The Quest to Make Composting as Simple as Trash Collection
Food waste accounts for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. More U.S. cities are exploring door-to-door compost collection, but it’s not as easy it might seem.
A sanitation worker picks up the food from a compost bin in Takoma Park, Maryland, which launched one of the region's first curbside food waste collection programs in 2013.
Photographer: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Erik Grabowsky is painfully aware that each time he chucks an overripe avocado, he’s not only lost a dollar; he’s also adding to the roughly 3,000 to 6,000 tons of food waste that residents in Arlington County, Virginia, generate every year. Most of it ends up in a nearby landfill. But Grabowsky, chief of the county’s solid waste bureau, is betting on a new residential composting program to change that.
The county expanded its curbside trash and recycling services last month to begin collecting food scraps from residents, mostly in single-family homes and townhouses. Residents can put out their food waste in a city-provided cart, just like their garbage, on collection days. The scraps will get composted, then returned to Arlington as soil.