If you’ve spent any time around me, you know I care deeply about composting. I love healthy soil. I love closing the loop. And I believe compost has an important role in our food system.
But if we’re honest about cutting food waste in half by 2030, prevention has a much bigger impact than composting.
Here’s why.
When food gets thrown away, we lose everything it took to produce it. The water. The labor. The fuel. The refrigeration. The packaging. The time. The money.
The average family of four spends $3,000 a year on food they buy but don’t eat. Restaurants and schools lose tens of thousands of dollars annually. When you prevent food from going to waste, you keep that money in people’s pockets. Composting does not recover that value. Yes, composting is better than landfilling. But the value of the finished compost is worth only a fraction of what the food originally cost.
Environmentally, the gap is even bigger. Most of food’s climate impact happens long before it ever reaches a plate during the growing, processing, and transporting stages. When we prevent waste, we eliminate all of those embedded emissions.
There’s also a hard infrastructure reality here in Michigan.
Composting food scraps at scale is not simple. It requires permitted sites, land, equipment, trained staff, contamination controls, long term markets for finished compost, reliable hauling systems and stable funding.
Michigan does not currently have the infrastructure to compost all the food we waste, or even half of it. Building that capacity would require significant investment and years of development. In many communities, especially rural ones, scaling composting systems would be expensive and difficult.
There’s another piece people rarely talk about. Food scraps are “green” material, rich in nitrogen. To compost properly, you need about twice as much “brown” material, such as wood chips or dry leaves, to balance the mix. Cutting food waste in half by 2030 means keeping a billion pounds of food out of our landfills. We simply do not have enough brown material across the state to compost our way out of food waste at scale.
This is why at Make Food Not Waste, we prioritize prevention.
We work with schools to right size portions. We help restaurants track and reduce overproduction before it becomes waste. We teach families practical strategies to shop smarter and store food properly. And when surplus does happen, we support donation and rescue to make sure good food feeds people first.
Composting absolutely has a place. For food that truly cannot be prevented, reduced, or donated, it is far better than landfill. But it should be the last step, not the main strategy.
If we want real impact by 2030, we HAVE TO prevent waste from happening. That is where the biggest environmental benefit is. That is where the strongest financial return is. And that is where we can make the most meaningful difference for Michigan.
