Some states make money on garbage. Composting grows there anyway

About a dozen states have policies addressing food waste, including composting requirements. Ohio is not one of them.

The reason is pretty simple: tipping a truckload of trash into a landfill is cheap, compared to more populated states.

“It's a supply-demand equation. So the reason that you see tip fees being much higher in northeast states is due to a lack of sufficient capacity,” said Brian Staley, CEO of the Environmental Research Education Foundation.

Ohio has more land and fewer people. Staley said that means conserving landfill space or repurposing trash are not major concerns.

“For example, a waste-to-energy facility that converts waste to energy. You don't see many of those in the Midwest. You see them concentrated in the Northeast,” he said.

The low landfill fees create local resistance to alternatives, too. Sam Crowl, Ohio University’s sustainability director, worked on a regional composting effort in Athens, Ohio. Participation ended up being a fraction of what he was hoping for.

“We do have a lot of people who struggle with finances, and basically it was that they didn't want another fee,” he said.

On top of those barriers, Ohio imports more than 8 million tons of trash every year from more populous states. “If it cost more, then we wouldn't be accepting trash from New Jersey or New York City and having it hauled here to fill in our valleys. But because it is so cheap, that's what happens,” Crowl said.

That means Ohio makes money on other people’s trash. Staley said policy and regulation tend to drive changes in this industry, but when sustainability gets pitted against creating jobs and boosting local revenue, it’s not a very popular political campaign.

So the deck is stacked against composting in Ohio. And yet some passionate people are trying to make it catch on anyway.

“We have the glorious challenge, truly, of figuring out how to make it happen in a state where there's no mandate, probably never will be,” said Nathan Rutz, director of soil at Rustbelt Riders.

Residents pay a monthly fee and drive their food scraps to drop-off locations, or pay more money to get it picked up for them. That obviously requires more time and money than tossing those scraps in the trash can (that the residents are already paying for).

The small-but-growing group in Cleveland collects roughly 4,000 tons of food scraps annually, turns it into compost, and sells it.

Rutz estimates that’s roughly 1% of the food scraps generated in the area. “The amount of stuff that we're diverting is chump change, and we're having no significant effect currently,” he said. “But what else am I going to do with my life?”

Rutz is trying anyway because, despite the headwinds in Ohio, some people are willing to pay to be more sustainable. His business, along with composting initiatives throughout Ohio, are growing. In the past decade, free drop-off sites for food scraps have cropped up in dozens of cities across the state as they work on their own sustainability goals. Rustbelt Riders already composts for two cities outside of Cleveland, with more partnerships in the works.