We Can’t Compost Our Way Out of a Food Waste Crisis

Food recovery is crucial to mitigating greenhouse gases from food

Food waste material processed by Compost Cab workers to create compost at Howard University Community Compost Cooperative on Wednesday, August 2 , 2017, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In 2019, Oregon researchers went digging through trash in 230 homes. The study, which aimed to understand how much food people were wasting, surveyed both urban and rural homes and asked residents to keep diaries of what they threw away. What they found in the garbage was mostly food — the majority of it edible.

Participants in the study had thrown away 103 servings of soup, 41 loaves of bread, 103 servings of beans, and 52 potatoes. They said menu items had spoiled, they’d gotten tired of eating them, or that the food just didn’t taste good as leftovers. Of course they wanted to discard fewer groceries, but nearly three-quarters said they felt “less guilty” when they composted this food waste. Composting, the researchers noted, seemed to feel different than wasting food.

These days, food makes up the largest share of landfill material — 24% — releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as it decomposes. Composting, for many, offers a solution: Instead of sending organics to landfills, the process turns it back into nutrients for farming, landscaping, and other projects.

Composting dates to at least the Stone Age. In the early 2000s, it began gaining ground in the United…