Managing Food Waste: Landfills

Landfills are not only unsightly; they also present numerous environmental issues:

• While transporting food waste to landfills, garbage trucks emit diesel fumes.
• In landfills, food scraps decompose quickly and produce methane—an environmentally harmful greenhouse gas at least 21 times more potent in trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2.
• Rotting food also contributes to leachate, an acidic liquid residue that can seep into and contaminate ground water.

Furthermore, new landfills are expensive to build and because land is scarce, as new sites are driven further from city centers to rural areas, costs to run and maintain them keep escalating.

Did you know?

While the number of U.S. landfills has steadily declined over the years, the average landfill size has increased.