Greater LA
Composting in LA isn’t as easy as it sounds
The nonprofit Compost LA maintains community gardens where residents can drop off food scraps, but many are at capacity, and cities have different rules on what’s allowed to go into certain bins.
By Steve Chiotakis • • 1 min readVenice Blvd. consists mainly of small storefronts and apartment complexes, but on one corner, next to the fire station, a large garden interrupts the buildings crammed together.
Demand is high because a lot of cities in LA County don’t accept compost. Most of them have green bins, but the rules about what goes in those bins changes across city borders.
"We also have more stringent air quality regulations, so to develop composting facilities within the South Coast Air Quality Management District (which most of LA County is in) would require those facilities to be fully enclosed. And to pull and treat all of the air within that facility ... that adds to the cost of the composting significantly,” Skye says.
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