[janj]

Food waste ending up in the landfill is bad, produces large amounts of methane. I imagine there will always be streams of food waste that need to be diverted out of the landfill. In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted. I don't think that option is available everywhere. Having a variety of options should help divert food from ending up in a landfill.

[hosh]

The key is onsite composting and having it go back to onsite gardens. Failing that, a neighborhood composting which goes back to neighborhood gardens. The idea is to close the carbon cycle to the local area. This has the additional benefit of being able to grow food that are bred to be nutritious rather than bred to be transportable, mitigating overharvesting (when producers and consumers are separated by enough distance).

Usually though, what we have in the US is that foodwaste goes to landfills (bad), and then lawns are grown with fertilizers (instead of compost). That's a much larger carbon cycle that ends up depleting the land in multiple ways. Let's not even get to how wasteful we get with water management -- pumping water, purifying them to drinking water standards, and then watering lawns with them.

[hanniabu]

> In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted

How strictly is that enforced? And is it applied without exceptions? For example I compost but if I have something oily I'm going to compost it because oily soil isn't great.

[CharlesW]

> How strictly is that enforced?

Anecdotally, I’m a CA homeowner and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

[_jal]

Can't speak for everywhere, but in SF, I've never heard of enforcement, at least towards residential waste producers.

[hosh]

Ah. So organisms such as oyster mushrooms can eat oil in contaminated soil and bring it back into something that plants can grow on.

It also depends on how you are composting. The main problem with composting oily food is that the oil goes rancid. There are solutions for that.

Black Soldier Flies Larvae can eat that stuff, and are symbiotic to human activity. (They stay in one place, drive out the other species of flies, and don't go after humans). If you have a red earthworm composting bin, you'd feed the BSFL stuff that you don't want to feed the worms. (You'd feed the worms the best stuff and give the rest to the BSFL).

Industrial composters will just throw them all in big piles and they will eventually compost. Some might implement ideas from Paul Stamets and cultivate fungi on the heaps to help it break down faster.

[hedora]

This is definitely not state law. Many cities don't even have compost bins in silicon valley.

[janj]

It definitely IS state law, unless I'm not interpreting this correctly.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-california-compost-law...

[hosh]

It's probably just San Francisco. I have heard of something like that at the municipal level. I don't remember something like that when I visited family in Sacramento a couple months ago.

Seattle has something like that too, when I lived there seven years ago. We were provided bins for composting, and compost bins were in every resturant I went to.

[janj]

It's new, as of January 2022 https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-california-compost-law...