Example: Composting food waste

The following example illustrates the inefficiencies of the current waste management ecosystem:

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

Of a total 63 million tons of food waste, 7.5 million tons are combusted and 35 million tons go to the landfill [1]. U.S. landfills release 4.3 million tons of methane annually (calculated by dividing 107.7 million carbon dioxide equivalent (CDE) tons by the global warming potential of methane, 25) [2,3]. While there are proposals to capture this methane to be used as fuel [4], composting could be an alternative approach that effectively captures carbon. Effective composting generates a negligible amount of greenhouse gasses [5]. If all food waste that went to landfills was composted instead, this would capture the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to approximately 23 million typical passenger cars (107.7 million CDE tons of methane production from landfills divided by 4.6 tons of CDE emissions per typical car) [6].