Sakonnet-area environmental and garden groups are excited for the New Year — for the first time, residents in Little Compton and Tiverton will be able to divert some of their household waste as compost, saving money, helping the environment and reducing landfill waste.

“We’re very excited,” said Jessica Cullinan of the Tiverton Litter Committee. “This is something we’ve been working on for a while.”

Volunteers on the litter committee and in Little Compton’s Sogkonate Garden Club started looking at private composting operators earlier this year at the encouragement of Rep. Michell McGaw. Eventually, they reached out to Black Earth Compost, a private company that for a fee, drives to subscribers’ homes twice a month and picks up all manner of household and yard waste — compostable materials like leaves, vegetable scraps, egg shells and even bones and meat. That compost is then taken offsite to Black Earth’s composting facility, which resells its product commercially and also offers some of it back to subscribers.

Black Earth doesn’t start servicing a new area until a certain threshold of subscribers is met. In this case, volunteers spread the word and so far, between 75 and 100 Tiverton and Little Compton residents have signed up — enough to start the service in parts of both towns by the first or second week of January.

So far, the northern half of Little Compton and much of the east, west and south sides of Tiverton are on Black Earth’s route. The cost per customer is $16.99 a month, or $89.99 every six months, for pickup every other week. But Cullinan said the route could expand, and the cost per customer could drop, if more people sign up. She noted that Black Earth provides a bin for compost, as well as compostable bags.

“We want to make it more accessible,” Cullinan said of the composting effort. “We’re paying to send our trash to the landfill, there’s a trash problem and we’re running out of space. And so we started this effort as, ‘Let’s help people reduce the amount of paid trash bags.’”

To find out more about the service, or to sign up, see Black Earth's website. A referral link that saves customers $5 when they sign up here.