Alex Cantoran parks his truck at the final house on the block, jumps out and grabs the five-gallon white bucket sitting near the edge of the property. He unscrews the lid quickly. Inside are several green compostable bags of trash, the contents of which he hauls to the truckbed and transfers into one of his six 90-gallon barrels. He returns the bucket, hops back in the truck and repeats the process at the next house.
For Cantoran, compost collection runs like clockwork. By late afternoon, he and his partner, David Lemons, had already emptied compost buckets at over 200 houses in the city of West University Place. They started early, around 6 a.m., when they drove down from the Woodlands north of Houston with empty barrels rattling around in the back awaiting fresh table scraps and banana peels.
Tuesdays are the longest of the week; Cantoran and Lemons hit just over 400 houses. The two men work for Zero Waste Houston, a residential food waste pickup service that began in 2017. Instead of going to the landfill, the trash is turned into compost – a process that transforms organic waste, such as decomposing plant and food leftovers or yard and tree trimmings, into enriched soil.
Experts and environmental advocates consider zero-waste projects, like composting or recycling, some of the most vital solutions to Houston’s growing trash problem. Composting diverts organic waste before it reaches the landfill, lessening the need for landfill expansion and reducing methane emissions from landfills by more than 50 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It also enriches soil with much-needed natural nutrients and stores carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
However, city-wide composting programs can be challenging. It can cost millions for local officials to set up a composting project. For cities like Houston, this means starting small and applying for competitive federal funding. Additionally, composting is a relatively new solution in some communities, where residents unfamiliar with using a separate bucket for organic waste may need education through composting classes and community outreach.
But, officials and advocates say this work is far from impossible. In the past decade, businesses like Zero Waste Houston have popped up to fill the gap and local community gardens and schools are instructing educational classes. To catch up with Houston’s growing pile of trash, however, advocates say there will need to be serious dedication from the city – in process as well as budget.
“Right now, composting is kind of looked at like a luxury service,” Lemons said on the drive. “But it’s not. Everyone benefits from it. It’s just like putting out your recycling or your trash. I really hope it catches on.”
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About one-third of food produced worldwide ends up in landfills, where it makes up for 20 percent of all the waste, according to the EPA. Of the 167 million tons of garbage produced by the United States each year, 50 percent of the trash set on the curb is compostable.
Organic waste is also the leading cause of methane emissions at landfills due to how quickly the matter decays. In a landfill, as trash piles on top of trash over time, the waste at the bottom is deprived of oxygen. Tiny bacteria that thrive without oxygen munch on the trash, producing methane gas.
Because compost retains its proper airflow, the presence of oxygen keeps the methane-emitting bacteria at bay.
Methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, meaning it is more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
Organic municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the United States, according to the EPA. The U.S. is the second largest emitter of methane in the world and Texas is the largest emitter in the country.
Of the 201 municipal landfills in Texas, Blue Ridge Landfill in Fort Bend County is the fourth top emitter of methane emissions and the McCarty Road Landfill in North Houston is the 10th, according to a 2022 EPA methane analysis conducted by the organization Industrious Labs.
“We need to tackle the trash problem with a multi-pronged approach,” said Melanie Sattler, the department chair for civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The cheapest and simplest is to just reduce the waste before it actually gets to the landfill. That’s composting, that’s recycling.”
Another sustainable practice is anaerobic digestion, said Sattler, which occurs in a tank without any oxygen. Without air flow, the digester produces methane and carbon dioxide, which can be captured, cleaned and used as natural gas for heating, cooling and electricity generation. The material left behind – a nutrient-rich semi-solid mixture called digestate – can be used as natural fertilizer for crops, gardens and landscaping.
“Digesters can be located on the same land as a landfill and they could divert organic waste, but it doesn’t have to be,” Sattler said. “A city can also have a separate container for food and yard waste and it can go to a composting facility or a digester rather than the landfill.”
In Houston, the energy company Synthica is constructing an anaerobic digester northeast of the city to take pre-consumer food – such as food manufacturing byproducts and expired produce – and industrial organic waste. The company plans to start operations in early 2026.
The methane problem is real and serious, but the more immediate issue is that Houston is running out of landfill space, as was documented in an earlier Landing story. Plus, you know, landfills are disgusting and foul-smelling and make the lives of everyone in the vicinity – mostly black and brown people – vastly worse. They also take up vast expanses of open land that could be better used for almost anything else, including primarily more housing.
We do little bits of voluntary composting in Houston, for things like Halloween pumpkins and Christmas trees. We’ve run pilot programs for more general use composting in the past, and while they were successful there was no financial support for their continuation, much less their expansion. Some of the financial support for a future program would need to go towards educating people about composting – we could learn from what the city of Austin has done – but one hopes that would decrease over time. This is one of those situations where spending money now would save money later, if only we would get started on it. I suspect we would need a different Mayor for that, but I will be happy to be proven wrong.