This series was partly supported by an Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first four articles focused on keeping food waste out of landfills to prevent the creation of methane, which accelerates global warming. This final piece considers food waste in the context of Maryland’s overall recycling infrastructure.
On paper, Maryland appears to have numerous options for disposing of food waste, including through feeding it to animals, incineration, landfilling, anaerobic digestion and composting. However, given the growing challenges in handling all the rest of our solid waste, only the last two options seem sustainable.
Incineration is dying because there has been continuous political pressure to shut down the waste-to-energy incinerators in Baltimore City and Montgomery County, and it is unlikely that new ones will be built. Activists charge that these incinerators are as polluting as coal-fired power plants. The Maryland legislature recently made them ineligible for renewable energy credits.
Landfills face at least three factors restricting their use. First, starting in 2023, Maryland required many large producers of food scraps to divert those scraps from landfills if, among other factors, those producers were within 30 miles of an appropriate composting facility or an anaerobic digester.
Second, the tipping fees at Maryland’s county-owned landfills can exceed $100 a ton, and that price is expected to continue rising. Finally, the state is simply running out of landfill space. In February, while basically supporting legislation to hold packaging producers more responsible for recycling or disposing of their products (Senate Bill 901), Maryland’s Department of the Environment (MDE) noted, “Maryland faces a landfill crisis, with only 22-35 years of permitted capacity that is not fully built and very localized.”
Food scraps and other organic materials can also be processed in anaerobic digesters, which produce compost and biogas for heating or producing electricity (see the May “Science of the City” column). However, BioEnergy Devco’s plant in Jessup is the only utility-scale anaerobic digester in the entire state, so digesters’ potential environmental benefits have largely been limited to agricultural areas, where feeding some food scraps to animals also makes sense.
Composting has great potential for handling food waste. As of this past January, MDE had issued 24 permits for composting facilities operated by local jurisdictions or private companies; however, only 21 were operational, and of those, only six handled food scraps.
To view Maryland’s solid waste challenge in perspective, consider that Prince George’s County is one of the rare jurisdictions to own all the facilities that will sustainably process its solid waste for the next three to five decades. This includes a landfill with space to expand, an organics composting facility (OCF) that accepts food scraps, and a materials recycling facility (MRF) to sort and market the materials from its curbside recycling programs.
In contrast, Baltimore City has no publicly owned MRF, and Montgomery County relies on Prince George’s County to compost most of its food waste. Montgomery County composts organics like grass and yard trim, but due to a legal dispute, it can’t compost any food until it agrees to close its Dickerson incinerator. Owning its own facilities gives Prince George’s County several advantages over other jurisdictions, which have to pay tipping or hauling fees to have their waste removed. The OCF usually sells enough LeafGro and LeafGro Gold compost to offset the cost of processing food waste. This is also true for the county MRF in Capitol Heights. According to the facility’s Senior Environmental Planner Desmond Gladden, “It’s not every day, but most of the time, our facility sells its materials at prices high enough to pay for itself.”
In 2025, aluminum cans have sold for as much as $1,700 a ton, and the best quality plastic scrap (usually from water bottles) reached $2,500 a ton in 2024. Cardboard, mixed paper, other plastic containers, and steel cans sell for much less but remain in steady demand. Local MRFs can sometimes get significantly more than national scrapyard prices because they provide very large quantities of cans or plastic bottles that are already baled, and are conveniently located close to Baltimore’s large port.
The Prince George’s County MRF Operations Manager Michael Bell revealed that another plus to the county owning its OCF, MRF and landfill is that these facilities can exchange materials and services. “In this area, there is very little demand for used commingled glass, and it’s too heavy and expensive to truck it to glass factories in the Midwest, where prices are higher,” Bell said. “So, we send it to the landfill for free, and they save by using it as daily cover.” He explained that “daily cover” is the various materials landfills use to cover new trash each day to reduce vermin or fires.
Despite these advantages, Prince George’s County still faces hurdles to increasing its food recycling rates and reducing methane emissions. According to David Brosch, a Sierra Club activist and member of the Prince George’s County Solid Waste Advisory Commission, some of the problems involve faulty infrastructure. The county landfill is supposed to have a system to capture the methane it produces and use it to help heat the county’s jail and prison in Upper Marlboro. “But,” Brosch noted, “the gas pipe between the two facilities has been broken for years, and the gas is just flared off and wasted.”
Brosch also faults local jurisdictions for their failure to work together to buy equipment and supplies at lower rates or to share them. During the supply chain problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, his town of University Park struggled to obtain enough organic recycling carts, while several thousand were left unused at the OFC as replacements for the households already served by the county’s food scrap recycling program. Michelle Blair, Laurel’s sustainability manager, reported similar difficulties.
And, because local jurisdictions have different recycling and composting policies, it’s hard to conduct effective education programs. Bell reports that even though Prince George’s County has had single-stream recycling since 2011, many people still don’t realize that everything plastic shouldn’t go into the recycling bin. “Plastic bags are our biggest problem,” he said, “but hoses can also get wound up in our equipment. Then we have to shut that line down until a worker can go in and safely cut out all that stuff that should never have been there in the first place.”
Expanding our recycling capacity for all materials and educating citizens to use it properly will cost millions at a time when budgets are tight. However, a lot of that funding may come from the Maryland Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program for packaging, which Gov. Wes Moore signed into law in May. EPR laws are common in Europe, and as of this June, various versions of EPR laws for packaging have been adopted in five other states.
The bottom line is that starting in 2028, the companies that produce most types of packaging sold in Maryland, such as cans and plastic bottles, will be responsible for 50% of the cost of cleaning up or recycling these materials, with that percentage rising to 90% of the costs by 2030. According to the MDE, the bill will increase the packaging recycling rate from 35 to 50%, capture $53 million more in valuable materials, reduce over 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and create 2,075 new jobs.
“Maryland is suffering from a deluge of plastic, cardboard and all kinds of food packaging,” said State Senator Malcolm Augustine (District 47), who co-sponsored SB 901 — the Senate version of the EPR legislation. “Right now, too many of those materials can’t be reused, or aren’t being recycled because there’s no market for them, and the financial burden of collecting and disposing of those materials falls on local governments. Our bill will shift more of the costs onto the companies that make and sell these products. But, I hope that they will also save money by finding ways to use less packaging, or only using materials that can be profitably recycled.”
Paul Ruffins is a citizen scientist and a professor of curiosity.