Experts say composting is the best solution to landfills. Where does Housto...

This story by MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellow Elena Bruess was originally published in the Houston Landing, where it appears with additional photos and resources. It is the second in a series of articles examining Houston's mounting trash troubles.

 

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.”

The benefits of composting

A year after Zero Waste Houston founder Leo Brito started his landscaping company in the Woodlands, he decided to offer composting. He began calling current and previous landscaping customers to gauge interest in a food-waste pickup service. 

“I remember one customer, who became my very first composting customer, said, ‘Oh wow, yes, count me in, sign me up.’ It started small, but we just grew from there,” Brito said.

Today, Brito picks up compost in West University Place, the Woodlands and the Heights, and he just started a pilot program in Bellaire. West University Place might be the most successful in part because the city has worked to educate residents and promote composting, said Brito. His total number of customers sits at right around 400 residents, each paying an initial $25 for the bucket, and $10 a month for the service. 

Every week, customers must place their bucket outside, usually in compostable bags, for pick up. If there isn’t a bucket outside, the compost collector will take a photo and remind the customer they missed a week. 

“We’re very local and hands-on,” Brito said. “We know who we’re serving.”

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.

How possible is composting in Houston?

For the City of Houston, composting has been challenging. In 2021, the city ran its first composting pilot program in the Heights, Kashmere Gardens and the Houston Botanical Garden for about a month through a partnership with Zero Waste Houston and Moonshot Composting, a Texas-wide company also collecting compost in Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas and Waco. 

Overall, the program diverted over 7 tons from the landfill. Again, in 2024 the city worked with Zero Waste Houston to set up four drop-off locations throughout the city for residents to dump food scraps. It lasted a month and diverted nearly 5 tons of waste from landfills. 

This didn’t come without its challenges, however, according to City Council Member Sallie Alcorn. For both pilot programs, some residents had no idea what composting looked like, which meant the city spent a considerable amount of time in education, such as hanging flyers on doors and hosting community meetings.

“We felt like we really made a mark educating residents about composting,” Alcorn said. “But we really need more funding for something long-term like this. The key is getting a grant from the federal government.” 

The Solid Waste Department has unsuccessfully applied for a $500,000 composting and food waste reduction grant through the United States Department of Agriculture two years in a row. The funding would help establish permanent drop-off locations, educational programming and free compost kits for those who can’t spare the monthly fee. 

“We got feedback from the USDA last time that we were really close,” Alcorn said. “This year, we got a grant writer and I’m hopeful it’ll happen. I’m going to be super involved.” 

In 2024, the USDA invested $11.5 million in 38 projects across 23 states. This included cities like Cleveland Ohio, where officials will use the funds to expand the city’s current drop-off composting locations and provide subsidized monthly composting subscriptions to SNAP-eligible households. 

The 2025 USDA grant is not open for applications yet.

In Houston, advocates and officials have also pushed for a citywide trash fee, which could help fund composting and prevent illegal dumping. Currently, the City of Houston’s Waste Management Department does not charge residents for trash pickup. Rather, the department’s $100 million annual budget comes from tax dollars in the city’s general fund. 

For the past month, the Houston’s Mayor’s Office did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and the city’s waste management department refused an interview with the interim waste management director, Larius Hassen, “due to onboarding.” This came after the previous director, Mark Wilfalk, resigned from his post in late March.

However, the budget is limited due to the city’s 2004 voter-imposed property tax revenue cap, which limits tax increases to 4.5 percent. Advocates, like Alcorn and City Council Member Tarsha Jackson, say a trash fee could provide the missing funding. 

“A lot of community leaders in my district say they have no problem with a trash fee,” Jackson said. “Because it’s really whatever can be done to completely eliminate illegal dumping. Trash is only getting picked up once a week and if the city misses a week, then suddenly residents have a lot of trash accumulating and nowhere to put it.” 

Trash fees can steadily fund the waste department as a form of funding outside of taxes. The fees could go to more trash pick-up days, combating illegal dumping, hiring more employees or a composting program. 

It’s not unusual for cities to have a trash fee, according to Jackson. In San Antonio, the fee ranges from nearly $15 a month to a little more than $30 a month depending on the size of the trash bin. Additionally, residents and businesses pay a monthly $3 environmental fee, which aids in the city’s efforts to combat illegal dumping. 

In 2019, Houston city council members overwhelmingly rejected a $27 monthly trash fee, but Alcorn says she’s hopeful that may change soon. 

“I’m in favor of a trash fee, but I’m also in favor of having less trash in general,” Alcorn said.

To Brito, composting is the best solution to Houston’s waste problem. He imagines a composting bin at the end of every block where residents can drop off their weekly table scraps and yard trimmings. He’s talked with the city several times about expansion and other opportunities. 

He’s well aware of the lack of education in composting, which is half the battle. Education is a must for Brito. 

In March, he hosted an urban composting class, and in early April, he led a hands-on composting class at Hope Farms, a community garden and training center in Sunnyside. Students learned together how to make the best mixture of compost. Brito brought a truck full of finished compost, woodchips and a 90-gallon container of compostable trash. He dumped the woodchips and trash all over the ground in front of the five students, laughing slightly. 

“As a society, we have to remind ourselves that, hey, we are wasting too much,” Brito said. “At what point do we want to fix the system? We can take control of that.”