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 collected food scraps from homes, event spaces and businesses — ranging from Walmart to Nike — and delivered them to urban farms and community gardens where they were turned into high-quality compost. It wasn’t long before the business had more than 1,000 customers throughout the city of Los Angeles.
Figueiredo’s business diverted food waste from landfills while education young people, corporations and consumers on the value of compost 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 take them to industrial-scale composting facilities outside to transport. the city. The law aims to reduce organic waste in landfills by 75 percent by 2025 and is on track to do so, but it has also had unintended consequences for community composting operations across the state. Within weeks, Compostable LA’s residential customers began canceling their memberships. The city contracted with a few major carriers that 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 could not afford to pay for two services, they told Figueiredo. The company was hit hard and by the end of August 2024, with only 400 customers left, it had to stop providing residential services. Figueiredo laid off her staff of eight. And while it may continue to provide the services to some businesses and events, she is not optimistic about the company’s future. After years of advocating in Los Angeles and at the state level for a seat at the table among larger waste management companies, she feels incredibly jaded.
“Even if this business remains viable, I don’t know if I’m viable anymore,” she said. If Compostable LA closes, she added, “it’s directly correlated with non-inclusive policies.”
Monique Figueiredo
The compost 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 has jumped from 50 percent to nearly 80 percent. And even more are working to comply. According to the Public Recycling and Compost Management Agency CalRecyclethe state has more than 200 organic waste processing facilities and is building 20 more to accommodate the flood of food scraps expected. These measures divert significant amounts of waste from landfills and reduce the amount methanea powerful greenhouse gas released when food waste decomposes and enters the atmosphere.
But community composting groups and their advocates argue that its implementation also hinders urban farming programs and educational programs in the communities that need them most. The introduction of large haulers in many cities, they say, has pushed community composting to the brink, limiting it mainly to drop-off hubs, which by nature only reach the most dedicated participants willing to transport their waste to pre-designated sites.
Community composting has several environmental and public health benefits. Industrial composting is often is infected with herbicides from garden waste PFAS of additives such as food packaging, paper products, and compostable to-go ware. Because of its poor quality, urban farmers usually do not use it to grow food on its own.
“Commercially made compost is good, but you have to change it with a lot of other things to get it to the level where it will grow food for you,” says Sarah Boltwala-Mesina, who runs the San Diego- based compost management. business Food2Soil, which is also struggling to remain viable after scaling back operations following 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 full life cycle of the food they eat. On the other hand, community compost advocates say that industrial haulers tend to treat compost as a commodity and focus on diverting the largest quantities to maximize profit. They also sell the finished product mainly to large rural farms rather than urban farmers and gardeners.
Community composting is relatively new, but it has exploded nationally in recent years. A recording 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 still operate on 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 saw composting unprecedented investment from the Inflation Reduction ActA 2022 law that more than directed $300 billion for clean energy and environmental projects. Last year, the US Department of Agriculture also awarded $11.5 million in funds from the USA Rescue Plan Act to 38 cooperative agreements focused on reducing food waste, and about a third community compost was involved.
With more federal funding coming down the pipeline, community composting “has the potential to grow,” says Clarissa Libertelli, who is a national coalition of community composting groups for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. But she added it was unclear whether the growing interest in composting as a climate solution would help small-scale composters grow, “or instead channel money to big industrial players pushing them out of the picture.”
Monique Figueiredo
In San Diego, Boltswala-Mesina said she was looking forward to the implementation of the compost law and assumed it would boost her program. Instead, she said, “the bundling of services is basically killing us.”
For the multiple community and youth-centered urban agriculture programs that support her compost, the loss had a reverberating effect. “All these programs designed around gardening, for the disadvantaged and underrepresented sections of society, 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 at farms that deliver local produce to their homes. “You can’t do that with compost,” she said. “[Policymakers] says: ‘Either take this inconvenient option, which is a drop-off point, or participate in the industrialized system.’
On a Monday morning earlier this summer, Michael Martinez, the founder of LA Compost, worked with a group of volunteers to combine several hundred pounds of freshly collected food scraps with wood chips near the base of a popular walking trail in Los Angeles’ Griffith . Park. The scraps were picked up at farmers markets over the weekend, and most were dropped off by apartment dwellers in multi-unit buildings without green bin service.
LA Compost currently has locations like this in three parks, and they plan for a total of seven by the end of the year. The non-profit organization employs 35 people, runs a robust education program and works with a large team of volunteers. It has received several grants to continue its work, including one for $400,000 from the federal Department of Agriculture.
The group has filled an important void in Los Angeles since the introduction of the California composting law. The sanitation department manages a service reaching 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 vast majority of Angelenos are in multifamily units.”
Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, an environmental nonprofit, said he understands why there is tension between the big waste generators and those in the community composting world. In recent years, most major carriers have had to make expensive changes to green their fleets and hire union workers, largely due to regulatory pressure. “Historically, the garbage collectors were really concerned about people coming in, not having to meet any of those same requirements, and looking at their customers and [undercutting their prices],” he said.
Lapis believes community composters can coexist with large haulers if they focus primarily 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 that they eat,” he added.
Drop-off sites like the one operated by LA Compost appear to be the most viable option for community composters moving forward, albeit far less convenient. Kourtnii Brown, the co-founder and CEO of the California Alliance for Community Composting, has helped establish 250 new composting centers since 2020. They are all small drop-off sites and spaces where food waste is generated on site.
In this landscape, community composting projects can grow, Brown said, as long as they take a distributed spokes-and-wheels approach that involves small, neighborhood-scale hubs and transforms what they do, making it clear they’re not trying to compete. with large garbage cans.
“We prefer to say that we never deal in waste,” she said. “This is resource recovery work. We take material and use it to feed animals, to feed people if it is still edible, but also to feed the local soil.”
