When you eat an apple, you can do one of two things with the core. You can put it in your garbage can and it will likely end up in Johnston, at Rhode Island’s Central Landfill. There, it will be buried among tons of other organic and non-organic waste. It will break down in the absence of oxygen to release methane, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times as damaging to the climate as carbon dioxide.

Or, you can compost that apple core. Instead of filling up the landfill, it will be converted into a nutrient-rich and valuable product. Instead of contributing to climate change, it can be used to enrich your local soils.

Every day we are mostly choosing that first option here in Rhode Island. And it’s not just an apple core — we are paying millions to haul and dump thousands of pounds of food scraps in our quickly filling landfill.

Compostable material including food scraps accounts for 33 percent of the waste we dump in the landfill. If we keep doing what we’re doing, our landfill will reach capacity and be forced to close by 2046. When that happens, the price we all pay to throw out our trash will increase exponentially as we are forced to ship our waste out of state.

Our neighbors in Massachusetts have already had to go this route, at significant taxpayer cost. Rhode Islanders enjoy the lowest costs in New England to throw out our trash and we want to keep it that way. Extending the life of the landfill is the best way to keep our costs down – and investing in composting is an essential part of that.

That’s why we recently proposed new legislation that aims to fund composting and organic waste diversion programs with just a $2 per ton surcharge on the trash we send to the landfill, a strategy that is already working in 12 other states. The money generated from that small fee will go right back into our cities and towns through a grant program, funding things like compost facility builds, curbside service for residents, and organic waste diversion education.

Reducing food waste dumped in the landfill will bring down waste hauling costs on our cities and towns, and that small surcharge will quickly result in savings. Composting is an affordable, scalable solution to our waste crisis that we should be implementing in every community, and this program will put us on the right track.

In 2023, municipalities in Rhode Island spent over $23 million to landfill over 350,000 tons of waste. Imagine if we removed a third of those totals from the equation!

Cutting down on waste not only extends the life of our only landfill, it’s also good climate and economic policy. Let’s change the way we look at our food scraps. Instead of turning them into polluting garbage, let’s give them a second life enriching our soils. Let’s provide our communities with common-sense, long-term solutions that are cost effective and sustainable in every sense of the word. The action we take now will pay dividends for decades to come.

Senator Bridget Valverde, a Democrat representing parts of East Greenwich, North Kingstown and South Kingstown, and Representative Terri Cortvriend, a Democrat representing parts of Portsmouth and Middletown, are the sponsors of the Composting and Organic Waste Diversion Act (S 2753 / H 7856).