California’s Revolutionary Composting Mandate
California has become the undisputed leader in composting growth across America. One year after California’s SB 1383 went into effect mandating organics recycling, 75% of jurisdictions report they have residential organic collection. The state’s aggressive approach has created what experts call “our hottest compost market because of that law”. California’s law doesn’t just suggest composting – it demands it. SB 1383 requires that 20% of still-edible food is diverted and redistributed by 2025, using a 2014 baseline, that’s about 231,000 tons diverted.
Cities up and down California are establishing curbside programs that provide bins for food scraps, sticks, and leaves, so they can be turned into ‘black gold’ compost for farmers. What makes California special isn’t just the scale – it’s the speed of transformation happening across the entire state.
Seattle’s Zero Waste Success Story
Seattle’s ‘Zero Waste Resolution’ was established back in 2007, demonstrating a focus on curbside organics collection and recycling services for both single and multi-family households. This was part of a three-year phase in, and in 2009 the city began requiring all residential properties to participate in food and yard waste collection, or backyard composting. The city went even further by implementing an organic waste disposal ban in 2015. Before this transformation, the city sent approximately 100,000 tons of food waste to a landfill site in eastern Oregon every year. The distance of this journey was 300 miles, resulting in a high cost expenditure and the production of greenhouse gas emissions.
Today, the results speak for themselves. Seattleites send 125,000 tons of food and yard waste to composting facilities each year, turning those scraps into compost for local parks and gardens. Seattle has proven that mandatory participation works when coupled with proper infrastructure and community education.
Portland’s Community-Driven Revolution
Portland has quietly become one of America’s composting powerhouses through a different approach than California’s top-down mandate. San Francisco; Seattle; Boulder, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon, are considered the gold standard for municipal composting programs. The city’s success comes from combining mandatory composting policies, widespread access to curbside composting and community composting sites and ongoing education as shared characteristics. Portland’s approach focuses heavily on education and making composting accessible rather than just mandating it.
What sets Portland apart is how they’ve managed to reduce waste collection costs while increasing diversion rates. Portland saved even more money by cutting back trash pickup to every other week. Residents just weren’t generating as much trash. This practical benefit has made composting programs popular with both residents and city budgets.
Northeast States Leading Policy Innovation
The Northeast has emerged as a surprising hotbed of composting innovation through smart policy design. Nine states — California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — have enacted laws over the past decade that divert organic waste from landfills to composting facilities. Massachusetts stands out particularly for its enforcement approach. In terms of business-scale composting, Massachusetts stands out for its successful program. It has been able to reduce organic wastes going to the landfill by using “carrots” — such as building an extensive network of food-waste-composting sites, which makes it easy and affordable for businesses to comply with the law.
Massachusetts law does not include exemptions for particular businesses, imposes a cost for not following the rules, and is rigorous in conducting compliance checks. In short, more than fellow states, Massachusetts achieved results because it coupled composting infrastructure and enforcement. This balanced approach has made Massachusetts a model for other states looking to expand their programs.
Texas Cities Breaking New Ground
Texas might surprise you as an emerging composting leader. Austin (No. 34) and San Antonio (No. 56) lead the Lone Star State in our ranking with access to city-run curbside composting services and local private composting businesses. Austin has a goal of reducing waste by 90% by 2040 and San Antonio is aiming to divert 60% of organics and recyclables from landfills by 2025. Austin’s ambitious goals represent some of the most aggressive waste reduction targets in the country.
Recology helped Austin, Texas, prepare their plan for curbside food scrap collection—and also advised officials in Paris, France, to implement a program in two districts. The fact that Austin’s expertise is being exported internationally shows how quickly the city has become a composting leader.
New York’s Citywide Expansion
New York City represents the largest single composting expansion happening anywhere in America. New York has 46 organics collection programs across the state, and its most famous city first began their efforts to roll-out organics collection programs across the 5 boroughs in 2016. In 2022, a large-scale composting program was then launched in Queens, turning organic waste from the borough’s 2.2 m residents into biogas, and soil amendment for city parks and community gardens. The Queens program alone showed impressive results quickly. The success of this program, where close to 13m pounds of organic material was successfully diverted from landfill in its first quarter, saw the NYC Department of Sanitation demonstrate intentions to expand curbside composting services to all city residents across the 5 boroughs.
New York City has both curbside food waste collection — rolling out citywide over the course of 2024 — and longstanding “community composting” programs, funded by the city and facilitated by neighborhood partners and organizations like GrowNYC. When complete, this will be the largest municipal composting program in the world.
Denver’s Mountain West Leadership
Denver has become the mountain west’s composting champion, leading a region that traditionally lagged behind coastal cities. In cities like Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, residents separate banana peels, corn husks, apple cores and other food scraps from cans, bottles and trash, then set their bins out at the curb — part of an ever-growing number of municipal composting programs. Denver’s program has grown steadily, focusing on making composting as simple as regular recycling for residents.
Other cities adopting the trend—Portland, Seattle, Denver and Boulder, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Baltimore, Anchorage, Eugene, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—prove this is a win-win-win for our landfills, farmers, and the planet. Denver’s success has inspired other mountain west cities to follow suit.
Vermont’s Statewide Transformation
Vermont has taken perhaps the most comprehensive approach to composting of any state. The state of Vermont passed a Universal Recycling Law in 2012 and is phasing in policies and programs until all of its recyclables, leaf and yard debris, food scraps and other organics will be banned from landfills in 2020. This phased approach has allowed Vermont to build infrastructure gradually while educating residents about the changes.
Vermont’s law applies to all municipal organic waste streams, including residential; Connecticut and Massachusett’s laws only apply to the commercial and institutional sectors. Vermont’s inclusion of residential waste makes it the most comprehensive statewide program in the country. The rural state has shown that composting programs can work everywhere, not just in major urban centers.
San Francisco’s Pioneering Legacy
San Francisco deserves recognition as the original composting innovator that inspired much of today’s growth. The first city to implement a large-scale organics recycling and composting program, San Francisco has been successfully diverting residential organic waste since 1996. Around 650 tons are collected each day by the city’s haulers Recology, equating to around 150,000 tons a year. The city’s long track record has provided valuable lessons for other municipalities.
Thanks to strong composting and recycling programs, San Francisco has reduced the amount of trash it sends to landfills by 80 percent and composts 255,500 tons of organic material each year. These impressive diversion rates have made San Francisco the model that other cities aspire to match.
Midwest Cities Joining the Movement
The Midwest has traditionally been slower to adopt composting programs, but that’s changing rapidly. Residents of cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa (No. 78), Athens, Georgia (No. 85), and Missoula, Montana (No. 209), enjoy the best of both worlds, with access to municipal and private composting services in addition to ample lawn space for establishing their own compost pile. These smaller cities are proving that composting success isn’t limited to major metropolitan areas.
Other cities adopting the trend—Portland, Seattle, Denver and Boulder, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Baltimore, Anchorage, Eugene, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—prove this is a win-win-win for our landfills, farmers, and the planet. Minneapolis and St. Paul’s twin city approach has created a regional composting hub that’s inspiring other Midwest cities.
Infrastructure Investment Driving Growth
Behind every successful composting program is significant infrastructure investment. Five years later, the number of full-scale food waste facilities has increased 8%, from 185 to 200 facilities — a small but notable change. During that period, there was marked growth in the number of community and captive composting sites. While the growth in large facilities has been modest, the explosion in community-scale operations shows the diverse approaches cities are taking.
San Francisco-based Recology, an employee-owned company with a workforce of 3,800 operates 8 composting facilities in California, Oregon, and Washington serving nearly 150 communities. In 2020 alone, they recycled over 810,000 metric tons of organic waste, including food scraps and yard trimmings. These regional partnerships allow smaller cities to access composting services without building their own facilities.
Community Programs Fueling Grassroots Growth
Some of the fastest growth is happening at the community level rather than through large municipal programs. Chicago, for example, rolled out its first-ever Food Scrap Drop-Off program in late 2023. And New York City has both curbside food waste collection — rolling out citywide over the course of 2024 — and longstanding “community composting” programs, funded by the city and facilitated by neighborhood partners and organizations like GrowNYC. These community-scale programs often serve as testing grounds for larger citywide initiatives.
A growing number of cities, towns and states are recognizing the benefits of composting programs. In just the last five years, the number of communities offering composting programs has grown by 65 percent. This grassroots growth is creating momentum that’s pushing larger cities and states to develop their own programs.
The Numbers Behind the Growth
The statistics behind America’s composting boom tell a compelling story of rapid expansion. In 2023, there were 400 municipal composting programs servicing 710 communities, representing a 49 percent increase since 2021 in the number of households in the United States with access to composting. This nearly 50% growth in just two years represents one of the fastest expansions of any environmental program in recent memory.
According to the ‘State of Composting in Our Country’ article by Brenda Platt of ILSR and Nora Goldstein of BioCycle, there are currently 4,914 composting operations in the U.S. A recent article by the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group said that 326 towns and cities have access to food waste curbside collection, but that is less than 2% of Americans. While the total coverage remains small, the rapid growth suggests we’re at a tipping point where composting could become as common as recycling.
The composting revolution sweeping across America shows no signs of slowing down. From California’s mandatory programs to Vermont’s comprehensive approach, cities and states are finding that composting isn’t just good for the environment – it’s good for budgets, communities, and local economies. The question isn’t whether composting programs will continue growing, but how quickly other communities will join this movement. What would you have guessed about which regions are leading the charge?
