Rima Grace

About a dozen states have policies addressing food waste, including composting requirements.

But Ohio is not one of them.

And the city where I live has no food waste program.

So I do it myself in the backyard.

The reason is pretty simple.

Tipping a truckload of trash into a landfill is cheap.

Like, it costs half as much as it does in, say, Massachusetts.

Brian Staley leads the Environmental Research Education Foundation.

He says Ohio's got more land and fewer people.

Conserving landfill space or repurposing trash?

Not major concerns.

It's the same with composting.

It's cost-effective in Massachusetts, where landfills are expensive, but not so much in Ohio.

Sam Crowell is Ohio University's sustainability director, and he worked on a regional composting effort in the small town of Athens, Ohio.

Composting would add to residents' monthly trash bill, so participation ended up being a fraction of what he was hoping for.

And the barriers don't stop there.

Here's the big one.

Ohio imports more than 8 million tons of trash every year from more populated states.

That means Ohio makes money on other people's trash.

Brian Staley with the Environmental Research Education Foundation says without the financial incentive to start composting...