Next Action: SB 191 will receive a public hearing on Friday, March 8 in the Environment Committee
- This bill designates “residentially generated food scraps as an item that is required to be recycled.” (SB 191, 75-76) as of July 2025. This will require that all the food scraps that people like you and me produce be diverted from the food waste and either donated or sent to composting and anaerobic digester facilities.
- To support this work, this act requires each municipality to establish a program to help require the residents separate surplus food and food scraps from the solid waste stream.
- In the existing law, generators of food scraps above 26 tons are already required to divert their food scraps. Now, this bill builds on the food donation part of the law. Large generators will now be required to adopt a written policy pertaining to their food donation program. Among the several requirements of this policy, they will need to describe how they “will make best efforts to donate excess edible food” (SB 191, 26-29), provide education to their staff and vendors about the “food distribution process and the relationship between such process and food waste” (SB 191, 35-40), and they will need to include a framework to formalize and streamline protocols around food donation.
- The final section of this bill bars people from redeeming beverage containers purchased outside of the state from coming into Connecticut to collect the ten cent bottle deposit. This is to address the concern that people would buy bottles in the surrounding states where the deposit is only five cents to make extra money in Connecticut. This practice of combining separate concepts into one bill is very common in the legislature.
