In early 2022, a law passed in California requiring residents to compost their food waste. The law, which is part of the state’s aggressive plan to reduce food waste and up recycling efforts, doesn’t require residents to do their own composting at home per se. Rather the charge mandates that every person or household must separate their tossed food from their trash and then dump those scraps into the city- and state-provided composting bins outside.

The idea behind California’s progressive effort is to get a handle on the amount of perishable food waste that ends up in landfills. (Food waste is the largest category of matter that fills landfills.) When food is tossed, it breaks down and releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and climate change contributor. Experts see this as both a detrimental habit and a lost opportunity: Trashed food emits gas and adds to landfill bulk when instead its nutrients could be benefitting soil and crops.

What Are the Benefits of Composting?

With its composting law, California is looking to mirror the work of the natural world: In nature, an uneaten piece of fruit decomposes on the ground before getting digested by microorganisms and fungi and then converted into nutrients that nurture new plant growth. Composting, essentially, does this in contained settings within our communities and cities—all the while reducing reliance on landfills. It is a win-win.

Two more reasons why composting is beneficial on a municipal and individual level include:

It enables sustainable and healthy agriculture. A challenge of modern-day farming is a depleting topsoil layer. Research shows that land degradation is happening at a rapid rate. Roughly 25 percent of the total land area in the world has been degraded, according to the Global Environment Facility: “When land is degraded, soil carbon and nitrous oxide are released into the atmosphere, making land degradation one of the most important contributors to climate change,” as stated on GEF’s site. Composting helps to replenish soil’s lost nutrients, aiding in restoring land fertility for agriculture.

Composting supports cleaner agricultural practices.

The United States’s reliance on toxic and potentially carcinogenic pesticides and herbicides is grave. The Environmental Working Group states more than 70 percent of non-organic fruits and vegetables have residue of potentially harmful pesticides. This is serious given how these chemicals have been linked to negative health and environmental effects. Experts say that replacing pesticides with composted matter naturally emboldens the soil, thus reducing the need for pesticides.

How Do You Start Composting in Your City?

Ideally, we would all compost our scraps at home. This isn’t too hefty of a feat, given how the marketplace for chic and easy composting bins has grown. We’d all live in cities and states that mirror California’s compost mandate. Thankfully, a growing number of cities, including Boston, are making composting easy by providing compost waste drop-off sites. To find out if your city offers this, look to the following:

Your city’s waste removal department. Reach out to our local City Hall or city government headquarters for a contact in the waste removal department. This contact will inform you if your town, city, or county offers compost removal services or drop-off locations. If they do not, push and ask why. (The pressing questions of residents often spark new city ordinances.)
Your local recycling or trash service. Your town or city may have resident waste removed by an outside non-municipal organization—something that is quite common. The name and contact can be found via your local government, homeowners association, or landlord.
Your local schools. More schools are developing unused land into working community and educational gardens to teach children about growing and cultivating produce.
Your local farmers’ market. This is always a win for any sustainably-founded question. Chances are the local farmers and purveyors in your region have a composting system in place. Ask to see if they would accept your scraps or refer you to a service they use.

To learn more about composting visit the National Resources Defense Council.