A. § 6602 (32) defines “Source separated” or “source separation” as ‘means the separation of compostable and recyclable materials from noncompostable, nonrecyclable materials at the point of generation.’

Source separation matters for a variety of reasons. The biggest and most straightforward is the fact that the better any recyclable material is separated, the more pure the recycled material is, the more easily it is recycled for the least cost.

Blending too many different materials inherently downgrades the resource. The further upstream you go toward the point of discard, the easier and least energy intensive it is to separate it.

Within this is the fact that while separation gets harder as you centralize and amass these materials, the ability to separate effectively is reduced, thus increasing the opportunity for contamination.

In the case of organic materials, that will (we hope!) eventually make their way back to soil, these contaminants can become pollutants. For instance, if a plastic bag enters a composting pile or methane digester, and then is applied to soil when it’s done, the bag begins to fragment and shed microplastics. Those microplastics become pollutants in the soil. Additionally, food packaging contains other potential pollutants like PFAs.

The Organics Management Hierarchy, or OMH, was born out of the awareness that markets are often not good at applying resources where they can be put to their highest and best use. Relying on the market results in materials going to their highest economic value, but not the highest social or ecological value. The OMH was included in the URL to establish the social priorities for the use of organic materials, regardless of the market valuation. This is an exciting part of the law because it provided meaningful clarity about what the law was intended to achieve, and didn’t leave it up to chance.

Sec. 6. 10 V.S.A. § 6605k reads:

FOOD RESIDUALS; MANAGEMENT HIERARCHY

(a) It is the policy of the state that food residuals collected under the requirements of this chapter shall be managed according to the following order of priority uses:

(1) Reduction of the amount generated at the source;

(2) Diversion for food consumption by humans;

(3) Diversion for agricultural use, including consumption by animals;

(4) Composting, land application, and digestion; and

(5) Energy recovery.

(b) A person who produces more than an amount identified under subsection (c) of this section in food residuals and is located within 20 miles of a certified organics management facility that has available capacity and that is willing to accept the food residuals shall:

(1) Separate food residuals from other solid waste, provided that a de minimis amount of food residuals may be disposed of in solid waste when a person has established a program to separate food residuals and the program includes a component for the education of program users regarding the need to separate food residuals; and

(2) Arrange for the transfer of food residuals to a location that manages food residuals in a manner consistent with the priority uses established under subdivisions (a)(2)–(5) of this section or shall manage food residuals on site.

Markets are not good at prioritizing the best use of resources, just the most valuable. We often mistake the two as synonymous. Since markets don’t place value on things like ecological pollution and social well-being, these are rarely incorporated into market valuation.

Plenty of discarded food is edible. The most effective use of this resource is to provide it to food insecure families to eat. The same food is also however a great source of energy to make electricity or gas with. If you put food insecure families and energy companies in the same market, energy producers will win in the market because they can sell energy, whereas families cannot sell their food security.

If we are to address the complex challenges of society, it is important to pass legislation that not only sets goals, but also defines the priorities within those so that the market does not override issues more important to society, like food security or a stable atmosphere.

Remember, we passed this legislation in the first place because markets were not adequately responding to real things, like global warming.

Depackaing is a mechanical approach to separating food from packaging.

Historically the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (VT ANR), some companies and some municipalities in Vermont have decided that keeping trash out of food scraps is a lovely aspiration, but impractical. As a result, little effort has gone into promoting and enforcing source separation.

At some point in 2018, VT ANR decided to reinterpret the URL’s definition of source separation and the Organics Management Hierarchy in order to make use of depackaging technology legal in Vermont.

As a result VT ANR has determined that even materials being removed from its ‘point of generation’ for separation from trash elsewhere meets the source separation requirements. This seems intellectual dishonest at best and posses a series of problems.

Depackaging isn’t really the problem, but it could create problems if we aren’t cautious about its use. The real problem is a lack of commitment to source separation, and depackaging is symptomatic of that.

Depackaging systems are impressive examples of engineering and may very well have an important role in managing certain materials streams, but they are imperfect. While most systems have impressive ‘purity rates’ even if they achieve a 1% contamination rate that amounts to a tremendous amount of of plastic.

In addition to the volume this amounts to, the particles that remain in the organic material are very small and are either microplastics or on their way to becoming them. At this point they are not removable from the organic material, and they will be applied to farm fields or other receiving soils. In this context microplastics pose a variety of risks to human health, ecosystems, and soil health.

Fundamentally, source separation is easily achieved for the majority of food materials. When depackaging is applied ubiquitously to something like a grocery store, this means that materials that were never packaged will end up being comingled with packaging. We are literally adding plastic into these pure materials and inherently down-grading and contaminating them.

When the URL was first introduced and for roughly the first five years of its implementation, ANR interpreted source separation as it reads in the Law - separating organic materials from other materials, at the point of generation.

Sometime in 2018, shortly after Agricycle won the Hannaford’s Supermarket contract to service their Vermont stores. the internal narrative around the interpretation of this definition began to shift in a way that could accommodate depackaging.

Since 2019 ANR has reinterpreted the definition passed by the legislature - ‘the separation of compostable and recyclable materials from noncompostable, nonrecyclable materials at the point of generation’ to mean that compostable and recyclable materials don’t need to be separated from one another, rather these two groups need to be separated from trash.

There are several gaping holes in this reasoning, and internal communications from ANR reveal there was internal discord regarding this new interpretation.

Here are the reasons this explanation makes no sense and is disingenuous:

1. This interpretation is premised on the idea that all food packaging is recyclable. It is not. ANR knows this.

2. All of the recyclable packaging that enters the depackaging stream will not be recycled. It will be landfilled or incinerated. Technically these would be illegal outcomes from the standpoint of the sections of the law that handle these materials. These are mechanisms of disposal, exactly what the law was drafted to prevent. ANR knows this too.

3. This also assumes that the depackers will effectively separate these materials later. Based on industry presentations by depackager operators, as much as 10% of the organic materials will be in the packaging that is destined for the landfill or incinerator, and thus, again, it is not being management as the Law prescribes. This too ANR knows.