If you’re like most people, you probably waste food. The leftovers from your favorite restaurant like the takeout pizza you never finished, overripe fruits and vegetables from your kitchen counter, and the outdated food in your fridge. Over the course of a year, it adds up.

40 percent of all food is wasted in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate. Put another way, for every three meals we eat, two others are wasted.

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If you are a typical resident of Los Angeles county and multiply your own discarded food by the population of about 10 million, it adds up to a lot of waste. Every four months, we produce enough food waste to fill Dodger Stadium. That’s three stadiums per year.

Feeding America Network data shows, we waste 108 billion pounds of food in the United States every year. That’s about 130 billion meals squandered– or $408 billion per year.

In the best case, we would use it better. Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

But the greatest long-term cost may be environmental. When food rots in landfills, it produces methane — the second most harmful greenhouse gas when it comes to climate change, next to carbon dioxide. While many point to electric vehicles as the path forward to combat climate change, other experts have turned their focus to food recycling.

“It's not like you're putting things in the landfill and they're disappearing…[like] they're kind of very, very, very, very, very slowly degrading while bacteria eat on that and release nothing,” explains Monique Figueiredo, founder of Compostable, an LA-based community composting company.

She explained how bacteria in landfills release methane as a by-product, which feeds on the organic material.

According to the nonprofit Extra Food, for every 100 pounds of food waste in landfills, 8.3 pounds of methane are released into the atmosphere.

“In California, landfills are our third largest source of methane emissions,” says Georgia Tunioli, community engagement program manager at the Bay Foundation.

If the same products are taken out of a landfill and processed aerobically — when microorganisms that require oxygen break down waste — methane production does not take place.

But in 2018, more food reached landfills and combustion facilities than any other material in our trash, according to an Environmental Protection Agency estimate.

That food often goes into landfills in plastic bags so nutrients never reach the soil. So, when the food rots it produces methane, which traps heat in the atmosphere 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, per the EPA.

Human-related activities have been the largest cause of the doubling of methane concentration in the air over the last two decades.

“Methane within the first 20 years of its life is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide,” says Figueiredo. Carbon dioxide has a more lasting impact than methane. We have to stop the warming of our planet by 2050, she adds, so we have to find ways to stop producing so much methane.

The Big Salad

It can look like a big, beautiful salad on the roadside of Blake Avenue: Tomatoes, lettuce, eggs, bananas, oranges, carrots, broccoli and some eggshells here and there. But it doesn’t smell like one. In fact, the heaps can cause the noses of visitors to wrinkle and their eyes water — especially on Sundays.

That’s when LA Compost hosts a pop-up compost drop-off at the Elysian Valley Community Garden from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The idea is to recycle the wasted food via composting to create edible food.

Composting helps accelerate decomposition by creating an environment for bacteria and fungi to work more effectively.

“LA Compost is the non-profit here, and they’ve been holding down the fort,” says Figueiredo. The women-owned company partners with compost hubs around Los Angeles including LA Compost.

LA Compost was founded in 2013 to make communities aware of where their organic waste goes and how it affects the environment. Their mission is to “connect the residents of Los Angeles with the soil and with one another,” according to Gina Vollono, the operations and projects manager of LA Compost.

Mark Pranger, Farmers' Market Program Manager at LA Compost, says they have been reaching out to the community from gardens like these where people can bring food scraps that will be turned into compost the gardens can use. Often, they mix the food scraps with woods and leaves, or they can take some of the compost home, he explains.

Karla Jeffers maneuvers in and out of the various composting piles inside the community garden. Each pile represents a different step in the composting process. Jeffers takes some of the finished compost and meticulously puts them in small garden trays. These will nourish the soil where new plants will be born. “It saves me of course money and it's also good for the environment so I'm not wasting plastic and I'm not wasting fuel going to the store trying to find and it's been the cycle of the nature since we've been around."

She says she recognized the importance of composting in waste management as well as its positive impact. For her composting in the garden is calming and has become a weekly routine. But she sometimes still wonders if she’s doing enough.

Out of Sight Out of Mind

Generation Earth partners with educators across Los Angeles County to provide environmental service learning training on recycling, composting, native plants, water pollution, and waste in the fashion industry.

Through the program, says waste management youth leadership coordinator Nanci Torres-Poblano, “Schools have been able to incorporate green spaces by receiving garden beds and tools that allow them and their students to learn about growing food. Other campuses have also been able to reduce the amount of waste they are disposing of by setting up recycling systems on campus to separate their recyclable materials.”

“Sometimes it can become really difficult to reach a large number of teachers because Generation Earth serves all of LA County, which includes 10 million people and over 1,000 public and private schools,” says Torres-Poblano.

(Photo/Compostable)

LA County Public Works started Generation Earth in 1997 with funds collected from Assembly Bill 939, which mandated that landfills had to reduce their trash each year or pay a fine or a “tipping fee” to the County, according to Torres-Poblano.

Figueiredo’s motivation to start Compostable was based on the premise that once “you know it is the right thing to do, you don’t want to stop.”

In her case, she was composting in Boston, and wanted to continue after she moved to L.A. in 2019. But she couldn’t find any significant composting infrastructure. She was confused because this went against the green, sustainable image.

Some of the biggest challenges for Figueiredo have involved navigating regulations in L.A., convincing people to compost, and trying to understand where her business model of providing compost pickup service fits into those regulations, especially the ones controlling waste which, she says, is heavily regulated.

“Getting away from natural systems, I think, has been a big contributor to the degradation of our ecosystems,” Figuerido says. “You know, the more connected we are with natural systems, the more we can help them function the way they're intended to, and that helps us drive as people who live in these natural ecosystems.”

Eco-Cafeterias and Restaurants

Another effort to make our food system more sustainable grew out of the Bay Foundation’s partnership with Environmental Charter Schools to create Table to Farm, which is a waste-reduction program.

Through the program, restaurants compost their organic waste at the Environmental Charter Schools compost hubs.

According to the foundation’s website, over 10,000 pounds of food waste have been composted at the Environmental Charter Schools.

Environmental Charter Schools are also trying to shape the next generation of environmentally-conscious thinkers.

“When children care, they actually learn,” says Alison Diaz, the founder of ECS and director of sustainability and growth.

The schools implemented the Green Ambassadors program, which is geared towards teaching students about environmental issues.

Teacher Tashanda Giles-Jones, who teaches “Green Ambassadors,” says that students have to take it all three years of middle school and the course is environmentally science based, but it also sits in humanity as well.

Giles-Jones says the biggest obstacles are commitment, time, budget, and expertise.

The goal of the program is for students to graduate high school and college as advocates for environmental issues that include nature, humans, other living organisms, and how they interact and depend on each other, says Giles-Jones.

The schools began composting in 2017 after receiving compost bins to reduce food waste and becoming compost hubs for their local communities.

Kye's is a restaurant in Santa Monica working to reduce food waste.

Kye’s, a restaurant that sits on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, has several trash cans by the entrance: recycle, landfill and mixed.

The bin for compost stands right at the front, with instructions about what to place where.

The motivation is simple, says Kadie, the restaurant’s operations director: “It’s always been part of our belief, if you can, why wouldn’t you?”

As the first restaurant to receive a green certificate from the Office of Sustainability, Kye’s has a composting dumpster in the alley that the city pays for.

More composting may be in California’s future. The state passed a law in January that calls for residents to compost in an effort to slash landfill food waste by three-quarters by 2025.. Since then, Figueiredo’s seen more people taking notice.

The people involve make one thing clear: If we don’t compost, it would be a waste.