× Expand City of Madison Under Madison's Food Scraps recycling pilot, 200 households on the west side will be asked to put food waste in a separate bin for curbside pickup.

After nearly a decade of unsuccessful attempts, Madison will give composting another shot with a new pilot program proposed for a neighborhood on the west side.

About 200 single-family homes near Memorial High School will be invited to participate in the Food Scraps Recycling pilot, in which the city will pick up food waste at the curb.

The pilot is an upgraded version of the Madison Organics compost pilot, which ran for more than seven years but failed because of misinformed participants and contaminated waste bins, according to city of Madison recycling coordinator Bryan Johnson.

Bed sheets, plastic bags and a deer head are among the oddities that Johnson described finding in waste bins during the Madison Organics run. With the new Food Scraps pilot, Johnson is stressing the name, asking participants for food only.

The Food Scraps pilot is scheduled to run for eight weeks starting in early August. Johnson says that if all goes well, the process could be used on a larger scale as a free city-wide service.

The new pilot will provide participants with more information about what materials can be composted. And the curbside pickup system will be revamped, ensuring that carts contaminated with non-food items won’t be taken to the composter.

“We have to stop the [contamination] before it gets in the truck,” Johnson says. “To make this process work we have to be narrow, we have to be strict.”

By distributing a list and illustrated chart of what can and cannot be put into the compost carts as well as adding a curbside monitoring system, Johnson is confident the new pilot will be more successful than past systems.

Dee Hunter at Rooted Curbside Compost says her organization faces similar difficulties. Her company charges a minimum of $10 for weekly pickup, which Hunter says deters many people from participating.

Johnson hopes the city’s program can avoid extra fees. “As soon as you start charging extra it winnows who can participate,” Johnson says. “Food waste is a problem for everyone, not just the people who are able to pay for a composting service.”

However, for Hunter, providing a cost-free service is not plausible.

“There isn’t much money in this business,” Hunter says. “We’re barely breaking even after paying for supplies and employee salaries.”

Despite this challenge, Hunter says composting is worth the cost for the positive environmental impact it makes. Compost from her business is used in growing local produce.

The compost collected in the Food Scraps pilot will go to the Middleton dairy digester, where methane from decomposing food is captured and burned to generate electricity. The remaining organic material can be used as fertilizer or landscaping.

“The largest [portion] of what we send to the landfill as a city is food scraps but we have the ability to stop this,” Johnson says. “Our food scraps are perfectly good resources.”