Town & Village Launch Residential Composting Program
Effective August 15th, 2026, The Town of Aurora in partnership with the Village of East Aurora and Erie County, now offers a free residential food scrap composting pilot program. Residents may drop off food scraps from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday at the East Aurora Department of Public Work's
yard waste drop off site on Pine Street by Sinking Ponds.
Free kitchen counter compost buckets will be given to residents on a first-come, first-served basis. Village residents can pick up buckets while the last at the Village Office, while Town of Aurora residents may obtain theirs at the Town Clerk's Office.
The food scraps recycling pilot program is part of Erie County's Plate to Field program, funded in part through the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation's Climate Smart Communities Grant Program.
Town Board Member Ray Wrazen said "This collaboration allows us to provide a practical service that promotes sustainability while strengthening cooperation between our local governments."
"This program demonstrates what can be accomplished when local governments work together," Village Mayor Luke Wochensky said. "By partnering with the Town and Erie County, we're able to offer residents a free, convenient service that reduces waste and makes good use of taxpayer resources."
Village Department of Public Works employees will oversee weekly food scrap collection at the East Aurora site. The Town of Aurora Highway Department will transport the material to Erie County's composting facility, where it will be processed into compost rather than disposed of in a landfill.
The pilot program will be used to measure community participation and evaluate demand for residential composting services.
Residents may collect accepted food scraps throughout the week and bring them to the Saturday drop-off site. Information about accepted materials will be included with each compost bucket and will also be available at the collection site.
Why Food Scraps Recycling?
Composting food scraps keeps them out of landfills where they
release methane- a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon.
Food scraps currently make up 30% of what ends up in landfills annually and they cost precious taxpayers dollars to be collected and disposed of. They're a terrible resource to waste! Instead of rotting in landfills, our food scraps can be turned into compost that can help restore our depleted top soils. Properly managed compost does not release methane into the atmosphere.
In October of 2023 the Federal EPA found that "approximately 58 percent of methane emissions from landfills are from food waste, 61 percent of which is not captured, but released into the atmosphere."
Does that impact our region? YES!
Climate Trace uses state-of-the-art monitoring to highlight climate warming hot spots globally. The maps below demonstrate two large hot spots in our geographic area- they are the Chaffee and Modern landfills where our trash is hauled. A primary cause of these hot spots is methane gas released from our rotting food waste. Some methane is diverted into energy by the Chaffee landfill to power their facility. The Modern Landfill by contrast has significantly higher emissions levels.
By simply diverting our food scraps from our garbage cans, we can ease our tax burden, enrich our local topsoils, and reduce our climate warming emissions.