How California boosted composting — but broke local composters in the process

Reporting for this story was supported by the Climate Equity Reporting Project at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

In the first few years after Monique Figueiredo founded Compostable LA in 2019, it grew rapidly. The small business picked up food scraps from homes, event spaces, and businesses — ranging from Walmart to Nike — and delivered it to urban farms and community gardens where it was made into high-quality compost. It wasn’t long before the venture had more than 1,000 customers throughout the city of Los Angeles.

Figueiredo’s business diverted food waste from landfills while educating young people, corporations, and consumers about the value of composting and providing free compost to more than a dozen urban farms and gardens that feed people in some of the city’s most marginalized communities. 

Then, in 2022, cities around California began implementing SB 1383, a law that requires them to contract with large waste hauling companies to pick up food scraps at the curb, along with garbage and recycling, and transport it to industrial-scale composting facilities outside the city. The law aims to cut organic waste in landfills by 75 percent by 2025 and is on its way to doing so, but it has also had unintended consequences for community composting operations across the state. Within weeks, Compostable LA’s residential customers began to cancel their memberships. The city had signed contracts with a few large haulers who bundled their green bin service with the other two, and all customers were charged regardless of whether they used it. 

Many of Compostable LA’s members couldn’t afford to pay for two services, they told Figueiredo. The company was hit hard, and by late August 2024, with only 400 customers left, it had to stop providing residential services. Figueiredo laid off her eight-person staff. And while it may continue providing the services to some businesses and events, she’s not optimistic about the company’s future. After years of advocating within Los Angeles and at the state level for a place at the table among larger waste management companies, she feels incredibly worn down.

“Even if this business continues to be viable, I don’t know if I’m viable anymore,” she said. If Compostable LA shuts down, she added, “it is directly correlated to uninclusive policies.” 

The composting law is causing a sea change in California. Since 2022, the year the law took effect, the number of cities, towns, and other jurisdictions with access to residential food and yard waste collection jumped from 50 percent to nearly 80 percent. And still more are working on complying. According to the public recycling and compost management agency CalRecycle, the state has more than 200 organic waste processing facilities and is building 20 more to accommodate the flood of food scraps expected. These measures are diverting significant quantities of waste from landfills and reducing the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas released when food scraps decompose, entering the atmosphere. 

But community composting groups and their advocates argue that its implementation is also hampering urban farming programs and educational programs in the communities that need it most. The introduction of large haulers in many cities, they say, has pushed community composting to the margins, and limited it mainly to drop-off hubs, which by nature only reach the most dedicated participants willing to haul their waste to predetermined sites. 

Community composting has several environmental and public health benefits. Industrially-made compost is often contaminated with herbicides from yard waste to PFAS from additives like food packaging, paper products, and compostable to-go ware. Due to its poor quality, urban farmers typically don’t use it to grow food on its own. 

“Commercially-made compost is good, but you have to amend it with a whole bunch of other things to bring it to the level where it will grow food for you,” said Sarah Boltwala-Mesina, who runs the San Diego-based composting business Food2Soil, which is also struggling to remain viable after scaling its operations down post-SB 1383. Even CalRecycle refers to the compost made in smaller community-led facilities as “a nutritious superfood.”

Smaller composting sites also create educational programs that engage urban residents in understanding the complete lifecycle of the food they eat. On the other hand, community composting advocates say industrial haulers tend to treat compost as a commodity and focus on diverting the largest quantities in order to maximize profit. They also sell the finished product primarily to large rural farms rather than urban farmers and gardeners.

Community composting is relatively new, but it has exploded nationally in recent years.  A survey conducted by The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit organization that supports sustainable community development, found that half of the 86 composting groups that responded had started since 2016. The group maintains a map of more than 200 groups across the U.S. Many are still working at a hyper-local neighborhood scale, but some have grown to serve larger portions of their communities. 

These efforts have received significant local and federal support. In California, community composting has seen unprecedented investment from the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that directed more than $300 billion toward clean energy and environmental projects. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also awarded $11.5 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to 38 cooperative agreements focused on reducing food waste, and about a third involved community composting.

With more federal funding coming down the pipeline, community composting “has the potential to boom,” said Clarissa Libertelli, who runs a national coalition of community composting groups for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. But she added it’s unclear whether the growing interest in composting as a climate solution will help small-scale composters grow, “or if it’s going to instead channel money to big industrial players that are pushing them out of the scene.”

In San Diego, Boltswala-Mesina said she had been looking forward to the implementation of the composting law and assumed it would give her program a boost. Instead, she said, “the bundling of services is basically killing us.”

For the multiple community and youth-centered urban agriculture programs her compost supports, the loss has had a reverberating effect. “All these programs that were designed around gardening, for the disadvantaged, and underrepresented sections of society, they all become meaningless without our ability to make healthy soil,” she said.

Figueiredo and others compare composting choices to the options available for fresh produce. In many cities, those who can’t make it to the farmers market but want to support local farmers can sign up for memberships with farms that deliver local produce to their homes.  “You can’t do that with composting,” she said. “[Policymakers] are saying, ‘Either take this inconvenient option, which is a drop-off site, or participate in the industrialized system.’”

On a Monday morning earlier this summer, Michael Martinez, the founder of LA Compost, was working with a group of volunteers to combine a few hundred pounds of newly collected food scraps with wood chips near the base of a popular hiking trail in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. The scraps had been collected at farmers markets over the weekend, and most had been dropped off by apartment dwellers in multi-unit buildings without green bin service.

LA Compost currently has locations like these in three parks, and they’re planning for a total of seven by the end of the year. The nonprofit employs 35 people, runs a robust education program, and works with a large team of volunteers. It has received multiple grants to continue its work, including one for $400,000 from the federal Department of Agriculture.

The group has filled a key gap in Los Angeles since the rollout of the California composting law. The sanitation department runs a service that reaches only a fraction of the single-family homes in the county, Martinez said. Most apartment buildings don’t have green bins, he added, and “the large majority of Angelenos are in multifamily units.” 

Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, an environmental nonprofit,  said he understands why tension exists between the large waste haulers and those in the community composting world. Most big haulers have had to make expensive changes to green their fleets and hire unionized workers in recent years, largely due to regulatory pressure. “Historically, the waste haulers have been really concerned about people coming in, not having to meet any of those same requirements, and going to their customer and [undercutting their prices],” he said.      

Lapis believes community composters can coexist with big haulers if they focus mainly on their role as educators. “It’s really hard to top a community composter working in places like schools, where they can compost waste on site and use it to grow food they eat,” he added.

Drop-off sites like the one LA Compost operates appear to be the most viable option for community composters moving forward, despite being much less convenient. Kourtnii Brown the co-founder and CEO of the California Alliance for Community Composting has helped establish 250 new composting hubs since 2020. They are all small drop-off sites and spaces where food waste is generated onsite. 

In this landscape, community composting projects can grow, Brown said, as long they take a distributed spoke-and-wheel approach that involves small, neighborhood-scale hubs and reframe what they do, making it clear that they’re not trying to compete with big waste haulers. 

“We prefer to say that we never deal in waste at all,” she said. “This is resource recovery work. We are taking material and using it to feed animals, to feed people if it’s still edible, but also to feed the local soil.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How California boosted composting — but broke local composters in the process on Oct 7, 2024.