Sustainability Committee

Tyngsborough commissioned a study to help us understand what is in our waste. As you can see from the results below, only about 25% of what we are putting in our trash is actually trash that must be brought to a landfill or incinerator. The Sustainability Committee continues to work on providing alternative destinations for the other 75% of our waste - recycling, composting, and donation/reuse.

Tyngsborough residents are responding! Residents exceeded the Committee goal of 3% tonnage reduction. The total trash and recycling tonnage for FY22 was 4,938 tons (9.9 million pounds). The total for FY23 was 4,331 tons (8.7 million pounds). This was a 12% reduction!

Read the full report (PDF).

Semi-Annual Zero Waste Days

• Held on a Saturday of May and November every year from 9 am to Noon at the Elementary School located at 205 Westford Road
• All items collected will be reused or recycled
• Next Zero Waste Day is November 1, 2025
• Zero Waste Day FAQ's
• Zero Waste Day Flyer - November 1, 2025

Holiday String Lights

Bring unwanted holiday string lights to Town Hall between November 15th and January 31st. We will get those string lights recycled!

Recycling Center

For your food waste, textiles, extra cardboard, scrap metal, and mercury-containing items such as rechargeable batteries and fluorescent or CFL bulbs. Open year round at the Highway Department located at 89 Kendall Road.

Christmas Trees

Christmas trees may be dropped of throughout the month of January at the Highway Department or the parking lot at 180 Lakeview Avenue. 
** No bags, tinsel or decorations**

Textile Reuse & Recycling

Tyngsborough has contracted with Helpsy for textile reuse and recycling. Helpsy offers curbside collection as well as a collection container at the Recycling Center on Kendall Road and at the middle school parking lot on Norris Road.

Schedule your curbside textile pick up online.

Place your items on the curb no later than 7 am on the day of your scheduled pick up. Items must be bagged but can be in any bag of your choosing.

HELPSY will accept:

• Clean, dry, and bagged clothing and fashion accessories (stained, worn, and torn is fine)
• Dresses, shirts, pants, suits, costumes
• Coats, gloves, hats, shoes
• Belts, ties, scarves
• Purses, wallets, backpacks, luggage, totes
• Towels, bedding, curtains
• Curtains, placemats, tablecloths, throw rugs

  
  

HELPSY will not accept:

• Breakable houseware, glass
• Electronics, appliances
• Furniture, building material, scrap metal, mattresses
• Encyclopedia sets, phone books, magazines

Repair Cafe
Repair Cafe is a neighborhood initiative that promotes repair as an alternative to adding items to the landfill. Residents can bring their broken items in and, with the help of volunteer repairers, fix them!

About Composting

Composting is a controlled process of decomposition of organic material. Naturally occurring soil organisms recycle nitrogen, potash, phosphorus, and other plant nutrients as they convert the material into humus or nutrient-rich soil.

Backyard, Drop-Off or Curbside Food Waste Composting

Food waste comprises almost half the weight of our trash and is a valuable source of nutrients to enrich our soil. The town offers three options for composting your food waste: Drop-off at the Recycling Center, compost in your yard, subscribe to curbside composting. Some residents choose to drop-off their meat and dairy scraps at the Recycling Center and then put their fruit and vegetable scraps in their backyard composter.

The Recycling Center at the DPW offers food waste bins for residents to put their food scraps into. Black Earth collects this food waste and composts it into soil at their Groton composting facility. If you want to be able to just toss your bag of food waste into the bin, be sure to use BPI-certified plastic bags only; otherwise, empty your bag into the bin and take your bag home to put in your trash.

Compost bins for do-it-yourself backyard composting are available at the Board of Health Office at a subsidized price of $35.

Curbside collection is available (for a fee) by contacting Black Earth.

Please contact the Board of Health at 978-649-2300, ext. 118, for more information.

Watch a video: "How to Assemble the New Age Composter."

Benefits of Composting

Composting is a convenient, beneficial and inexpensive way to handle your organic waste and help the environment. Composting:

• Reduces the volume of garbage requiring disposal
• Saves money for you and your community in reduced soil purchases and reduced local disposal costs and enriches the soil. Using compost adds essential nutrients, improves soil structure, which allows better root growth, and increases moisture and nutrient retention in the soil. Plants love compost!

What to Compost

Yard wastes such as leaves, grass clippings and weeds make excellent compost. Fruit and vegetable scraps, plus food wastes such as coffee grounds, tea bags, and eggs shells, can be composted. To keep animals and odors out of your pile, do not add meat, bones, fatty food wastes (such as cheese, grease and oils), dog and cat litter, and diseased plants. Do not add invasive weeds and weeds that have gone to seed to the pile. Elements of a good compost pile With these principles in mind, you can convert your organic wastes into resources by turning your spoils to soil.

The Biodegraders

Nature has provided an army of workers who specialize in decomposing organic material. These "critters" - bacteria, fungi, molds, earthworms, insects and other soil organisms - eat all types of organic material and in the process convert nutrients into a form plants can utilize. Without those compost critters, we would be surrounded by mountains of leaves and the soil would be barren. The process of composting is simply a matter of providing the soil organisms with food, water and oxygen. They do the rest.

Organic Material

Organic material contains varying amounts of carbon and nitrogen which nourish the organisms naturally present in your compost pile. (Billions of bacteria inhabit the surface of every leaf and blade of grass in your yard.) The critters need both carbon and nitrogen. An easy way to provide both of these is to remember that brown, woody materials, such as autumn leaves, are high in carbon while green, moist materials, such as grass clippings, are high in nitrogen (refer to "How to Make a Compost Pile" below).

Alternating layers of brown and green materials will yield finished compost in three to eight months. Leaves alone break down in six to 15 months. Grass clippings or food scraps composted alone result in unpleasant odors because they contain more nitrogen than the compost organisms can use. Layer leaves or straw with green material, or let it dry until it turns brown before composting it alone.

How to Make a Compost Pile

There are as many different ways to make compost as there are people who do it. The following guidelines will get you started, but soon your own experience will help you tailor a method that best fits your needs.

• Build or purchase a compost bin from the Board of Health Office in Town Hall, or your local garden center or home store. Enclosed compost piles keep out pests, hold heat and moisture in, and have a neat appearance. Or, bins can be simply made of wire, wood, pallets, concrete blocks, even garbage cans with drainage holes drilled in them. In urban areas, rodent-resistant compost bins – having a secure cover and floor and openings no wider than one-half inch – must be used.
• Set up the bin in a convenient, shady area with good drainage. A pile that is about three feet square and three feet high will help maintain the heat generated by the composting organisms throughout the winter. Although a smaller pile may not retain heat, it will compost.
• Start the pile with a layer of coarse material such as corn stalks to build in air passages. Add alternating layers of "brown" and "green" materials with a shovelful of soil on top of each layer. Shredding leaves or running over them with a lawn mower will shorten the composting time. Be sure to bury food scraps in the center of the pile.

High Nitrogen "Green" ingredients

• Grass clippings
• Weeds
• Food wastes: fruit and vegetables, coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells
• Manure (cow, horse, chicken, rabbit)
• Seaweed
• Alfalfa hay/meal
• Blood meal

High Carbon "Brown" Ingredients

• Autumn leaves
• Straw
• Paper towels, napkins, bags, plates, coffee filters, tissue and newspaper
• Cornstalks
• Wood chips
• Saw dust
• Pine needles

Add water as you build the pile if the materials are dry.

As time goes on, keep oxygen available to the compost critters by fluffing the pile with a hoe or compost turning tool each time you add material. A complete turning of the pile – so the top becomes the bottom – in spring and fall should result in finished compost within a year. More frequent turning will shorten the composting time.

How to Use Compost

When the composted materials look like rich, brown soil, it is ready to use. Apply one-half to three inches of finished compost and mix it in with the top four inches of soil about one month before planting. Compost can be applied as a top dressing in the garden throughout the summer. Compost is excellent for reseeding lawns, and it can be spread one-quarter inch deep over the entire lawn to rejuvenate the turf. To make potting soil, mix equal parts compost, sand and loam. You may put the compost through a sieve to remove large particles – these can go back into the pile.

Mulching & Composting Without a Yard

Mulching

Grass clippings, leaves and woody yard wastes can be used as mulch in gardens and around shrubs to keep the soil moist, control weed growth and add nutrients. Woody materials should be chipped or shredded. Use a mulch of pine needles around acid-loving plants. Leaves will work first as mulch, then as a soil enricher as they decompose. Grass clippings should be dried before using as mulch. Do not mulch with grass clippings which have been treated with herbicides; composting them first, however, will break down the herbicides.

Composting Without a Yard

Composting can be done indoors using an earthworm farm. Not only can you recycle your food scraps, you can also have a steady supply of fishing bait! See MassDEP's vermicomposting page (PDF).

For more information, contact Mass. Department of Environmental Protection.
Phone: 617-292-5500

Air & Moisture

The compost critters need oxygen, just as we do. Lack of oxygen will slow down the composting process and cause odors. Turn your pile, fluff it with a hoe or compost turning tool, or build air passages into the pile with cornstalks to provide oxygen to the organisms.

Compost organisms need a moist environment. The pile should be as damp as a wrung-out sponge, but not dripping wet. Make sure leaves are damp when you add them to the compost pile because they will not break down if they are dry. Since moisture evaporates as the pile heats up (a sign of active composting), let rain and snow replace it, or add water during dry spells. A cover helps retain moisture in hot weather.

Every spring, the Sustainability Committee, Highway Department, Library and Board of Health ask residents to help clean the litter from our roadsides. Please joint the effort!

Town-Wide Clean Up Flyer

April is town-wide cleanup month!

Committee Established June 10, 2019 by vote of the Board of Selectmen
Formal Charge Adopted 6/24/ 2019 by vote of the Board of Selectmen

By an act of the Board of Selectmen of the Town of Tyngsborough, this charge shall establish a Sustainability Committee as presented below.

Mission

The Sustainability Committee will be tasked with (a) supporting efforts to reduce contamination in the current recycling program and reduce future costs through the consideration of new programs and public outreach, (b) work with town departments to support recycling initiatives at public events and buildings, (c) assist the Conservation Commission with public engagement and awareness regarding storm water management, and (d) serve as a resource for both town residents and businesses in the areas of improving and implementing waste reduction and energy saving initiatives.

Membership

The Sustainability Committee shall be appointed by the Board of Selectmen. It shall consist of 5 to 7 members, all of whom must be residents. The Board of Selectmen may designate relevant staff to serve as non-voting "advisory" members.

Term of Membership

The original members shall be appointed to staggered terms with (2) being appointed to three year terms, (2) being appointed to two year terms, and (1) being appointed to a one year term. If the Board of Selectmen choses to add seven members, the sixth member shall be appointed to a one year term, and the seventh member shall be appointed to a two year term.

Following the original appointment, members shall serve three year terms. In the event of a vacancy, the Board of Selectmen may appoint a replacement to complete the original term of the member who left the position vacant.

Organization

The Committee shall elect annually a Chairman to preside over the meetings and act as the organizer of the meetings, a Vice Chairman to serve as Chair in the absence of the Chair, and a clerk who shall be responsible for posting meetings, and recording minutes in accordance with open meeting laws.