Reducing Wasted Food a Scale: A Comparison of Organics Recycling Methods

August 28, 2025

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In this post: Urgency to Scale Capacity | Organics Recycling Comparison | Recycling Vendor Checklist | Scalable Organics Recycling  

Every day, food and beverage companies face the challenge of responsibly managing unsellable products, byproducts, and surplus ingredients. Sending these materials to the landfill or incinerators may violate regulations, in addition to being costly and environmentally damaging, prompting an industry-wide shift toward organics recycling. Yet not all organics recycling methods are created equal. Composting, animal feed, and anaerobic digestion all offer ways to reduce the harm and recover value from unsold, non-donatable food––but only one is built to handle the volume, complexity, and pace of commercial food operations, while supporting compliance with emerging regulations. Understanding the differences can help your business choose the most effective, scalable landfill diversion solution.  

The Urgency to Scale Organics Recycling Capacity 

Across the U.S., nearly 65% of surplus food accumulates without ever reaching a consumer’s kitchen––from the farm where it’s grown, across the supply chain, to retail shelves or restaurant tables. According to ReFED, more than 85% of that surplus never feeds people or animals, with landfills claiming a large share.   

When unconsumed food is wasted, it creates a nexus of social, environmental, and economic problems, from food insecurity to climate change, as well as contributing to inflation.  

Sending food to a landfill is particularly harmful: according to the EPA, wasted food is the single largest stream of landfill waste and creates the majority of uncaptured methane emissions from municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills. Landfill capacity is also rapidly decreasing across the U.S. A 2020 report by Waste Business Journal projected landfill capacity would decline to 17 years nationwide by 2022, with some regions like the Northeast facing a much sharper decline to under 10 years by 2022. 

These urgent social and environmental crises are spurring new organic waste regulations in states across the country, requiring businesses and consumers to divert their organic waste from landfills and incinerators. Forward-thinking food companies are preparing for the shift by proactively adopting landfill diversion programs that employ a mix of strategies, such as marking down and donating edible food before employing recycling methods such as anaerobic digestion, animal feed, and composting for non-donatable food.  

Organic Recycling Infrastructure at a Glance 

When it comes to keeping unsold food and food byproducts out of landfills, businesses have three primary options: animal feed, composting, and anaerobic digestion. Each landfill diversion method has a role to play in a circular economy, but they differ significantly in capacity, processing requirements, and the types of materials they can handle. Understanding these distinctions is essential for choosing a solution that meets business goals and also aligns with the scale and complexity of commercial food operations. 

Animal Feed is a process that returns food and byproducts to livestock, or recycles food into animal feed products for livestock.  

• The pros:  
  • Resource recovery: it keeps food out of landfills and recovers value by turning that organic material into an agricultural input.  
  • Cost savings: it can be cheaper than landfilling or composting, especially when done through a local partnership.  
  • Local economic support: it can be given to nearby farms or feed producers, creating regional supply chain benefits.  
  • Minimal processing is needed for non-packaged foods like fresh produce. 

• The cons: While Animal Feed technically ranks highest on the EPA’s Wasted Food Scale after Waste Prevention and Feeding Others, its scalability is limited by a few factors, making it less suitable for commercial waste generators:  
  • Fluctuating demand: farmers’ need for feed fluctuates by season, commodity prices, and herd sizes, making it an inconsistent outlet for large-scale volumes of unconsumed food. 
  • Regulations (both federal and state) limit the list of acceptable organic material for animal feed, especially post-consumer and animal-based food products, or require intensive treatment.  
  • Animal feed operations often lack adequate depackaging technology, leading to great risk of contamination from microplastics and harmful chemicals.  

Composting is an aerobic (oxygenated) process that naturally transforms organic material including food and byproducts into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. It can be done on a small scale at home or on a farm, but in the last few decades, large-scale composting infrastructure has grown to try and accommodate commercially generated wasted food.  

• The pros: as with animal feed, composting is a circular and economical solution when the compost can be applied directly back to the land for growing more food.   

• The cons: There are a few key challenges to large-scale composting infrastructure: 
  • Scalability is limited: there is a natural cap on how much food material composting facilities can accept at any given time to maintain the careful balance of moisture, oxygen, and nutrients needed to produce healthy compost. For this and other reasons such as odor, pest, leachate, and pathogen concerns, compost facilities typically avoid large volumes of liquids, dairy, and meats. 
  • As with animal feed, composting facilities often lack adequate depackaging technology, leading to greater risk of soil contamination from microplastics and harmful chemicals.  

Proximity is another challenge for both animal feed and composting. The further animal feed or compost has to travel to reach its agricultural destination, the more emissions it creates and the less sustainable it becomes, making both solutions better suited to rural farm operations than commercial businesses, especially those in urban areas where there is no livestock or farmland to accept it. 

Anaerobic digestion (AD), which occurs naturally through marshes and swamps, is a process through which bacteria break down organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Anaerobic digesters are large enclosed systems that can recreate this natural process to generate biogas, which can be upgraded into renewable natural gas, as well as digestate, a soil amendment similar to compost. 

• AD accepts many materials that other methods cannot, and in large quantities, making it key for commercial scale diversion of unsold food. 

• Through AD, nearly 100% of surplus food’s organic matter is put to beneficial use. 

• AD’s liquid process, paired with sophisticated depackaging technology, greatly reduces any risk of contamination from microplastics or harmful chemicals.  

• AD significantly reduces the organic mass of the resulting digestate, making it more sustainable to transport. 

• A close analysis of the EPA’s Wasted Food Scale shows that AD has a greater potential for reducing GHG emissions compared to composting and other alternatives because it produces renewable natural gas, which will ultimately help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. 

No single organic recycling solution can solve the wasted food crisis; it will take a mosaic of solutions working together to help us effectively reduce waste and reshape our food system into a circular one. These diversion programs can complement one another to help businesses create a holistic strategy that addresses the unique variety of organic material their operations generate. For example, if your business already contributes to composting or animal feed programs, anaerobic digestion can complement those efforts by processing the unsold food products that other outlets can’t accept. 

Questions to Ask When Choosing an Organics Recycling Partner 

Before committing to a waste diversion partner, here’s a short list of important questions to ask so that you can evaluate solutions and choose the one that best fits your operations.  

• Can this solution accept all – or most – of our food waste and food byproducts? 

• What does this solution do with that waste, and is it the most sustainable approach? 

• Can it integrate with our existing operations seamlessly?  

• Does this solution help us comply with emerging legislation in the state(s) where we operate?  

• Does this solution include depackaging, or would we have to do it ourselves (and potentially purchase and maintain depackaging equipment?) 

• What is the proximity of this solution to our operations? Would we need to subtract transportation emissions from our sustainable impact? 

• Does this solution provide substantial documentation, such as certificates of destruction, as well as impact reporting?  

Scalable, Sustainable, Proven: Why Food Companies Trust Divert  

At Divert, we take a holistic approach to wasted food diversion, working with our customers to prevent waste upstream, increase donations of edible food to local food banks, and recycle inedible food into carbon negative renewable natural gas and digestate via our anaerobic digestion process. 

With 18 years of experience, we’ve helped our customers prevent more than 3.2 billion pounds of unsold, non-donatable food and organic byproducts from going to waste, and we’re scaling rapidly to serve your business across the United States. Through financings from Enbridge and Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit, as well as agreements with companies like bp and PG&E, we’re gaining momentum on our goal to be within 100 miles of 80% of the U.S. population to help food companies transform their unsold food into renewable energy that powers local communities.  

Learn more about our solutions for industrial food and beverage companies and retailers here: