Oak Bluffs is pursuing $2 million in grant funding to start a food composting service at the town’s transfer station.

The select board voted Tuesday to submit a proposal to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday for a composting facility that could process as much as 2,080 tons of food waste a year, cutting down on the amount of scraps that get shipped off Island.

The Edgartown transfer station for the four-town district is now accepting food waste for composting. The pilot program began last week.

Central composting facilities and a variety of community initiatives are among the final recommendations of an Islandwide food waste study that wraps up this month.

A four-month pilot study, which began in June, may set the stage for an Islandwide composting program that could help businesses comply with the state’s ban on commercial food waste.

Every year, 40 per cent of the food grown in this country is never eaten. The waste happens in farm fields, during processing and transportation, in grocery stores, restaurants, and in our homes.

A state ban on commercial food waste has yet to be enforced, but Islanders have launched a comprehensive study of the issue.

Massachusetts has become the first state in the nation to put a ban on commercial food waste entering landfills. Larger businesses on the Vineyard are preparing for the changes, and businesses and residents are feeling the need for more composting regulations.

While the Martha's Vineyard Refuse Disposal and Resource
Recovery District committee negotiates costs, facility capacity and
logistics with the Rhode Island-based Waste Options company to build a
composting facility on the Island, many Islanders seek answers to more
basic questions.

Coffee grinds, apple cores and curly orange carrot peels: straight to the trash they go in most households. But on Island farms, these food scraps (along with egg shells, wilted greens and watermelon seeds) go to the compost. For the farmers, this trash is treasure.

“It’s like crop insurance,” explained Jim Athearn of Morning Glory Farm last week as he stepped down from his tractor.

Less agriculturally-minded folk than Mitchell Posin might mistake the sign on South Road advertising compost tea for a joke, something dreamt up by kids searching for the world’s least appealing beverage to flog by the side of the road.

In fact it is there to promote the result of three years’ trial and error by Mr. Posin, the co-owner Allen Farm sheep and wool company: an organic fertilizer solution for the bespoke ecology of Martha’s Vineyard.