In early 2025, GreenBlue undertook an effort to update and expand its dataset of residential access to composting programs. We began by building out a new dataset that looked at the 6,233 largest U.S. cities, representing more than 60% of the nation’s population (based on 2020 Census Data). Using web scraping tools and a rigorous QA/QC process to analyze these cities for an availability of residential composting programs, we learned that:

• 17.8% of the researched U.S. population (n= 200,228,468) has access to curbside or drop-off programs that accept food waste only (no compostable packaging accepted).
• 18.1% of the researched U.S. population has access to curbside or drop-off programs that accept some form of compostable packaging in addition to food waste.
• In total, nearly 36% of the U.S. researched population has access to some kind of curbside or drop-off composting program that accepts either food waste only, or food waste and some forms of compostable packaging.

This represents an 8.9 percentage point increase in the researched U.S. population that has access to these programs since GreenBlue’s 2020 data effort.

What are the different types of composting access?

Knowing where residents can compost is important, but we also need to know how the program is structured. Residential access to composting collection can be through:

• Municipally-run curbside programs, which are administered by the resident’s city or county. These are generally considered to be easier to use, since residents typically already access other waste services through their municipalities.
• Privately-run curbside programs, which are managed by private composting companies that pick up material from residents and take it to a nearby composter or their own composting sites. These programs are often structured as a monthly subscription service, and see use from motivated residents.
• Drop-off programs, which can be municipally run or privately run, often offer multiple drop-off locations, and are typically free but in some cases may include a fee.

In the data tables below, “Yes (FW)” represents programs that accept food waste (also known as food scraps), while “Yes (FW+CP)” represents programs that accept food waste as well as compostable packaging. “None” indicates that a composting program or service did not exist for this city at the time the data was collected. It is important to note that the type of compostable packaging accepted varies from program to program. In some cases, programs may require third-party certification or may explicitly prohibit certain packaging materials or formats such as PLA or cutlery.