An Easy Change You Can Make Today to Eliminate Food Waste

By: Will Roth 
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Food waste makes up over 20% of material in landfills. Once there, it is surrounded by inorganic materials and lacks the airflow needed to break down. Instead, it releases methane, which is at least 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Putting our food waste in the trash is the absolute last resort. Luckily, for many of us, there is an environmentally-beneficial alternative that is just as easy.

In many areas, food scraps can be disposed of in the same bin as your yard waste. That means that a solution for preventing greenhouse gases from entering our atmosphere may be as simple as placing your food waste in the green bin instead of the black bin. 
I live in Los Angeles, where the city’s Sanitation Department accepts uncooked food scraps (not including meat, fish, or eggs) along with yard waste. These materials are composted along with other sources of organic waste like manure from herbivores at the LA Zoo. Exotic! Once the compost is complete, the product is bagged and sold under the brand name “TopGro.” 
In the neighboring city of Manhattan Beach, Waste Management has a program through which both commercial and residential food waste is actually converted into renewable energy. Residents bag their scraps and place them in the green bin. From there, the materials are sorted and taken to a CORe (Centralized Organic Recycling) facility. The materials are turned into a slurry, which is then taken to wastewater treatment plants where it aids in creating energy. According to Waste Management, each ton of food waste can power eight to ten homes. There are four CORe facilities in the U.S. 
In many cases, the systems to break down food waste in an environmentally-beneficial way already exist. Unfortunately, not enough people know about them. I spoke with several members of my community and no one was aware that our food scraps could be recycled with yard waste. I didn’t even know about it until a few weeks ago. Now, I keep a container with a lid in my kitchen solely for scraps, which I empty into the green bin once it gets full. The change to my routine has been minor, and although the impact is difficult to quantify, it’s something. 
It’s important to keep in mind that this option should be considered an alternative to the landfill. But there are other achievable ways to positively impact the environment with the decisions we make on a daily basis. Kathryn Kellog has listed several tips from shopping habits to storage practices. These can help us stop food waste before it happens. The next best thing is to compost. This allows for food waste to break down without creating methane, because the microbes that produce methane are not active in the presence of oxygen. Additionally, compost is proven to accelerate plant growth, meaning that your plants can more rapidly pull carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester it in the soil. Free fertilizer that saves the planet is a win-win! For a guide to starting your own compost pile, check out this guide. If you don’t have the space to compost, there are innumerable community composting sites where you could deposit your scraps. Usually these are located in community gardens or parks. Search for community composting sites in your area and you’ll likely find something close by. 
With all of that said, some of us might not always be able to compost our food scraps. Many community composting sites are currently closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Others may be too far. Sometimes, life simply gets in the way and we can’t make time. That’s okay! It doesn’t mean that those food scraps have to be placed in the trash destined for the landfill. For now, proper disposal of food waste can be a good start, and separating your food scraps from the rest of your trash is a good habit to build. Eventually, the prospect of contributing to a community compost pile or starting your own may seem more achievable. 
Since organic recycling programs vary by region, it’s important to look up the policies where you live. If you don’t see the information online, reach out to your local municipality. Once you have a definite answer, spread the word in your community. If organics recycling isn’t available yet, it may be soon. California has committed to reducing methane output substantially by this year, meaning that more cities will be forced to provide these services.
We may not all be able to compost, but we can almost certainly prevent food waste from going to landfills. Shrinking our personal carbon footprints is easier than many of us thought.