Leftover food comes and goes easily. Wilted salad left from a potluck, daily coffee grounds, the moldy butt of a loaf of bread, slick potato peels from Thanksgiving prep—if you’re like most people in Durham, all these scraps go promptly in the trash before being carted out to a curb and taking a 98-mile journey to a Sampson County landfill.
Locally, for those wishing to forgo landfill waste, two routes have traditionally been available: DIY backyard composting and paid services like CompostNow, a private company that offers pickup prices starting at $29 a month.
These options could soon expand: Durham is currently piloting an ambitious food scrap curbside collection, the first city in North Carolina to do so. The city hopes to make the public service permanent someday.
In 2016, The City of Durham’s Solid Waste Management Department hired a consultant to gather and analyze household waste. The study entailed collecting a sample of waste and sorting it into categories: Cardboard, plastics, metals, food scraps.
“About 18% of what was in the waste stream was compostable food scraps,” department director Wayne Fenton says. “And by percentage that was the largest component of what was sent to waste. So we made that a priority to look at getting food scraps out of the landfills.”
Keeping organic waste out of landfills reduces methane, a gas that contributes to climate change—significantly.
In Sampson County—where waste from Durham, alongside 43 other North Carolina counties, go to die—those emissions are particularly egregious: According to 2021 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures, Sampson County ranks second in the nation for methane emissions, beating out 1,319 other municipal solid waste landfills for damage. (Landfills tend to be disproportionately placed in low-income areas and North Carolina is no exception: Sampson County ranks 12th in poverty across the state, with a poverty level of 22.8 percent.)
“The EPA estimates that one-third of all food available for human consumption goes uneaten and is the most commonly landfilled material, responsible for 58 percent of the fugitive methane emissions at landfills,” explains Christine Wittmeier, organics recycling team lead at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. “Composting food scraps creates green jobs, reduces emissions, and extends landfill life by saving valuable air space.”
Pilot program phases
The practical outcome of the 2016 study came years later, in January 2022, when the City of Durham launched the first phase of its pilot program to collect and compost food scraps from city residents.
The initiative is three-pronged: Education, an essential phase, came first. For habits to become truly reflexive, people need to grasp the full picture and feel incentivized. In the United States, the average household wastes a shocking third of the food it purchases. This translates to financial loss: In a 2024 study, researchers found that the average North Carolina household loses $2,259 per year on food waste, a figure slightly higher than the national average of $2,033.
As part of the educational initiative, the City has encouraged backyard composting and run sales on composting units. When possible, this method is ideal, Fenton says.
“The city doesn’t have to collect [the waste],” Fenton explains, “which means there’s no cost involved, and the resident gets the finished product.”
The pilot’s second phase, making drop-off containers and sites available to residents for food waste disposal, launched in July 2024.
These dropoff sites—put in place through a partnership with CompostNow—are especially geared toward individuals living in apartments or other homes without outdoor space. One collection site is located at City Hall, another at the waste disposal and recycling center at 2115 East Club Boulevard.
The dropoff containers are available to all city residents to use free of charge, though users must download an app, CompostHere, to unlock the containers and deposit food scraps.
The Solid Waste Management Department plans to expand this program and has accounted for an additional five drop-off locations in its fiscal year 2025-2026 budget request. These units will be distributed across the city to serve a broader population.
The third prong of the City’s food scrap pilot is curbside collection. The pilot curbside program initially included 80 households in Walltown, a neighborhood chosen for the trial because it demographically mirrors Durham as a whole and because it is proximate to the Club Boulevard dropoff site.
Each household participating in the pilot was provided with an indoor countertop container to collect food scraps, as well as an outdoor cart. The food scraps residents collect are picked up once a week.
The first goal of the curbside program was to learn how to best communicate with community members about what items can and cannot be composted. It also provided an important timeframe for collecting general feedback and learning what barriers exist to food scrap collection.
The trial has since expanded to include 440 households and the city is exploring what the program could look like on a city-wide scale, considering the costs, benefits, and logistics. Participation in the pilot is free and Fenton believes that the service should continue to be provided at no cost to residents, though annual budget changes ultimately need to be approved by City Council.
“If you’re asking someone to spend additional time—sort their food scraps, put it in a different cart, put it out on a different day, and then you tell them you’re gonna charge them, you’re not going to get as high a participation rate,” Fenton says.
Collaboration with other organizations has been central to putting program elements in place. In addition to its other partners, the city contracts with Atlas Organics which composts the food scraps on-site at the waste disposal and recycling center.
As with any public initiative, financing the program is critical. In this case, the Solid Waste Management Department received funding from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Division of Environmental Assistance and Customer Service through its 2022 Community Waste Reduction and Recycling Grant Program to purchase countertop compost bins and outdoor carts for the pilot.
So far, the curbside collection pilot has been received well. Of the 440 households, the only instances of participants leaving the pilot were due to individuals moving out of the area served. How the program might be eventually rolled out and budgeted is still up in the air, Fenton emphasizes.
breaking ground: reducing food waste
The diversion business
Collecting food scraps and composting is one of those things that’s not particularly pretty or convenient—unlike out-of-sight, out-of-mind disposal habits, it puts a process of interacting with smelly, slimy kitchen waste at the fore.
Nevertheless, the popularity of public compost collection has surged around the country, in years, with a recent study determining that about 12 percent of U.S. households have access to a food-waste program, with about 400 programs concentrated in big cities like Chicago, Houston, and San Diego.
In 2022, California passed a bill requiring every jurisdiction to provide collection services for organic waste; an ambitious goal that has been met by about 75 percent of jurisdictions thus far. (Another recent California bill requires supermarkets to give away unsold food that is still good; an effort that squares waste reduction with efforts to fight hunger—another gargantuan problem in the United States, where 13.5 percent of households are reportedly food insecure.)
And that direct interaction with household waste also has its benefits: Just as it is possible to shift disposal habits, it is possible that composting can also lead to greater shifts in environmental consciousness.
Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, an applied behavioral science research center, is another Durham pilot partner. During the curbside collection pilot, it ran a study to see if composting households also see general waste levels reduced.
“We were really interested in how taking on this new behavior changes the way people think about themselves and whether they will develop any spillover behavior,” says Joseph Sherlock, a behavioral scientist at the Center for Advanced Hindsight.
For example: if someone starts sorting their food scraps, there’s a chance they may make other environmentally-friendly lifestyle adjustments like eating less meat, driving less, or recycling more.
“It’s a problem,” Sherlock says of food waste, “that we all need to solve and it really can only be done at the local level.”
Observing the public’s attitude toward composting and how the program has been received, Fenton draws parallels to recycling.
“I’ve been working in this industry for quite a few years and I’ll just say that the enthusiasm we saw in the past when curbside recycling first started—people were very interested and very willing, and communities saw it as a really good thing,” he says. “We’re kind of now revisiting this with food scraps. People are very interested. They hear about the issues with methane and greenhouse gasses and they would like to do their part.”
“We don’t want to be in the disposal business,” Fenton continues, summing up the motivation behind his work. “We want to be in the diversion business—we want to divert things from landfills.”
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