Why throwing food out is worse than composting

Question

I understand that composting helps break organics down faster, but in the grand scheme of things, wouldn’t food and other organics just end up naturally decomposing in a landfill anyways?

In: 6

Answer 1

The value of composting is what you can do with it. Composting allows you to reuse the nutrients from the organic matter as fertilizer for a garden, while soil in a landfill is generally unusuable since it’s often contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins that are hard to get rid of. The bad stuff in compost gets broken down into safe dirt, while the bad stuff in a landfill festers and accumulates.