Sept. 02, 2026, 3:58 p.m. ET

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Boston

Gretchen Nash notices when her kids toss produce into the trash instead of into the family’s compost bin. “I saw that peach pit,” she says, laughing.

The Nashes’ bin is part of something bigger. Ms. Nash, an artist in the Bellevue Hill neighborhood, is one of some 27,000 Bostonians who participate in weekly free food-waste collection in this port city of 675,000. Started in 2022, the Curbside Food Waste Collection program is just one example of Boston’s continued efforts to manage food waste, a growing challenge across America, where an estimated 30% to 40% of the nation’s food supply – more than 100 billion pounds, worth hundreds of billions of dollars – is discarded each year.

Bostonians now have several composting options: enroll in free city pickup, drop their compost at city-sponsored bins, pay for private pickup, or build their own compost pile.

Cities like Boston are making strides in expanding composting to reduce food waste, though one big challenge is getting residents to make it a habit. Program costs, hungry pests, and limited access are other hurdles.

Many are doing it, and some cities are hoping more will join in.

Boston currently ranks fourth in the nation in food composting, behind San Diego, New York, and Los Angeles. (This ranking compares composting services and food waste policies across America’s largest cities.) While comparable statistics are hard to find, Washington, D.C., which has one of the larger municipal composting programs, announced this week that it has collected over 11 million pounds of food waste since 2014.

The composting rate, experts and city leaders say, ultimately depends on residents making the effort to toss old salad, eggshells, leftover chicken, and other meal scraps in a separate bin.

But each composting option comes with its own barriers.

Composting’s success, in the end, depends on how conveniently a resident can adopt a new habit, experts say. And as cities like Boston work to reduce waste, convenience will be key to behavior change.

“The way you form the habits [is] you make it easy for people,” explains Jackson Somers, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Connecticut. “You have to make it so convenient that it’s seamless.”

While West Coast cities like Seattle and San Francisco were early leaders in food waste recycling, Boston has been aggressively moving up the compost chain. In 2014, the city set a goal of becoming carbon-neutral and producing zero waste by 2050. It has also imposed a commercial food waste ban requiring restaurants and other businesses that generate more than half a ton of food waste per week to compost it.

Boston isn’t the only one. Some 19% of the nation’s largest cities have composting programs. Twelve states – from California to Vermont – also have food waste bans, with a growing number of composting programs.

The upshot? Between 2021 and 2023, out of America’s 130 million households, the number with access to food waste collection grew by almost 50%, from 10 million to 14.9 million.

Boston is joining a growing cohort of cities with free curbside pickup. Washington, D.C., launched its own composting pilot program in 2023. Now officially part of city pickup, their Food Waste Collection Program grew from 9,000 to 12,000 households in the most recent fiscal year, netting 1 million pounds of compostable material.

Source: Read the original article on www.csmonitor.com

Written by https://futureknowledge.in/