Closing the Loop, 
From Waste to Food Security

by Sean Cummings

Unlike most vendors at the Kailua Farmers Market, Sean Butterbaugh takes food from people instead of offering it. In fact, only once a month does he actually have anything to give—and to the untrained eye, it resembles dirt.

But “this isn’t dirt,” he assures. “This is something magical.”

Butterbaugh co-owns and operates Leftover Love Company. For $25 a month, subscribers get a bucket to fill with home food scraps, which they can trade in at the farmers market for a fresh bucket. At their base at Full Circle Farm, Butterbaugh and his co-founder, Gregory Williams, convert the scraps into that “magical” substance: compost. Members receive a gallon of the stuff every month. At the market, Butterbaugh lights up when people share pictures of thriving houseplants nourished on the compost.

“All day long, it’s full of stories like this. People show up and we’re showered with gratitude,” he says. “They’re beginning to covet this compost as the gold that it is.”

The stakes here rise far beyond houseplants. Had those scraps not become compost, they would have joined the 26 percent of Hawai‘i’s food that goes to waste each year—the equivalent, per person, of 356 pounds of food and nearly $700 annually.

Composting is one way Hawaiʻi and Pacific Islander communities are tackling this issue, with other strategies including food banking and feeding scraps to pigs. Done properly, each method can reduce Hawaiʻi’s dependence on food imports while also diverting waste from landfills that, on some islands, are approaching capacity.

Treating Symptoms of Excess 
By many measures, one landfill is already too many. In landfills, under anaerobic conditions, bacteria breaking down food scraps release methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that food waste accounts for 58 percent of landfill methane emissions in the U.S., the country’s third-largest source of human-generated methane emissions. The resulting annual climate impact equals that of 15 coal-fired power plants, or the energy usage of 7 million homes.

O‘ahu, for its part, sends its food waste to an incinerator and dumps the resulting ash, saving landfill space. But food incineration is energy-inefficient and still emits greenhouse gases.

Yet despite these symptoms of excess, as of 2021, 48 percent of families with children in Hawaiʻi experience food insecurity.

“We’re a culture of abundance, but there are still folks who are going without,” says Marielle Terbio, vice president of strategy and programs at Hawai‘i Food Bank.

One way to address both waste and hunger is to redistribute unused food—the second-ranked solution in the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, after minimizing the production of surplus food in the first place. In fiscal year 2024, Hawaiʻi Food Bank dispensed around 17.6 million meals to folks on O‘ahu and Kaua‘i. For Terbio, who grew up food-insecure, providing lunch to children through school food pantries often feels like the most meaningful aspect of her work.

“You can’t help but get teary-eyed about it,” she says.

Meanwhile, Maui Food Bank currently serves Maui, Moloka‘i, and Lana‘i at a rate of more than eight million pounds per year, while The Food Basket distributed almost three million pounds on Hawaiʻi Island in 2023.

But not all food waste can be redistributed. Some spoils before it can be donated, and schools and restaurants produce tons of meal scraps unfit for human consumption.

In these cases, the EPA’s third-ranked food recovery solution often steps in: feeding animals. Food banks, restaurants, and schools often send leftovers to pig farms around the islands. Farmers then boil and supplement the scraps with commercial feed for the pigs, who can handle human food better than other farm animals. The county of Kauaʻi estimates that in fiscal year 2020, pig farmers took 11,000 tons of food waste, equivalent to about 12 percent of the total refuse dumped at the island’s landfill each year.

This practice predates commercial pig farming. Traditionally, says Dr. Noa Lincoln, associate researcher of Indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Indigenous Hawaiian families tossed things like kalo peels to pigs, chickens, and dogs. Lincoln’s own household does this today, as do rural families on other Pacific Islands like Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands, says Geoff Dean, an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania who has studied Pacific Island food systems.

Food From Scrap 
Many rural islander lifestyles have historically included another method of recycling food waste that, like feeding it directly to pigs, generates more food in the process: using manure and other organic matter to fertilize soils. “On atolls [across the Pacific region], making compost is traditionally almost genetic,” Dean says. “The soils are all derived from corals, so it’s pretty much sand. The only way to survive was to bring organic matter into the system.”

Lincoln uses piles of peels and cores from ʻulu (breadfruit), banana, and papaya to fertilize his ʻulu farm. Traditional practices of using food waste to nourish either animals or crops, he says, is “really not rocket science…the same things can be done today.”

Many community leaders in Hawai‘i have taken this to heart with composting projects, the EPA’s fifth-priority food recovery solution. Back at Full Circle Farm on O‘ahu stands a small commercial-scale composter from Green Mountain Technologies in the State of Washington, made from a repurposed shipping container. Sustainable Coastlines Hawai‘i (SCH), which provides waste and recycling education and disposal to surf competitions and private events, acquired the machine—known by its model name, the “Earth Flow”—to handle food waste at a larger scale than ordinary compost piles could. Taking up to 1,000 pounds of waste daily, including scraps from Leftover Love Co., it produces usable compost faster than standard pile methods while eliminating common concerns about pests and odors.

“When we turned that auger on, it was so cool to watch,” says Rafael Bergstrom, executive director at SCH, recalling using the Earth Flow for the first time. “As you throw something in that is smelly and rank, to see how quickly it dissipates the smell and mixes it in…was a really cool moment.”

For those who want to keep composting personal, the County of Kaua‘i offers free 80-gallon backyard compost bins, diverting as much as 4,000 tons of food waste from the island’s landfill each year (assuming all residents that have bins are using them regularly), while Compost Kaua‘i offers curbside food scrap pick-ups for its members. O‘ahu residents, meanwhile, can join the Worm ‘Ohana, which for $95 will provide an educational workshop, a bin, and some worms to compost household food waste. Since 2020, founder Mindy Jaffe says, the Worm ‘Ohana has composted over 37,000 pounds of waste.

The City and County of Honolulu requires large establishments like restaurants and hotels to divert food waste to food banks, soup kitchens, or pig farmers, but has no such program for residents and small businesses. In 2023, however, Honolulu passed an ordinance to allow residents to put food waste in the green bins previously reserved for yard waste, to be composted at Hawaiian Earth Recycling. How much this will reduce incineration depends on residents’ participation, while the compost’s quality hinges on what materials go in. But Henry Gabriel, Honolulu’s acting assistant refuse chief, feels hopeful.

“With the city having to site a new landfill, I think people realize how important it is to divert waste,” he says, adding that Honolulu is developing an educational campaign to encourage best practices, like not bagging the waste in plastic. If all goes well, Gabriel says, the program should divert about 15,000 tons of residential food waste annually.

Bergstrom’s and Jaffe’s solutions operate on smaller scales but prioritize quality, which they say is key for compost to feed back into local food production. SCH staff monitor and sort waste that goes into the Earth Flow, ensuring high-quality compost for Leftover Love Co. subscribers. Jaffe hopes Worm ‘Ohana can build support for school composting programs, like one she formerly ran that converted food waste from five Kailua schools into compost for farms.

“This is a great way to divert food waste and make it a resource for agriculture, even if it’s just our backyard gardens,” says Dr. Travis Idol, professor of tropical forestry and agroforestry at UHM and manager of his department’s field and greenhouse space at the Magoon Research and Instruction Station in Mānoa. The station is the new home for the Worm ‘Ohana, now a project of Hui Koʻe ʻĀina in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience.

Supporting local agriculture can reduce Hawaiʻi’s costly food imports, thereby easing food insecurity. Beyond composting, the islands’ food banks often buy produce from local farms, supporting those farms as well as hungry families. Feeding food waste to pigs can have a similar impact.

The result, ideally, is a world not just with less waste and fewer landfill emissions, but one where more island communities can afford enough to eat.

“What we don’t eat can actually create more things for us to eat,” Bergstrom says. “Waste doesn’t have to be waste. That concept in itself is life-changing.”

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