BAR HARBOR – In two years, Mark Dittrick has produced four bags of garbage.

Now the Nova Scotia resident is coaching Mainers on how to accomplish what seems to be an impossible goal: living a life that produces zero waste.

Monday night, Dittrick, an American who has lived in Atlantic Canada for decades, told the Bar Harbor Conservation Commission and a large group of local residents about the successful efforts of Anapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

After defeating a landfill proposal in their area, many of the town’s 600 residents turned NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – on its head with a pledge to keep garbage in their own community.

“We said, ‘We’re going to see if we can deal with it all where we are,'” said Dittrick, who was one of the leaders of an effort to reduce the community’s waste to nothing by 2005.

Dittrick currently works for the Atlantic Canada chapter of the Sierra Club.

“There is no such place as away,” he said, quoting a recycling group.

The province had already banned the disposal of organic waste, like grass clippings and food scraps, in landfills, but proposed trucking the organic waste hundreds of miles to Halifax to be composted.

Anapolis Royal has instituted recycling plans, encouraged home composting, and developed a community composting system. The town educated consumers to reduce the waste stream at its source. The program, called Zero Waste, is based on a waste management strategy developed in New Zealand.

Since then, the Anapolis Royal effort has been praised by the United Nations. Also, communities such as Santa Cruz, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, and Carrboro, N.C., have signed on to the program.

It’s important not to underestimate the public when planning for waste management, Dittrick said.

“Design for the smart shoppers,” he said, referring to consumers who will make the effort to compost and recycle.

Bar Harbor has addressed much of the “low-hanging fruit” and is considering augmenting its recycling programs with composting, said Conservation Commission Chairman Gary Friedmann.

Monday night, Dittrick demonstrated “Green Cones” which are subsidized by the town and used by individual homeowners to compost food wastes.

The devices are about 4 feet tall, with about one-third buried in the ground. The part above ground looks like a large traffic cone, with a cap to cover a hole in the top.

Technically known as accelerated aerobic digesters, they speed up the natural decomposition process of food waste by creating ideal temperatures, air flow and drainage. The cones are produced from recycled plastic in Vermont, and sell for about $60.

Food goes in the top and is decomposed by natural bacteria, and then nutrients leach out of the bottom into the soil.

“It’s almost a miracle how fast these things work,” said Dittrick, who is not affiliated with the manufacturer.

The College of the Atlantic is testing a Green Cone, as are COA president Steve Katona and Friedmann. Although Green Cone sales weren’t the goal, a dozen people requested the composters after Monday night’s talk, organizers said.