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State context

Two 2025 state actions push in the same direction as Peterborough's pay-as-you-throw program: change the price of throwing food away, and let people respond.

HB 300: food waste disposal ban, effective Feb 1, 2025

Anyone generating a ton or more of food waste a week must divert it, but only if a permitted facility with adequate capacity exists within 20 miles. No facility nearby means fully exempt. Households are exempt outright.

The law's hierarchy: reduce at the source, feed people, feed animals, then compost, digest, or apply to land, then recover energy.

The design puts the obligation on generators, never on the facility. A composter builds what it can afford and signs contracts by choice; when it's full, the remaining generators go back to exempt. Opening a facility converts nearby generators into obligated prospects. NHDES has framed the law as changing the marketplace rather than enforcing.

The known weakness: soft enforcement means a new composter has guaranteed prospects but not guaranteed revenue. The smart sequence is to sign anchor generators first, then build to that volume. Massachusetts followed the same soft-start-then-enforce arc.

The economics: diversion wins when the composter's price per ton, hauling included, beats the trash price per ton. At roughly $85 a ton to tip, with food the heaviest and wettest fraction of the bag, it usually does.

State data

HB 462: composting infrastructure grants

$500,000 appropriated into the Solid Waste Management Fund (RSA 149-R) for food waste infrastructure. Matching, competitive grants awarded on proposals that show a significant improvement in diversion. Not automatic, and not gated on signed customer contracts. NHDES has to write rules first, and no list of New Hampshire recipients has been published yet.

Nearby activity: the Lakes Region Planning Commission won an $87,300 USDA Composting and Food Waste Reduction grant for two large-scale sites in the Laconia area.

State data

Statewide, the trend is the wrong way

NHDES estimates just under 17% of New Hampshire's waste was recycled in 2024, down about four points since 2020. Statewide waste generation is down 13.2% since 2018. All six of the state's landfills are projected to be full by 2060.

Peterborough, with pay-as-you-throw since 1999, runs against that trend.

State data

Same lever at both scales

Pay-as-you-throw nudges households. HB 300 nudges businesses. Neither mandates behavior; both change prices and let people do the math.

Inference

Sources