Why your food scraps travel more than 100 miles and how an L.A. council member wants to stop it

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Bob Blumenfield would like to see Angelenos’ old banana peels and moldy bread stay local.On Tuesday morning, the City Council member told a small crowd of waste advocates in front of city hall that he was introducing a motion to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by strengthening local composting infrastructure and decreasing reliance on distant facilities.

Currently, when city residents separate their food waste and yard clippings, chances are it’s being trucked to faraway processing facilities in Bakersfield or Lancaster.The motion would help the city meet targets set by California’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Strategy, or Senate Bill 1383, which phases out sending green waste to the landfill, because it is a major source of the powerful climate pollutant methane.It also would help meet Mayor Bass’ Climate Action Plan, which aims to use at least 50% of locally produced compost and mulch within Los Angeles by 2030.

Currently, only 25% to 30% of the city’s material is applied to land locally.The city produces approximately 350,000 tons of organic material a year, Blumenfield told the crowd, which he said equates to roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.“That’s a big number, and when you do the math,” he said, that’s roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide released by the entire country of Belize, the entirety of Humboldt County or the equivalent of burning 1.6 billion pounds of coal per year.As the announcement was underway, in the background a fire burned for a sixth day in a Boyle Heights warehouse, where 85 million pounds of frozen food was thawing and beginning to rot.

Signed into law in 2016, the state’s composting bill mandated a gradual increase in the amount of organic waste that must be diverted away from landfills.It required 50% of all green and food waste be diverted by 2020; by 2025, that number was su...