Benefits: The Act of Composting

Creating Compost

1) Reduces Personal Food Waste

Did you know that food is the single largest category of material in U.S. landfills?

Separating food waste from the rest of our garbage gives us immediate visual feedback of what we’re wasting and why, which helps us to prevent food waste to begin with!

There are two types of food that most households in the United States think of as “garbage”: Food scraps and food waste. Food scraps are food items that are typically discarded rather than eaten, such as peels, rinds, cores, eggshells, seeds, pits, bones, coffee grounds and paper filters, loose-leaf tea & paper tea bags. Food waste refers to food that is or was perfectly edible, but has been left to spoil or expire. When we compost both types of food instead of putting them in our trash we get clear, immediate, visual feedback of what food we’re wasting.

When we compost our food waste, we can get a better understanding of how our shopping patterns and habits can be improved: Do you buy more veggies than you need to because there is often a BOGO deal? Do you always buy lettuce because you want to be healthy but then never eat it? Do you often forget about fruits and vegetables, such as garlic or onions, that you start but then never finish? NRDC research in three U.S. cities indicated that the category of edible food most wasted by households was fruits and vegetables. The best way to reduce impacts from food waste is to prevent waste from occurring in the first place, so NRDC works through its Save the Food campaign and other tools to educate consumers on how to shop for, prepare, and store food to minimize waste.

In addition to all the environmental and societal benefits of reducing food waste, you will save a lot of money! An average person in the U.S. wastes about 238 lbs of food per year. Imagine how much money that is!?! The average U.S. family tossing between $1,866 and $2,798 of food in their garbage every year, equating to about $240 BILLION annually. When we separate our food waste from the rest of our garbage we get immediate and visual feedback on how much food we’re wasting, which can help us to make better shopping decisions.

Food scraps are another important piece of the puzzle we should examine. There are so many alternative uses for food scraps that we should take advantage of before putting them in the compost. Until I started composting, I never even thought about the fact that I could use my coffee grounds to make luxurious body scrubs at home! Pineapple rinds? Who would have thought they make a delicious tea with a laundry list of health benefits, including some that aren’t found in the actual fruit! Eggshells? They’re perfect for crushing up and using as a natural “pesticide” in your garden at home. Pits? If you were on social media at all during 2020 you probably saw A LOT of people growing avocados using their pit. Citrus peels? Perfect ingredient for your next non-toxic at-home cleaner!

When we compost, we separate our food scraps and food waste and can truly SEE how we can reduce our food waste and save money.

2) Reduces Carbon Emissions 

Did you know that garbage trucks only get a maximum of 3 mpg?! And that approximately 66% of what we toss at the curb for garbage collection is actually compostable?! This is a very inefficient operation, especially when we consider how far our trash is going. For instance, NYC sends their trash to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even as far as Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina. That’s a lot of money and a lot of pollution we’re talking about.

So, what would happen if we dramatically reduce the volume & weight of our trash, thereby requiring less trucks to pick up our trash less frequently? Less carbon emissions!

3) Reduces Methane Emissions 

In addition to reducing carbon emissions associated with transporting garbage to landfills, composting helps us dramatically reduce the amount of methane that’s emitted into our atmosphere.

Organic material requires oxygen to decompose, but landfills lack oxygen. When organic material lacks the oxygen it needs to decompose it emits methane, which is 84x more effective at trapping heat in our atmosphere than CO2, but thankfully only lives in our atmosphere for 10 years! That means if we act NOW, we can reduce the rate of global warming by up to 30% just by composting alone!

4) Diverts Waste from Landfills 

Composting is an easy way we can extend the life of landfills, which are nearing capacity across the country (and world!), helping us to avoid dangerous alternatives like incineration, waste-to-energy facilities, and new landfills.

Based on data collected by Waste Business Journal in 2018, it was forecasted that by 2021 the U.S. would only have an average of 15 years left of capacity for all of its landfills. Regional capacity estimates vary widely, from 10.5 years in the Northeast to 27.4 years in the West. These estimates were calculated without taking into account China’s 2018 Operation National Sword, which banned the import of several types of wastes, including plastics, from foreign countries, like the United States. Now many of these plastics which we used to send to China and other foreign countries are finding their way into our landfills.

Compostable material represents 66% of what we send to our landfills — if we compost our organics we can drastically reduce the rate at which we fill our landfills and buy ourselves more time with the ones we currently have. In addition to this massive piece of the landfill pie that can be diverted from landfill simply by composting, we can divert even more if we look at more effective and accessible recycling programs.

5) Creates Clean, Green Jobs

According to the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, on a per-ton basis, composting employs 2x more workers than landfills and 4x more workers than incinerators (including waste-to-energy facilities). When we look at the number of jobs supported by composting vs. landfill or incineration (including WTE) on a dollar-per-capital-investment basis, the numbers are even more impressive: composting creates & supports between 2-3x more jobs than landfills and 17x more jobs than incineration (including WTE)! These jobs include skilled equipment operators for windrow turners, front-end loaders, grinders, and screeners.

But what about afterwards, when the organic material has been transformed into finished compost that’s ready to use? Green infrastructure jobs that utilize compost create an additional 6.2 jobs per 10,000 tons of material that’s composted (which can also be expressed as 18 jobs for every 10,000 tons of finished compost used). This reinforces the fact that composting isn’t just an ethical & sustainable way to divert waste, but it’s also the foundation of green infrastructure which provides a plethora of its own economic, environmental, and public health benefits.

6) Composting is Cleaner

As a self-proclaimed neat freak, I was shocked by how much cleaner my kitchen (and trash!) seemed once I began to compost my food scraps instead of mixing them in my garbage with all my other discards. When we compost, we eliminate the odors that build up in our trash.

Another observation I made was how I didn’t need to empty the trash NEARLY as often. Food takes up space in our garbage and makes it A LOT heavier. This means that if the smell of your trash doesn’t force you to take our your trash often, the weight of it will!

7) Promotes Circular Economy

Composting takes the saying “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” to a whole new and literal level!

Landfill and incineration are the epitome of a linear economic system — take-make-waste & repeat — whereas composting is the epitome of a circular economic system where we take-make-take-make-take-make-take-make over and over again. When examining both the short and long-term costs of landfilling on our wallet alone, compost always wins. In Hoboken, NJ for instance, taxpayers pay $106/ton to landfill vs. $20/ton to compost. Circular systems are restorative for our planet, prosperous for our economy, and beneficial to all life on earth!

Waste is only waste if we waste it!
So let’s transform it into compost instead, ok?

Sources: FDA, EPA, USDA, ISLR