Simplify New Hampshire’s compost regulations

TO THE EDITOR:

Clarifying and simplifying composting regulations helps NH save money and soil at no added costs. Since we already have vast and ever-growing amounts of organic waste materials, composting is the best way to handle that material.

Clarified and simplified regulations expand this home-grown industry. Such regulations address the issue rather than fighting paperwork.

Simplified regulations generate positive results:

• Small-scale composting becomes a local industry that creates soil while it also saves haulage fees.

• Small-scale composting diverts massive tonnage of wet, methane-generating and vermin-attracting waste from costly landfills and into the production of useful compost.

• Small-scale composting makes composting convenient, thus assuring greater participation than at present.

• Small-scale composting can become widespread, thus reducing food waste on a broader scale than today.

• Small-scale composting makes our waste stream adaptable and resilient, so when things go sideways we can recover in a timely fashion.

• Small-scale composting takes a problem of waste removal and makes it a solution of soil amendment.

• Small-scale composting creates jobs that reduce tipping fees, amend New Hampshire’s poor soil and also reduces methane generation, vermin growth and noxious smells.

• Small-scale composting diverts wet and heavy waste, which lightens the waste loads and significantly reduces municipal tipping fees.

Complex and confusing regulations discourage composting and waste a product we already possess. We dump valuable materials into costly landfills, when simplified regulations could save money and help our soil.

Enact simplified and streamlined compost regulations today.

J. MICHAEL ATHERTON
DOVER

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