U.S. landfills have the polluting power of a quarter of the country’s cars. Cutting down on that pollution starts at home.
You grab a banana on your way out the door, eat it in a few bites, and toss the peel. Simple enough — but that peel is part of a massive climate problem. Every year in the U.S., about 133 billion pounds of food scraps and leftovers end up in landfills. As they break down, they release climate-warming gases on par with half of all coal plants or a quarter of all cars in the country.
So how does a banana peel become a climate issue? And what can you do differently? Let’s take a look.
Food waste: a sneaky threat to our climate
At the landfill, that banana peel — alongside the rest of your trash — gets packed down, then blanketed under a layer of dirt or ash. Those scraps then become food for bacteria, and as they feed, the microbes start to deplete all the oxygen inside the landfill, replacing it with carbon dioxide. That sets the stage for a second group of microbes called methanogens, which thrive without oxygen. Methanogens “breathe” carbon dioxide and exhale methane — a potent climate-warming gas. That’s why landfills are such a major climate problem.
Both carbon dioxide and methane trap heat, but methane is far more powerful. Over 20 years, it traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. And landfills spew thousands of tons of methane each day. Operators of large landfills are supposed to capture and burn this gas before it escapes. In practice, that often doesn’t happen. A 2024 study found that more than half of U.S. landfills are “super-emitters,” releasing over 100 kilograms of methane every hour — about the same as driving from Ashland to New York City and back.
The result: landfills are now the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.
Community composting is climate action
There’s a simple alternative to sending food scraps to the landfill: composting. Composting is the controlled breakdown of food scraps into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. Like in landfills, microbes do the work — but here, the process is aerobic. Compost piles are mixed and aerated so oxygen-loving microbes thrive, while methane-producing microbes are kept at bay. Done right, composting releases some CO₂, but not the super-pollutant methane.
Even better, composting actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. When compost is added to garden beds or farm fields, some of that carbon is captured by plants and stored in soil. Applying compost to just one acre of soil can remove about three tons of CO₂ from the air — about 75% of what the average car emits in a year.
Getting Started
Wondering where to start? Check out our how-to videos for tips on home composting. If you don’t have the time or space, there are plenty of community options. From March through November, the Ashland Tuesday Grower’s Market offers free compost drop-off. Services like Ashland Community Composting and Rogue Produce Community Compost also provide curbside pickup and community drop sites.