This story aired on the November 26, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
With the approaching holidays, you might find yourself with more food scraps than usual. But leftovers can turn our trash into a big climate problem. When food scraps and yard waste end up in landfills they produce methane, a nasty greenhouse gas.
Studies show that keeping most organic material out of landfills in California would be like removing 3 million cars from the roads. So why aren’t more people using their green bins?
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TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER: Every morning, I make breakfast while listening to the radio. Sometimes while frying my eggs, I’m reminded that the earth is heating up, too.
JEFF BRADY ON NPR: Methane is a climate super-polluter with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide….
REPORTER: Then I toss my eggshells and banana peels into my countertop compost bucket. Later, I take the green bin out to the curb – something as a Bay Area resident, I’ve been doing for years. And since 2022, all Californians are technically required to do this, because when food is buried in a landfill and starts to decompose, it releases methane. This week, I don’t stop at the curb. I do a little tour of my neighbor’s bins, too. And it’s not quite what I expect.
REPORTER ON STREET: My neighbor’s building, which has at least 3 units, I think 4, they don’t seem to compost anything at all. There’s nothing in here except some coated paper and a plastic bag.
REPORTER: I check the next bin …
REPORTER ON STREET: Oh, wow. OK, well,I don’t know why they even brought this out. There’s styrofoam inside the compost bin.
REPORTER: I’m not finding much food or yard waste.
REPORTER ON STREET: A yogurt drink container, a Ziplock bag…this one is full of bags, it has aluminum in the compost bin…
REPORTER: But the next morning, the green bins are picked up — with my eggshells, other food and yard waste and the trash that’s mixed in.
A few days later, I continue my composting tour at Napa Recycling and Waste Services. I see trucks — like the one that collected the green bins in my neighborhood — streaming in. Each year, they drop off about 100,000 tons of organic waste here.
The facility’s education manager, Tim Dewey-Mattia, shows me a mini-mountain of organics that have been dropped off. The pile is littered with plastic bags, film, bottles, and other debris.
TIM DEWEY-MATTIA: Conventional plastic is our number one contaminant by far — plastic bags and plastic film. You also get garden hoses, you know, different stuff from people's yards.
REPORTER: All this contamination? It has to get sorted out.
DEWEY-MATTIA: We see actually about 1-2% contamination, by weight.
REPORTER: That doesn’t sound like a lot, but a plastic bag weighs very little. So 2% of 100,000 pounds is 2,000 pounds of contamination, each year. Just at this facility. It’s a literal ton of plastic crap.
DEWEY-MATTIA: So we have to do a lot of processing to remove the things that don't belong in there.
REPORTER: He takes me to a conveyor belt where a machine sorts out the plastic waste from the organics. The problem is the machine can’t tell a plastic bag from a compostable one.
DEWEY-MATTIA: This is the thing though, if you're removing plastic, the machines don't know the difference, right? So it all gets removed.
REPORTER: Some of the food waste gets lost, and it’s less revenue for the company. Dewey-Mattia says it's going to take time to educate people on how to properly use their green bins.
DEWEY-MATTIA: Curbside recycling started in the 70s, really. It took a while. Curbside food composting? It's 40 years or so behind in that respect.
REPORTER: Unlike in landfills, when organic waste biodegrades aerobically — or in the presence of air — it breaks down faster and doesn’t create methane. To see where that magic happens, Dewey-Mattia walks me over to a row of large pens, divided by concrete walls. Most are filled with large mounds of deep brown compost-in-the-making.
DEWEY-MATTIA: Below here, there's a system of pipes blowing air into the pile.
REPORTER: It can take up to a year for a backyard compost pile to degrade. But here, scraps like my eggshells are reincarnated into compost in just two months.
If I hadn’t thrown my eggshells in the green bin, they’d end up in a landfill, where they’d generate methane. Cities collect that methane, and either use it or burn it off. And they have to keep doing that even after the landfill closes.
At the Berkeley Marina, there’s an old landfill buried under Cesar Chavez Park. That's where I meet Matt Cotton, a compost industry consultant. Cotton says that air regulators recently discovered the methane collection system here was leaking. The EPA has found leaks at active landfills across the country, too.
MATT COTTON: Turns out we're not collecting as much methane as we thought we did. EPA has lowered their estimates. So it’s really good to keep organics out of landfills.
REPORTER: Methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. But the good news is that methane doesn’t last as long. So the more methane emissions we cut today, the sooner we’ll see climate benefits. That’s why the state recently enacted a law requiring Californians to put their food waste in our green bins instead of in the trash. And it’s why Cotton is such an evangelist for composting.
COTTON: Bottom line, it's the single most cost effective thing that you can do to reduce climate change. The greenhouse gas benefits are numerous and easy. You can participate in your house, at your business, at your restaurant, at a sports stadium…
REPORTER: On the side of the road at the marina, there’s a giant pile of earthy-smelling material. It looks like dirt. But it’s free compost, made from Berkeley’s green bins. It’s their own food waste, served back to them.
COTTON: All of this would have been in the landfill. [But instead] it's used locally. It provides amazing benefits to California soils.
REPORTER: In the span of just 30 minutes, five cars roll up to get some.
CAROL CHAMBERS-BLOCKTON: This has been an absolute godsend.
REPORTER: Carol Chambers-Blockton and her partner are here, shoveling compost into a couple buckets.
CHAMBERS-BLOCKTON: Well, I guess I've been coming here for what? Four or five years now? My garden when I started was all clay, and I needed a cheap way to break that up, and this was it. And I have a lovely garden now.
REPORTER: Maybe that’s where my eggshells will end up.
