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Once a little girl roaming the vibrant fields of an organic lettuce farm in Kealakekua, Hawai‘i, Ella Kilpatrick Kotner learned how to live in harmony with the land before most kids learn how to tie their shoes. Nourishing the soils that gave her a regular supply of leafy greens was just a part of life. As was playing with the piles of compost on her family’s farm.

“Composting, for me, is a lot about community,” said Kilpatrick Kotner. “It’s about connecting people to food and soil, and it’s about learning and being engaged in the process, and meeting your neighbors, and treating this thing that many people think of as a waste as a resource to be cherished and handled with care and turned into something beautiful that we can then reuse to grow more food.”

She now leads a program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, that does just that.

Every day, her team of three bikes throughout the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households, which are then brought to a community garden. There, they mix pounds of nitrogen-rich food scraps otherwise destined for landfills with carbon-rich materials, such as dry leaves and wood shavings, while sifting out pieces of plastic and even the occasional fork. In doing so, Kilpatrick Kotner is creating a menu and a habitat for the microbes that prompt the decomposition process, transforming the waste into a spongy source of life for the soil. The compost is then made available to those enrolled in the subscription-based service to use in home gardens, yards, or urban farms.

The U.S. wastes over one-third of its food supply, which contributes considerably to global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily as a result of the methane that is released when food decomposes in landfills. A decade ago, the Obama administration set a national target to cut the nation’s food waste in half by 2030. Many observers expected the first Trump administration to ignore that goal because of the implicit climate focus, so it came as a surprise when Trump doubled down on the benchmark.

Not only did Trump officials participate in the 2018 U.S. Food Waste Summit, but his first administration also launched the first interagency agreement to reduce food loss and waste. That involved formal commitments to the 50 percent food waste reduction goal from the Environmental Protection Agency, the........

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