Framingham's Curbside Composting Program Launches After Two Years of City Administration Obstruction
The members of the Composting Task Force deserve a special award for enduring the bureaucratic nightmare the Mayor designed for them.
You may have heard of curbside composting, which is a great way to divert about 40% of your household trash into compost, cutting methane production from landfills, and lowering city/town costs for trash collection.
Many cities and towns have given Black Earth Compost (BEC) their stamp of approval as their preferred curbside composting service, and seen curbside composting grow rapidly as BEC subscribers signed up for service, with the assurance they were dealing with a reliable vendor and that they were getting a great deal with one or more of:
Immediate deep discounts on subscription costs
Free starter kits, including a compost bin and liners
Downstream cost reduction as more subscribers sign up and volume discounts kick in
In typical cases, a town or city with about 300 BEC subscribers, paying $14.99/month for curbside composting service, has seen that cost drop to $10.99/month as the subscriber count went past a few thousand.
A number of articles have been written by this author on the Framingham curbside composting experience, and trace the painful progress of the Framingham community's attempt, starting in April 2023, to convince a reluctant Mayor that curbside composting was a win-win for the city.
The first article detailed the Mayor's initial reaction:
Framingham Mayor: Polite but Non-Committal on Curbside Composting (May 4, 2023)
while explaining the benefits and all of the details of the curbside composting program provided by Black Earth Compost.
Then, when community pressure forced the Mayor into action, he decided to put together a task force to ‘study the problem’, through an executive order in October 2023, even though the path to rapidly get curbside composting going was well established, and a launch could have been achieved in a few months.
Not long after the 'study the problem' maneuver was executed, another article showed how a simple path could be followed to avoid bureaucratic delays:
Another Composting Example for Framingham to Follow (Jan 30, 2024)
Nothing came of that suggestion, and the Mayor's Composting Task Force spent the next 20 months, with 15 meetings in 2024, and 9 meetings so far in 2025, trying to make a reluctant city administration do the obvious.
Even the mandatory Request For Proposal for a preferred vendor for curbside composting took 6 months, yes you read that right, 6 months, to settle on Black Earth Compost as the city's choice, when there is pretty much no other company of repute currently in this business in Massachusetts.
Finally, with a MassDEP grant secured, with the efforts of the stalwart souls on the task force, and not a single penny of city money in sight, the launch was announced on August 11, 2025:
City of Framingham Launches Curbside Compost Pilot Program
The Mayor was quoted in the MetroWest Daily News:
“This program is another step forward in making Framingham a cleaner, greener and more sustainable community,” said Mayor Charlie Sisitsky, in a statement. “By expanding composting access, we’re giving residents an easy way to keep food waste out of the landfill, save money in the long run and protect our environment for future generations.”
That sounds just great, with an election coming up on November 4, 2025, but belies the tortuous process created by the Mayor, and his lack of enthusiasm for the entire effort.
To get an idea of how task force torture was relentless to the very end, it is worth watching its most recent meeting on August 13, 2023:
Composting Task Force August 13, 2025, Meeting
There it becomes apparent that the final insult the task force members had to cope with was the studied indifference of the Public Information Officer (PIO), Susan Petroni, to their requests to review and provide input on the curbside composting launch promotional materials, which included a video and a flyer.
They did get to see the first cut of the video, which focused entirely on the DPW end of the operation, and they managed to convince the PIO that residents want to see the customer view of the operation, not the backend, since expansion of the subscriber base was the goal.
However, that criticism of the PIO’s handiwork came at a price.
Petroni shifted the video perspective to the customer view, but then refused to let the task force members see that customer oriented version prior to its release.
Obviously, further task force input was not welcome.
The vibe in the task force meeting was not good on that score.
Further, the flyer had a remarkably poor design, and no one on the task force wanted to distribute it.
For the curbside composting launch to be successful, these promotional materials are vital, as any professional in the communications business knows.
It is hard to fathom why the PIO acted in such an adverse manner.
How much torture can a task force take?
That is why in the scheme of things, the City Council should at least issue one of its proclamations to draw attention to the fact that every member of the Mayor’s Composting Task Force has endured two years of immense difficulty, exhibiting the patience of Job, for the greater benefit of the Framingham community and the city.
The Mayor may be taking credit in the news media, but the real heroes in the city are its citizens who labored with no encouragement, and prevailed in the face of difficulty on an important environmental initiative.
Yep! There’s never a shortage of politicians who are ready to pick up the flag and jump in front of the parade after everyone else has done the work. I never forgot how during the 1990s, Bill Clinton fought against welfare reform but when it proved successful through hard numbers, he lost no time taking credit for it and claimed it as his idea all along.