Small Pilot Grows to Drop-Off Network and Curbside Subscription Services
This case study was originally published in Mantén el compost local, a report offering survey data, case studies, and policy recommendations to equip governments to collaborate with local composters and foster community prosperity.
Municipality and Interviewees: City of Hoboken Office of Climate Action and Innovation, Jennifer Gonzalez, Director/Chief Sustainability Officer; Marilyn Baer, Communications Manager
Compostador comunitario: Community Compost Co. (Eileen Banyra, President/CEO)
Public-Private Partnership (PPP)
Compost Comunitario S.A., founded in 2013, services multiple municipalities with food scraps drop-off services in northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley in New York State. The company, which has a registered food scraps composting site in Kerhonkson, New York, pioneered municipal food scraps drop-off in the City of Hoboken in 2014. It began by collecting residential food scraps at farmers’ markets, then evolved to drop-off spots (drop spots) in City parks. In 2015, Community Compost Co., in partnership with the City, started door-to-door collection in Hoboken for residents and commercial businesses. About 250 households currently subscribe to curbside collection. The City of Hoboken has provided support for the program, including an operations space and truck parking at the Department of Public Works yard.
Community Compost Co. renewed its Service Agreement with the City of Hoboken in February 2025 to collect and haul residential and commercial food scraps from the City’s 14 drop spots and curbside routes. The agreement includes providing the City with five cubic yards of bulk finished compost at no charge. Community Compost Co. bases the volume to be delivered on the contract size and type of compost product requested.
Hoboken composting drop-off site. Credit: City of Hoboken
Hoboken food scraps hauler container. Credit: Community Compost Co.
Map of Hoboken drop-off sites. Credit: City of Hoboken
Municipal Motivation
The City tested the waters for residential food scraps collection when Eileen Banyra approached them about trying out drop spots at two farmers’ markets in Hoboken. “We then set up drop spots in five commonly visited places in the city,” says Banyra. “There wasn’t much participation, but the City of Hoboken was willing to continue trying different approaches, including drop spots in City parks as well as assist with the creation of a door-to-door collection service for households and businesses. A main reason the City contracted with Community Compost Co. in those early years was it was looking to be a greener City, and we were the only company around promoting a food scraps collection service.”
Jennifer Gonzalez explains that the City of Hoboken has continuously sought to scale up its composting efforts to divert organic waste since the program began. “As the fourth most densely populated city in the country without space for a municipal composting facility, we need to haul our organic waste to a disposal facility, and unfortunately, we are limited by the availability of licensed composting facilities in New Jersey,” she says. “Solid waste collection (hauling) and disposal is a significant line in the annual municipal budget. Organics, and more specifically food scraps, are the most prevalent waste fraction in Hoboken’s garbage stream. The City is always seeking ways to improve both fiscal and environmental sustainability, including through organics recycling.” An audit completed in 2024 for the City of Hoboken’s Zero Waste Plan found that organics constituted 45% of the overall waste characterized, and 76% of this fraction was food scraps.
Because the drop spots set up in 2015 were not widely used by residents, Community Compost Co. discontinued them. The drop spot program resumed in 2019 and quickly expanded with the public’s growing environmental awareness. In 2018, the City partnered with the company to implement a nine-month commercial organics collection pilot. Under its contract with the City, Community Compost Co. agreed to accept one 20-cubic-yard container of materials a week, which the City would haul to the company’s composting facility, along with the residential food scraps collected. “That contract included a clause about contamination,” explains Banyra. “Loads with greater than 3% contamination were rejected and photo documentation was provided. Levels of contamination between 1% and <3% had a set fee per load, plus an hourly labor charge if it took our staff more than one hour to remove contamination. It is important to include a clause like that in municipal and commercial contracts.” The City found that the time and labor expense to haul collected food scraps to Kerhonksen was too costly, and discontinued hauling after the pilot ended. It then contracted with Community Compost Co. to do the collection and hauling.
Solid waste collection (hauling) and disposal is a significant line in the annual municipal budget. Organics, and more specifically food scraps, are the most prevalent waste fraction in Hoboken’s garbage stream. The City is always seeking ways to improve both fiscal and environmental sustainability, including through organics recycling.
Jennifer Gonzalez, Director, City of Hoboken Office of Climate Action and Innovation
In 2024, the City of Hoboken released its Zero Waste Plan, designed to “achieve zero waste and move the City towards a more circular future,” states the City’s website. The four core categories in the plan are garbage and recycling, organics, reuse and repair, and education. Initiatives in the organics category include requiring businesses to collect food scraps, developing a network to connect food donors and recipients, and advocating for a Hudson County (New Jersey) composting facility. (Hoboken is located in Hudson County.) Community Compost Co. assisted the City in its application for a U.S. EPA Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grant (SWIFR) in 2024; the company was named as the key partner for organics recycling. However, the City was notified in July 2025 that it would not receive a grant. “We are continuing to seek grant funding to scale up the composting program,” notes Gonzalez. Currently, there are 14 free drop spots in Hoboken that are serviced under the agreement with Community Compost Co. Twelve of the locations have two 48-gallon totes that are serviced twice a week; the other two have two totes and are serviced weekly. Drop spot locations include City Hall, seven City parks, a community garden, and several public spaces (e.g., a plaza).
Contractual Arrangements
The 2025 Agreement has a “not to exceed” amount that covers hauling of collected food scraps to Kerhonkson one to two times per week, servicing the 14 drop spots, monthly education and outreach information sessions, and pallets of bagged compost equal to 50 1-cubic-foot bags per pallet.
Composting Activity
Composting is done in aerated static piles; the facility’s registration with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation allows Community Compost Co. to compost up to 5,000 cubic yards (or 2,500 wet tons) of source-separated organics a year, including preconsumer and postconsumer food scraps. Plans are underway to develop a second site in Middletown, New York, which would shorten the transport distance to 60 miles each way from Hoboken versus the current 95 miles. “The new site will help us expand our distributed ‘waste to resource’ model, while reducing overall transportation and environmental costs for all parties,” notes Banyra. “It also offers an overall improvement to the flow of goods and services to the region. We are seeking local approvals and, if successful, are looking to open the new site in 2026.”
Outreach & Education
The City actively promotes the composting program and “recycling right” via its sitio web, social media, and print advertising on public waste receptacles.
In its municipal partnerships, Community Compost Co. charges a fee for outreach and education. In the case of Hoboken, given the longevity of the program, outreach to the public goes beyond promotion of the drop spots and curbside collection service to trainings on various types of composting options, including backyard composting and vermicomposting, soil ecology and compost utilization, and best practices for drop spot management.
Compost Markets
Households that subscribe to curbside collection in Hoboken can receive two deliveries of bagged compost a year if they opt into that offer. Bulk compost given back to the City of Hoboken is used in community gardens and public spaces.
Costs & Benefits: City of Hoboken
The City has been able to offer residents and businesses food scraps collection through its partnership with Community Compost Co. Over the years, program logistics have been fine-tuned, creating a solid foundation to increase organics recycling under the City’s Zero Waste Plan.
Costs & Benefits: Community Compost Co.
What started as a pioneer program in 2014 has evolved into a mature residential and commercial food scraps collection “institution” in Hoboken. The 14 drop spots that are free to use are accessible to all households in Hoboken. “We make more money on our door-to-door service for residents and businesses, but access to food scraps collection for all is core to our mission,” says Banyra. “The challenge with a free service, however, is you can’t come back from that in terms of shifting to a paid system. We suggested that if a fee was to be charged, that it be included with the garbage bill and represented as a utility bill or shown as a line item on the tax bill so that people really knew the cost of removal of waste and organics. Understanding costs is a significant consideration when creating municipal programs for food scraps diversion.”
Vehicle unloading food scraps at compost site. Credit: Community Compost Co.
Another consideration is access to land for local, small composting sites, closing the loop within the city limits. The SWIFR grant application that Hoboken submitted included composting at innovation parks that the City is creating to manage stormwater and mitigate flooding. For example, its ResilienCity Park transformed an asphalt-covered former industrial site into 5 acres of public open space that encompasses not only athletic spaces and a playground but also green infrastructure to filter and store stormwater to “alleviate the City’s infrastructure system and adjacent nuisance flooding,” according to the City. Currently, there are three resiliency parks, and two of those have food scraps drop spots.
PPP Lessons Learned
City of Hoboken: For the City of Hoboken, having an asset like Community Compost Co. has been essential to the success of its residential and business food scraps collection programs. “Partnerships are essential for innovation in municipal operations,” says Gonzalez. “Community Compost Co. was an instrumental partner in establishing Hoboken’s residential compost collection program and supports the City’s organic recycling efforts by helping fill the void created by limited licensed composting facilities in New Jersey. The City of Hoboken has physical space constraints that prevent the City from establishing its own organic recycling program, and the City’s Zero Waste consultant, Eunomia, determined at a high level that outsourcing waste collection is more cost effective than bringing those operations in-house.”
Lessons learned/programmatic experiences that the City of Hoboken gained working with a company like Community Compost Co. are to “start small, evaluate progress regularly, and be flexible to make changes to evolve the program,” adds Gonzalez. “We have made various program improvements over the years as recommended by Community Compost Co., ranging from physical changes (e.g., better sheds and signage for the compost drop sites) to digital changes (e.g., a registration system to provide the locks to the drop sites and ‘what to compost’ education.”
Community Compost Co.: Banyra also emphasizes how the longevity of the partnership has facilitated incorporating lessons learned into each new contract the City negotiates with Community Compost Co. Having a municipal policy in place to incentivize food scraps diversion when negotiating public-private partnerships would be a benefit to community composters, she adds. “The policy anchors a program because it can take a few years to get people to buy into the practice until it becomes more natural.”
An important public-private partnership lesson learned for Banyra has been getting buy-in for a program from elected officials. “They have to be in the discussions from the getgo,” she explains. “Your job is to sell them the importance of the program and get them to make funds available to invest in it. Suggest the municipality start with a pilot. Offer a sample program to gauge interest. For example, if the municipality wants a drop spot, tell them to get 20 people interested in using it before you commit. Also, make the jurisdiction pay for some consulting time to set up the pilot and tell them if a contract is negotiated, they will get 50% of the money spent back.”
Several other lessons learned are:
Initiate community involvement early and often and identify who will be your advocates.
Discuss a “scaling trajectory” and what steps are needed by both parties to scale a program, maintain it, etc.
Encourage the municipality to allow or require that a certain percentage of the food scraps collected are composted within the city limits to demonstrate the value of compost and to create a “real-time,” living circularity model.
Mantener el compost local: una hoja de ruta para que los gobiernos locales fomenten la prosperidad de la comunidad mediante el compostaje.
Un informe que ofrece orientación a los municipios para apoyar y colaborar con iniciativas locales de compostaje, cumpliendo sus objetivos de compostaje y fomentando al mismo tiempo innumerables beneficios económicos e intersectoriales.
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