Food Waste Policy, From the Tipping Floor

On June 12, I sat in on a food waste policy webinar hosted by the Northern California Recycling Association’s Zero Food Waste Forum Committee, with co-sponsors CRRA, Zero Waste USA, and SWANA. I went in expecting an hour of policy. I came out with a simple observation: almost every bill, grant, and tool the speakers described lands somewhere on a composting facility’s receiving pad.

That’s the thing about policy. It can feel like something happening in a committee room far from the windrows. But the rules being written this summer decide what shows up in your feedstock, what you can charge for finished compost, and whether there’s a grant to pay for the loader you’ve been putting off. So here’s the recap, written for the people who actually turn the piles.

Four people did the talking. Susan Blachman, who chairs NCRA’s Zero Food Waste Forum Committee, MC’d. Tori Oto, policy lead at the Zero Food Waste Coalition, covered federal legislation and the state bill tracker. Neha Sanghera, Policy Director at the Berkeley Food Institute, ran through California bills, the state budget, and a research project worth watching. Jack Steinmann of NCRA closed with a preview of the committee’s next webinar. You’ll meet each of them again below.

A tool you can open today: the legislative tracker

Tori walked everyone through the Zero Food Waste Coalition’s State Food Waste Legislative Tracker. It’s a searchable database of food loss and waste bills across all fifty states, built with Coalition member Divert and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

For a composter, this isn’t abstract. You can filter by your state to see what’s moving, or filter by topic. Type “composting” or “organic waste” and you’ll see how other states are drafting the language that, in your state, might become an organics ban, a procurement requirement, or a tax incentive that sends more material your way. If your facility is thinking about asking a legislator for something, the tracker shows you the bills that already passed somewhere else. Don’t draft from scratch. Steal a good idea and adapt it.

Federal money that builds and upgrades compost facilities

Tori’s federal update covered appropriations, the Farm Bill, and date labeling. The appropriations piece is the one with your name on it. The Coalition pushed three funding asks this year, and all three touch composting directly.

The honest part Tori shared: the House funded all three, just at lower levels than asked. That’s normal. You ask high because you expect to land lower. The bills are now with the Senate, and the timeline is uncertain. The practical move for a facility is to track the grant openings yourself. Tori’s tip was to sign up for USDA’s grant notifications so you hear the moment a funding round opens. The Community Compost grants didn’t go out last year, and the Coalition is pushing to make sure they do this year.

The Farm Bill quietly changed what your finished compost is worth

Here’s the one that should make a compost operator sit up. The House-passed Farm Bill includes a compost amendment that establishes applying compost as an authorized conservation practice under EQIP, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

EQIP pays farmers and ranchers to adopt conservation practices on their land. Make compost application one of those practices, and you’ve just put a federal financial incentive behind every grower deciding whether to buy your product. That’s demand creation, paid for by the conservation title of the Farm Bill. It came out of the COMPOST Act, and it’s now riding the larger bill toward the Senate. The same House bill also added reducing food loss and waste as a research priority, which means more funding aimed at the questions composters keep running into.

Date labeling: the upstream rule that shapes your inbound

Two date labeling efforts came up, and both matter to feedstock. California’s AB 660 takes effect July 1, 2026, standardizing food date labels down to two phrases: “BEST If Used By” for quality and “USE By” for safety. No more “sell by,” “freshest by,” or the rest of the confusing zoo. The federal Food Date Labeling Act of 2025 would take that nationwide, and for the first time it’s moving with bipartisan, bicameral support.

Why care? Confusing date labels are one of the largest single drivers of edible food getting tossed. Clearer labels mean less perfectly good food in the waste stream. Some of that food was never going to reach you anyway. But the broader effect is a system that’s getting more deliberate about where surplus food goes, and that conversation increasingly includes composting and anaerobic digestion as the right destinations when donation isn’t possible.

A quick, candid note from the webinar: California’s law is supposed to be implemented this year, and Susan Blachman couldn’t get either the Department of Food and Agriculture or the Department of Public Health to say who’s actually running it. The agency responsible for enforcement is still a bit of a mystery. If you know the right person, the committee would love an introduction.

A methane finding worth watching

Neha highlighted the Central Valley Community Compost group, a project led by UC Merced’s Rebecca Ryals that’s scaling community-level composting across the San Joaquin Valley. They’ve run 20 workshops, built a K-12 curriculum, and signed up 50 new home composting families in a year.

The part that should interest every operator: their research suggests methane emissions from smaller, community-scale composting can run lower than emissions from large-scale operations. The group hopes to bring that to the California Air Resources Board and influence how the state calculates composting’s methane in its next climate scoping plan. How composting gets counted is how composting gets regulated, and how it gets credited. If the methodology improves, the case for diverting organics to compost gets stronger on paper, not just in the soil. (Ryals’ Agroecology Lab has also found that a small amount of biochar can cut composting methane dramatically, which is a practical lever you can pull on your own site.)

Contamination, stickers, and the daily headache

Two attendees raised the produce sticker problem, and anyone who’s screened finished compost knows it well. Those little PLU stickers, plastic and glued, don’t break down, and they end up as confetti in your product. Washington State commissioned a study on plastic produce stickers under a 2024 law, which is worth a read if you’re building a contamination case.

There’s a hopeful thread too. One attendee had toured the USDA Albany lab and learned about a genuinely compostable produce sticker in development with Sinclair, adhesive included. No federal bill to ban stickers outright yet. But the research is pointed at the right target.

How a compost operator plugs in

The webinar’s real message was that none of this happens to composters. It happens with them, if they show up. A few low-effort ways to do that:

Join the Zero Food Waste Coalition. Membership is free, it’s open to organizations and individuals working in this space, and members get the toolkits, the tracker, and the sign-on opportunities first. Tori’s at zfwcoalition@gmail.com. In California, the California Food and Farming Network is the statewide coalition Neha recommended for meeting legislators and learning what Sacramento is prioritizing. Reach Neha at nehasanghera@berkeley.edu.

If you want to be in the room where bills get supported, NCRA’s Zero Waste Advocacy Committee is holding Advocacy Day 2026 at the Capitol in Sacramento on June 17, with priority bills spanning refrigerant takebavck, greenwashing, and chemicals in receipts. And keep an eye on the July webinar: NCRA’s Jack Steinmann and researcher Hilla Abel are studying backhauling and return-to-vendor practices, the question of what really happens to surplus eggs and milk after they leave a grocery store, and whether more of it could reach compost and digestion instead of the landfill. If you’ve ever wondered where that material goes, you probably know something they need. Their intake form is here, and Hilla’s at hilla.abel@gmail.com.

The takeaway

Compostable organics are still 40 to 50 percent of what gets landfilled, and in a landfill they make methane. That’s the whole reason COOLNow exists. The webinar was a reminder that the pipe between a banana peel and your finished compost runs through appropriations bills, conservation programs, date labels, and emissions accounting. Every one of those is being decided right now, mostly by people who’d be glad to hear from someone who actually runs a facility.

So open the tracker. Sign up for the grant alerts. Join a coalition that costs nothing. The policy is going to get written either way. It might as well get written with your pile in mind.

Thanks to Susan Blachman, Tori Oto, Neha Sanghera, and Jack Steinmann for a genuinely substantive hour. Resources mentioned in this piece are linked inline.