KNOWLEDGE BASE

Composting is an important way for you to immediately reduce your impact on the planet and to help mitigate climate change. When food scraps or compostable materials are put into a landfill, they turn into methane gas (a climate breakdown accelerant that is 25 times more potent than carbon emissions) and liquefy and mix with toxic chemicals to become leachate that will contaminate groundwater. When you compost, you reclaim the nutrients that are in your food scraps. You sink their carbon back into the soil for the future use of raising plants.

Putting your food scraps down the garbage disposal is worse than putting it in the landfill. You use fresh drinking water, which is really precious—and resource intensive to use—to do this. You also have to pay the City for your water use that comes into and leaves your house. This action squanders a lot of nutrients in the food that could be reclaimed. You ground up food scraps get mixed with all sorts of chemicals, sewage, forever pollutants, and other things that have to be removed in a facility. Your scraps also—because of the ridiculous system we have—run the risk of ending up being dumped into the rivers with raw sewage when there are over flow events. It is a deeply irresponsible way to process all of a household’s food waste.