Municipalities
Recover and capture the valuable resource within your community’s organic waste.
Organic waste and left-over foods make up more than 44% of global waste each year, adding up to almost 1 billion tons. Additionally, food scraps and soiled paper, make up a significant percentage of the municipal solid waste that gets landfilled or incinerated in the U.S. and Canada. In fact, in the U.S., 58% of landfill methane emissions are generated by landfilled food waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Those same organic wastes, if recycled via composting and anaerobic digestion, eliminate those methane emissions and generate compost and renewable energy. Getting started with a program to collect and recycle food scraps and other source separated organics, can be as simple as collectively changing a small habit like the bag used to collect them. Municipalities don't just reduce harmful methane emissions with food scraps collection — they actively replenish the soil and reduce use of fossil fuel.
Distributing compostable bags to residents is more than just handing out a bag; it’s about providing households with a tool to contribute to making a positive environmental impact. What’s great about our bags is that they are fully certified compostable with food waste, so the bags become a natural part of the organic waste they collect. This enables recovery of the valuable resources within the organic waste by converting them into biogas or compost.
Biogas production contributes to renewable energy generation, while compost enriches soil, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers and promoting healthier crop growth. Both are obviously great! No matter the destination of organic waste in your municipality, providing compostable bags to your community has proven to make a difference. Many models worldwide have shown that compostable bags increase participation and decrease contamination, including pioneering domestic cities Biobag has worked with over 20 years like San Francisco, Seattle, NYC and Minneapolis. A study in Minneapolis found less than a 1% contamination rate when using compostable bags. This shift to using compostable bags not only makes composting more effective, but also helps residents be more mindful of keeping their food scraps free of contaminants.
What can you do?
- Show residents the value and effectiveness of sorting & collecting food scraps.
- Implement a separate organics collection system that makes it easy and convenient for households to participate and provide them with the tools to do so.
- Launch education campaigns to inform residents about the benefits of sorting organic waste and how to do it correctly.
- Enhance engagement with households through workshops, school programs, and community composting initiatives.
- Ask about our municipal program deals and community envelope starter packs with bags and coupons to help launch or expand your organics diversion strategy.
Invest in processing infrastructure to convert organic waste into compost, biogas and digestate. Compost can be used in your city parks and distributed to residents. Biogas can be upgraded to use as renewable natural gas (RNG) or to generate electricity. The digestate is an excellent soil amendment. The RNG can fuel local buses and garbage trucks. Biobags are composted successfully with other organics wastes and can fit into different types of biogas facility infrastructure —whether the bags get sorted out before hand to be composted or go into the digester. We will be able to advise your municipality on what type of bag could work in your system and make sure that there is no persistent microplastics left in the soil.
Luckily, more and more households are already using our bags to collect their food scraps, as many governments and municipalities around the world have started using and distributing our bags and kitchen countertop buckets to drive the behavior change needed to fight climate change. We hope you will too! Choosing compostable bags can align seamlessly with your broader environmental objectives by offering multiple benefits.
Please connect with us. We’d be happy to share our experience with municipal pilot programs and offer useful tools to promote your program and engage with your residents and businesses.
