Hamden Symposium Focuses On Sustainability

Food scraps: should they be turned into methane or composted? What about the state of Hamden’s trees? And what was the town doing generally to create more green space and move toward reducing its carbon emissions?

These questions and more were addressed on Saturday at Hamden’s Sustainability Symposium, held at Memorial Town Hall and organized by Laurie Sweet, at-large representative on Hamden’s Legislative Council and chair of the Environment and Conservation Committee.

“I’ve been grateful to see how this administration has prioritized sustainability,” Sweet said. She explained that the symposium had two main purposes: first, to provide an overview for the public of various environmental efforts happening in Hamden, many of them run or fostered by the town; and second, to give the various officials and committee members across Hamden’s town government a chance to talk with one another. In their day-to-day work, ​“everyone’s in their silos,” Sweet said. She was hoping to change that.

The symposium drew an audience of a few dozen. Participating in the symposium were Joe Collelo, Hamden’s director of public works; Joe DeRisi, recycling coordinator; Stephen White, town engineer; Diane Hoffman, tree commissioner and founder of Hamden Alliance for Trees; Justin Farmer, organizer and member of Six Lakes Coalition Steering Committee; Alice Kosowsky, chair of Hamden’s solid waste and recycling commission; Susan Neitlich, tree commissioner and member of Hamden Alliance for Trees; Courtney McGinnis, environmental science and studies program director at Quinnipiac University; Tom Mead, facilitator of volunteer cultivation and engagement at Third Act; Brendan Smith, chair of Hamden’s energy use and climate change commission; and members of Bear Path School’s Green Team.

Over the course of the afternoon, a few of the more lateral conversations Sweet was hoping for came to pass, coalescing around trees and food.

Students from Bear Path School’s Green Team — organized by Doreen Stohler, math specialist at the Hamden elementary school — set the tone for the meeting as a program dealing with the nuts and bolts of environmental work. The students detailed how the Green Team’s efforts were focused on the waste generated during the school’s lunch period. Thanks to the Green Team, Bear Path was now separating its trash into recyclable and non-recyclable material, but also creating a bin for food scraps, collected by Blue Earth Compost in Hartford to be composted into soil, and setting aside extra food that could be brought to shelters. 

The students learned that they had to be vigilant, making sure that the materials were properly sorted to avoid contamination. They were learning about some of the complications of dealing with trash, from storing it properly to seeing that it was transported elsewhere regularly. But they also felt the work they were putting in was going a long way. 

“I’m really glad I could help and learn how to make this world a better place,” one student said.

Trees

Hamden’s tree activists came together around United Illuminated’s pruning of trees in Hamden in the 2010s, which tree advocates and some legislators found overly aggressive. By 2018, Hamden’s Tree Commission had issued statements to allow residents to push back against tree cutting on their own property, emphasizing that utility companies needed permission from property owners and the town before doing their work. In 2020, the town of Hamden issued a cease-and-desist order to UI regarding cutting down trees. 

A year later, the state-level Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) issued a similar order for the entire state that UI, in a complaint, stated was ​“tantamount to eliminating the [tree-cutting] program in its entirety.” As of 2022, the town now has a more robust tree ordinance designed to protect Hamden’s trees and keep the tree population healthy, and has been designated a Tree City by the Arbor Day Foundation.

The effort, in Hamden and elsewhere in the state, was a victory in the eyes of tree commissioner Diane Hoffman, but she noted how long it took. ​“It takes a long time to get anything to happen,” especially at the state level, and ​“11 years later,” she said, ​“we are more concerned than ever” about the loss of trees.

“Trees are our best natural allies” in dealing with the effects of climate change and avoiding the creation of heat islands, Hoffman said. They are ​“central to the resilience of the town,” ​“community assets” that benefit ​“entire neighborhoods.” Susan Neitlich, fellow tree commission member, pointed out that a healthy tree population leads to cooler temperatures, cleaner air, higher property values, and healthier residents.

Looking ahead, in addition to monitoring UI and educating residents about their rights and responsibilities regarding trees, the Tree Commission will hold two community meetings on April 3 and April 19 for residents interested in having the town plant a free tree on the tree lawn — the strip between the sidewalk and the street — in front of their residence. This is part of a larger push to plant more trees in Hamden, especially in Newhall, Neitlich said, noting that some residents have already been waiting several years to have a tree planted.

The commission wants to ​“make sure we have a healthy tree canopy” across town, Neitlich said. (See Hamden’s Tree Commission for more information.)

Solid Waste

For Alice Kosowsky, too often the environmental conversation has been framed as ​“what happens from unconsidered side effects,” and environmental concerns are ​“the last to speak up” in policy decisions. She described Hamden as being in the middle of a ​“solid waste crisis” akin to the slow-moving, looming problems of climate change generally. The crisis, in her view, has been shaped by ​“decisions made in the past” and ​“increasingly in our culture” that haven’t taken the ​“social costs” of waste management into account. The town must deal with the consequences of those decisions now. 

In her time at the microphone, Kosowsky focused on ​“food waste,” as in, the food that households throw away in their trash. ​“Whenever we throw away food,” she said, methane is the result; according to Kosowsky, 58 percent of the methane emitted from landfills is from discarded food.

“People have a lot to learn about this issue,” Kosowsky said. Handling trash, she observed, had its own stigma attached to it; moving past it meant alleviating ​“cultural concern about what the neighbors think.” During the Q&A session that followed the presentations, however, it was clear that most of the people in the audience had dealing with food waste on their minds.

Enlarging on the point that the Bear Path Green Team made, Kosowsky posited that, if we couldn’t prevent households from throwing food away, that waste could be put to better use. Currently Hamden’s transfer station accepts household food scraps, which are then brought to an anaerobic digester run by Quantum Biopower in Southington, to be processed into ​“renewable methane gas,” an energy source. ​“We are paying to have that done,” she said, ​“but at least it’s not going to a landfill.” Joe DeRisi, during the Q&A period, pointed out that Hamden saves thousands of dollars with this move.

Kosowsky envisioned what might happen if neighbors networked more to collect food scraps and take turns bringing them to the transfer station. DeRisi — again invoking the work of the Bear Path Green Team — wondered if each of the schools could implement such a program, and then have the schools function as a neighborhood drop-off point. 

Kosowsky also mentioned that Hamden could reduce the costs of transporting those food scraps by having ​“composters at the municipal level.” The town has applied for a permit for that as of this week and is awaiting DEEP approval, remarked Stephen White during the Q&A. Costs could be reduced even more if more people composted their own vegetable scraps.

For its part, Kosowsky said, the solid waste commission hadn’t figured out how to talk more effectively to the rest of the town government yet — which was what the symposium was all about. In the meantime, she said, ​“we’re doing a lot of stuff, and we hope that it pays off.”

Connections

The presentations and subsequent conversations among presenters and audience about trees and food waste fit into the broader context of environmental work in town. Brendan Smith detailed the work of the energy use and climate change commission in making the town’s operations more energy efficient, to meet a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2040 and reaching net zero emissions by 2050. These efforts ranged from updating buildings to switching to electric town vehicles where possible, to improving infrastructure for EV charging overall, to replacing old streetlights with more efficient LED bulbs. 

Justin Farmer, speaking as a representative of the Six Lakes Park Coalition, took a longer view, starting with a brief summary of the history of the 102-acre Powder Farm near Dixwell Avenue and the ongoing effort to move it toward becoming a public park. Echoing Kosowsky, he said that ​“we deal with the consequences of policies made before our time,” but ​“we have to believe we can win.”

He stressed the need for even greater community involvement. ​“We’re always looking for big projects to save us,” he said — whether from state and federal agencies or large corporations pressured to do right — when the solution could maybe more effectively be built upward from local efforts. 

“Who is not in the room” yet? he asked. ​“How can we have this green space together?” How could Hamden develop a greater sense of cultural and environmental stewardship in the community? 

It was something of a callback to another comment from the Bear Path students, asked by Kosowsky what they had learned about the difficulty of starting a new environmental initiative at their school. They emphasized that the work wasn’t necessarily as complicated to begin as it might seem, once you had a team. ​“You just need a few bins and labels,” one student said. ​“That’s really all you need to start it — and students who are dedicated to this.”