Are Your Organics and Food Waste Programs Built to Scale?

This diagnostic helps identify whether your drop-offs and composting infrastructure can support clean participation — or if design limitations are holding programs back.

Across North America, organics and food waste programs are expanding rapidly. Yet as participation grows, many programs encounter the same challenges: rising contamination, operational strain, pest issues, and declining confidence in drop-off sites. These outcomes are often treated as engagement problems, but in practice they are usually design problems. This diagnostic helps you assess whether your organics infrastructure is doing the work it needs to do — or whether hidden design gaps are putting program stability at risk.

Organics Program Diagnostic Checklist

By working through the Organics Program Diagnostic Checklist, you will gain a clear view of where participation and contamination risks are coming from, what typically breaks down first as programs scale, and whether staff time or education is being used to compensate for design limitations.

The diagnostic checklist is designed to be practical and quick to complete, giving you a defensible starting point for improving performance, planning investment, and supporting internal conversations about long-term program stability.

Diagnostic Checklist

Organics Infrastructure
Risk & Readiness Guide

Receive the full Organics Infrastructure Risk & Readiness Guide via email, as a downloadable PDF. This expanded version includes guidance on the hidden costs of inaction, decision paths for programs once risk is identified, and how infrastructure gaps typically show up in staffing, contamination, participation loss, and program resets.

This complete guide is designed to support internal conversations and help you make informed decisions before issues become structural.
Receive the guide in full.

Expanding Organics Access Across Communities webinar highlighted how Ann Arbor, Princeton, and Ridgewood are using secure, well-sited drop-off systems to expand food scrap recycling. Municipal experts shared practical lessons on siting, access control, operations, and resident engagement, finding drop-off cleaner, simpler, and more cost-effective than curbside—especially for multifamily housing. The session emphasized starting small, learning quickly, and scaling access with well-maintained infrastructure that supports high participation and low contamination. Watch the full webinar to hear how three communities are leading the way and breaking barriers.

Watch the full webinar here