Princeton’s free food scraps collection program has been expanded to five sites with the addition of three green collection boxes.
The new food scraps drop-off sites are located at the entrances to the Johnson Park School on General Johnson Road; the Riverside School on Riverside Drive; and the Littlebrook School on Magnolia Lane.
Those sites are in addition to two food scraps collection drop-off sites at the Municipal Building at 400 Witherspoon St. and Monument Hall at 1 Monument Dr. (the former Princeton Borough Hall). They opened in October 2023.
Additional food scraps drop-off sites are in the works, officials said. The goal is to expand the free program to 12 sites, which can serve 1,200 households.
The expansion to 12 sites is being funded by a $245,590 Compost and Food Waste Reduction grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, officials said. The town received the grant in October 2024.
The food scraps drop-off program is free and open to all Princeton residents, said Ann Soos, who chairs the Princeton Environmental Commission. They may sign up by visiting https://www.princetonnj.gov/1425/Food-Scrap-Drop-Off-Program and follow the link to register.
“(The food scraps drop-off program) is especially designed to be useful to apartment dwellers and homeowners who have properties too small to allow for on-site composting,” Soos said.
The expanded food scraps collection program also take meat, dairy and grease, which are not recommended for backyard composting.
The food scraps are collected and delivered to Trenton Renewables, which recycles food waste into premium compost, organic fertilizer and renewable biogas.
The compost and fertilizer are sent to local farms, and the biogas is used on-site to produce electricity to power the facility and also contribute renewable energy to the grid when it is needed most, Soos said.
The core goal of the food scraps drop-off program is to divert food waste from landfills, officials said. Diverting the food waste will help to reduce methane and carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to climate change.
Almost 20 tons of food scraps have been diverted from landfills since the program was initiated in 2024, Soos said. On average, the two sites at the Municipal Building and Monument Hall have diverted about 1.7 tons per month.
Diverting food waste from household trash also affects the amount of trash collected, officials said. Reducing the tonnage collected also reduces the amount of money that the town pays when the trash hauler delivers it to the transfer station.
This is not the first time that Princeton has encouraged residents to recycle their food wastes.
The town offered an organic food waste recycling program through its former trash hauler, but the program was put on hold in early 2019 and did not resume until 2023. Households had to sign up and pay a fee to participate in the earlier program.
The move to suspend the program in 2019 grew out of a combination of a doubling of the current price for the service – which would have been $829,200 for 2019 and 2020 – and the hauler’s failure to pick up the organic food waste, and sometimes sending it to an incinerator instead of a processing facility.
