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?
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Surprisingly, generally, no. Well, in the very grand scheme, millions of years, yes, it will all get broken down or eroded and washed down to the sea, because landfills mostly are not built in places that sediment is depositing, but rather in places where it is eroding.
Composting provides for moisture and aeration, and generally speaking, growth of bacteria and fungi and all those fun things needed to eat dead vegetative material and convert it into small compounds that plants can use (like, ultimately, CO2 and water that plants use to make sugar).
Landfills are generally packed down, and water passage through them is minimized, because water from landfill is leachate and tends to contain a lot of nasty chemicals that aren’t good to release to the natural environment. A real dog’s breakfast of stuff gets dumped into landfills: metals, plastics, residual household chemicals and who knows what else, and a lot of that ends up in the water while water flows through the pile, so the general idea is to try to make it so the amount of water passing through is small, and what does come out (usually) has to be treated just like raw sewage needs to be treated. Landfill leachate is not very good quality water. Pretty nasty, usually.
Landfills are not routinely turned over, so the oxygen content everywhere but at the very surface is very low. Although there are bacteria that thrive in low-oxygen conditions (anaerobic bacteria), those bacteria make different chemical compounds as their wastes than the “good” aerobic bacteria and other life that employs oxygen as part of its attack. A lot of organic materials (vegetative debris and similar) react very slowly to chemical attack in the absence of oxygen. As in, you can pull out a buried newspaper from 50 years ago and still read it lack of destruction.
Composting is designed to maximize decay. Landfills are designed to keep things isolated, and in place forever. Two totally different objectives.
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