Food waste recycling means sending scraps somewhere other than the trash, where microbes or a digester turn them into compost or energy. There are five realistic routes for a household: curbside organics collection, a community drop-off point, a backyard compost heap, a bokashi bucket, or a worm bin. Which suits you comes down to two questions: do you have outdoor space, and do you need to deal with meat, dairy and cooked food? A backyard heap handles the largest volume for free but takes only raw plant material. Bokashi takes almost everything, but needs soil to bury the output in. Curbside and drop-off programs often take everything, including bones, with no work at home beyond a caddy.
The stakes are mostly about landfill methane. According to the US EPA, food makes up about 24 percent of the municipal solid waste sent to landfills, and an estimated 58 percent of the methane escaping from those landfills comes from decaying food. Because food decays so quickly, the same EPA research finds it contributes more landfill methane than any other material.
What is the best way to recycle food waste?
The best route is whichever one you will use every week. The table compares them on the points that decide that in practice.
| Route | Space needed | Takes meat, dairy, bones? | Typical cost | Where scraps end up | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Curbside organics | None | Usually yes | Often in trash fees, or a subscription | Industrial compost or digester | Lowest |
| Community drop-off | None | Varies by site | Free or small fee | Industrial compost, digester or garden heap | Weekly trip |
| Backyard compost heap | Outdoor, about 3 × 3 ft (1 × 1 m) | No | Free to about $110 | Your garden | Low |
| Bokashi bucket | Indoor corner | Yes, except large bones | $40–80 setup | Buried in soil or added to a heap | Medium |
| Worm bin | Under a sink or outdoors | No | $30–150 | Houseplants, beds, containers | Medium |
The routes are not exclusive, and a combination is often the most practical answer. A heap for vegetable peelings and garden waste alongside curbside collection for meat and cooked leftovers covers everything a household produces, and neither system gets overloaded.
Curbside organics collection
If your municipality or hauler offers it, this is the easiest option by a wide margin and it takes material no home system can. Programs usually supply a small kitchen caddy and a wheeled cart, collected weekly or every other week.
Some states have gone further than offering it. Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law banned food scraps from household trash statewide from July 1, 2020, according to the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. Residents there can use curbside haulers, drop-off sites or home composting, and the state allows people who compost at home to put meat and bones in the trash, since those don’t belong in a backyard pile.
Accepted materials vary by program, so check the list for yours. Common inclusions beyond plant scraps are meat, bones, dairy, bread, coffee filters and cooked food, and often food-soiled paper such as napkins and pizza boxes. The common exclusions are:
- “Compostable” plastics and bioplastic liners. Many facilities cannot process them in their cycle times and cannot tell them apart from ordinary plastic, so they screen them out. Use only the bag type your program names.
- Produce stickers, twist ties and rubber bands. They don’t break down and end up as contamination in the finished compost.
- Pet waste, diapers and cat litter, which carry pathogens most facilities are not permitted to handle.
Community drop-off
Where there is no curbside service there is often a drop-off: farmers’ markets, community gardens, transfer stations and some food co-ops run them. Keep scraps in a lidded caddy, or in a bag in the freezer to stop smells and fruit flies, and empty it weekly.
A few habits make any collection route easier to live with. Line the caddy with a sheet of newspaper or the liner your program approves, which soaks up liquid and keeps the caddy cleaner. Drain wet food such as soup or salad dressing before it goes in. Rinse the caddy every week or two with hot water, since residue left in the bottom causes most of the smell. In summer, freezing scraps until collection day removes the fruit fly problem entirely.
Rules differ more between drop-off sites than between curbside programs, because some feed a garden heap that cannot take meat while others feed an industrial facility that can.
What happens to food waste after it’s collected?
Two industrial processes handle most of it, and which one your scraps feed changes the output.
Windrow or in-vessel composting breaks the material down aerobically in long turned rows or enclosed drums. Large volumes run hot enough to kill pathogens and weed seeds, which is why municipal facilities can accept meat and cooked food that a backyard pile can’t. The output is compost sold or given away for landscaping and farming.
Anaerobic digestion breaks food down in sealed tanks without oxygen, captures the methane as biogas for electricity, heat or vehicle fuel, and leaves a nutrient-rich digestate that can be spread on farmland. In Maine, for example, the ecomaine waste cooperative has sent collected scraps, including meat, dairy and bread, to a farm digester that combines them with cow manure to produce electricity, compost and animal bedding.
The EPA’s Wasted Food Scale, which ranks options by environmental impact, places anaerobic digestion with beneficial use of the digestate and composting in the middle of the scale, well above landfilling and incineration. It ranks three things higher still: preventing waste in the first place, donating edible food, and upcycling it into new products.
Can you put meat and dairy in food waste recycling?
In curbside and many drop-off programs, usually yes. At home, it depends on the system:
- Backyard heap: no. The EPA’s home composting guidance lists meat, fish bones, dairy products, eggs (apart from the shells), and fats and oils as things to keep out, because they create odors and attract rodents and flies. A home pile also rarely gets hot enough throughout to destroy the pathogens raw meat can carry.
- Worm bin: no. Worms won’t eat it before it rots, and the bin turns sour.
- Bokashi: yes. The sealed, acidic fermentation pickles meat and dairy rather than letting them putrefy. Small bones are fine; large ones are best left out.
Our indoor composting guide covers bokashi and worm bin setup in detail, including the smell troubleshooting that decides whether an apartment system lasts.
Is a garbage disposal better than throwing food in the trash?
Not by much, and in the EPA’s ranking it is no better. The Wasted Food Scale puts sending food “down the drain” in the least preferred group alongside landfilling and incineration. A disposal moves scraps to a wastewater plant instead of a landfill; some plants run digesters that recover energy from that material, but many do not, and the plant has to treat the water either way. Disposals also struggle with fibrous peels, grease and starchy food, which are common causes of household drain clogs. Where any of the routes above is available, it beats the disposal.
Home composting
A heap or bin in the yard is free, handles the largest ongoing volume, and gives you the finished product. Stick to raw fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and filters, tea, eggshells and garden waste, balanced with roughly equal or greater volumes of dry browns such as leaves and shredded cardboard.
Our beginner’s guide to composting covers the browns-to-greens ratio and troubleshooting, and the DIY compost bin guide has five builds from free to about $110.
Which route should you choose?
- No outdoor space, want to handle everything: bokashi, plus a drop-off or curbside service for anything you can’t bury.
- No outdoor space, mostly plant scraps: a worm bin.
- Yard, plant scraps only: a backyard heap. Cheapest and highest volume.
- Yard, and you cook a lot of meat: a heap for plant material, curbside or bokashi for the rest.
- Curbside available: use it, and add a heap if you garden, because the compost is worth having.
Reducing the volume first
Recycling scraps is the last step, not the first, and the EPA’s scale puts prevention at the top for a reason. Most kitchen waste is not peelings; it is food that was bought and never eaten. Storing produce in the right place and keeping leftovers visible, as our guide on how to store food to prevent waste explains, keeps far more out of the bin than any composting system can process.