How Technology and Government Funding Are Rebuilding America’s Composting Infrastructure

Food and organic waste remains the single largest category of material landfilled in the United States, and landfilled organic generate methane, a greenhouse gas with an outsized short-term warming effect. That’s the underlying reason state legislatures and federal agencies have spent the past several years treating composting less like a nice-to-have diversion program and more like core waste infrastructure, on par with water treatment or recycling.

The pressure shows up in two ways at once. Diversion mandates are pushing more tonnage toward composters than existing facilities were ever designed to handle, especially in metro areas where land for traditional windrow composting simply doesn’t exist. At the same time, as curbside organics collection expands to more households, the feedstock arriving at facilities gets messier produce stickers, plastic bags, takeout containers which means contamination removal has gone from a minor housekeeping step to one of the hardest operational problems in the industry.

There’s a genuinely encouraging data point buried in all of this: ReFED’s 2026 U.S. Food Waste Report found that total food waste declined for the first time since the pandemic, and private investment in food waste solutions grew 16% in 2025 to roughly $794 million, the first year-over-year growth in four years. The sector is maturing, not just expanding.

Modern facilities increasingly run on continuous data rather than a worker with a thermometer and a clipboard. Embedded sensors track core pile temperature, moisture, and oxygen levels around the clock, feeding that data into systems that flag anaerobic pockets, confirm pathogen-kill time-and-temperature requirements for regulators, and trigger turning or aeration before odor complaints start coming in from neighbors. For facilities operating under tight municipal odor ordinances, that kind of early warning isn’t a luxury; it’s what keeps the permit.

Where land is scarce or neighbors are close, enclosed in-vessel systems are replacing open piles entirely. These sealed tunnels and containers process material faster than traditional windrows, control odor and pest access by design, and let cities site organics processing in or near the urban areas actually generating the waste which matters enormously as state laws push curbside food-scrap collection into dense neighborhoods that have nowhere nearby to send the material otherwise.

This is arguably the trend with the most operational urgency right now, because it’s the one composters complain about most. Pulling plastic film, glass, and other “man-made inerts” out of organic material before or after processing has become the difference between a saleable, spec-compliant compost product and a load that gets rejected.

It’s also the part of the technology stack where eFACTOR3, a Rock Hill, South Carolina-based recycling equipment supplier, has been directly hands-on. In a 2023 demonstration at the Compost Central Recycling Center in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, the company ran incoming material through a mobile Spaleck screener and a Westeria AirBasic windsifter. The screen split material into three fractions: an oversized waste stream, a middle fraction, and a fine fraction the facility’s own technical manager described as “gorgeous compost” and the windsifter then pulled plastic film and other contaminants out of that middle fraction, removing roughly 90% of it on the spot. That single demonstration is a useful, concrete illustration of what “AI and optical sorting” trend pieces usually describe in the abstract: real machines, on a real compost pad, solving the contamination problem that diversion mandates are making worse every year. The same logic shows up upstream in equipment like Ecostar’s Dynamic Disc Screening systems, used globally to screen organics, biomass, and refuse-derived fuel, and in AI-controlled material-distribution systems that feed cleaner, more evenly spread material into downstream optical and density-based sorters.

All of the equipment described above costs real capital, which is exactly where federal and state funding programs come in. Here’s the current state of the main ones.

SWIFR is the largest single federal funding stream touching composting today, authorized under the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act and funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law not the Inflation Reduction Act, a distinction worth getting right since the two programs have had very different fates under the current administration. SWIFR is structured as roughly $275 million distributed across fiscal years 2022 through 2026, split into three lanes: grants to political subdivisions (counties and cities), formula funding to states and territories, and grants to Tribes and intertribal consortia.

Across its first two main rounds, SWIFR has put more than $220 million into local, state, and tribal recycling and organics infrastructure. Composting-specific examples from the program are concrete and varied: Utah’s Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District received $3.4 million to expand a compost facility and fund curbside organics receptacles, and earlier funding opportunities specifically called out composting facility construction and anaerobic digester upgrades as eligible uses. The program survived a period of real uncertainty in 2025, when the new EPA administration paused and reviewed numerous Biden-era grant commitments, but EPA has since confirmed SWIFR funding is continuing, with additional Tribal and state-level selections expected through 2026.

Jointly run by USDA’s Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, this program has run annual cycles since 2020, putting more than $30 million into roughly 145 cooperative agreements with local governments, tribal governments, and school districts. Priority consistently goes to projects that make compost accessible to working farmers, show a credible economic case, and bring multiple partners to the table; the Geneva, New York food-waste diversion project and the Tucson Unified School District’s school-garden composting program are both past examples USDA points to. The catch worth knowing: the program has been funded through remaining American Rescue Plan Act dollars, which are finite, so it’s worth checking usda.gov/urban directly for whether a new cycle has opened rather than assuming continuity.

FPEP doesn’t get nearly as much attention in composting circles as SWIFR, but it’s been a real and substantial funding source for compost producers specifically, because compost and biochar qualify as “nutrient alternatives” under the program’s fertilizer framing. By the end of 2024, USDA had invested $517 million across 76 facilities, with compost-specific examples including a California vermifiltering operation processing dairy manure, a Georgia biosolid composter expansion, an indoor food-scrap composting facility in Massachusetts, and a Florida operation converting yard trimmings and food waste into both compost and biochar.

FPEP went through its own period of disruption in 2025 as the new administration reviewed and re-scoped the program, reportedly finding that the large majority of previously announced projects had stalled without follow-through. By spring 2026, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the program was back online with roughly $700 million in previously stalled funding moving again, now framed more tightly around fertilizer-cost impact than climate policy. One of the specific projects she cited: a $3.89 million Iowa project explicitly built around expanding large-scale composting and organic fertilizer capacity, with a ribbon-cutting expected in summer 2026. The lesson for anyone tracking this program is that it’s volatile and politically sensitive, but currently active and still composting-relevant.

Launched in September 2025, Feed It Onward isn’t a grant program at all; it’s a national recognition and storytelling platform connecting food donors, food-recovery organizations, and composting operators with public visibility and an official EPA partnership designation. Kansas City’s KC Can Compost has been one of the more visible beneficiaries, highlighted by EPA as it works with four area municipalities to manage food waste diversion around the 2026 FIFA World Cup. There’s no funding check attached, but for composters and municipalities building a public case for local political or philanthropic support, the national platform and the signal that federal attention on food waste hasn’t disappeared are both worth something.

None of the above funding matters without material to process, and that’s where state policy keeps the pipeline full. California’s SB 1383 the strictest organics diversion mandate in the country, with enforcement regulations that took effect in 2022 requires jurisdictions to provide organic waste collection to virtually every household and business and has become the template other states reference. Washington and Vermont have enacted their own versions, and the list keeps growing as more states treat landfilled organics as a methane problem rather than just a disposal inconvenience.

Pay-As-You-Throw pricing is the quieter companion policy: cities that charge less for trash service when residents separate out organics see participation rates climb without ever passing a new mandate. And starting in 2026, California’s new climate disclosure law adds another layer of pressure from the corporate side companies doing more than $1 billion in business in the state will need to report Scope 1 and 2 emissions this year, with Scope 3 reporting (which captures supply-chain food waste impacts) following in 2027. That’s a new category of organization that suddenly has a balance-sheet reason to care about where its food waste ends up.

Here’s the honest math on federal funding. ReFED’s analysis of the past decade found that direct federal food waste funding roughly quadrupled, from an average of about $31 million a year between 2015 and 2020 to about $135 million a year between 2021 and 2025, largely thanks to categories the Inflation Reduction Act opened up. But ReFED also estimates that meaningfully reducing food waste at scale requires closer to $3 billion a year in government implementation support, with $1.6 billion of that needed in grants alone. Current federal funding covers a small fraction of that.

That gap is exactly why private and philanthropic capital has become so central to the conversation, and why the $794 million in private investment ReFED tracked in 2025 is a meaningful signal rather than a footnote. Organizations like Closed Loop Partners’ Composting Consortium have built a public-private model specifically around this gap pairing patient capital and technical assistance with local governments to de-risk and scale organics infrastructure that government grants alone can seed but not finish funding. It’s a similar arc to early-stage solar and wind: government money proves the model and builds initial capacity, and private capital is what actually gets the sector to scale.

A grant announcement or a state mandate is a starting gun, not a finished facility. Somebody still has to engineer, install, and keep running the physical systems that turn a converted lot or a decommissioned treatment plant into an operation that actually hits compost quality specs day after day and that’s the layer of this industry that gets the least attention relative to its importance.

This is where eFACTOR3 has built its business since the company’s founding in 2008. eFACTOR3 isn’t a compost producer; it’s a turnkey supplier of the pre-shredding, screening, windsifting, separation, and conveying systems that determine whether material arriving at a facility actually becomes clean, marketable compost or gets rejected for contamination. The company represents equipment manufacturers including M&J Recycling, Ecostar, Westeria, Tecnofer, and hamos, and works across plastics, municipal solid waste, and organics processing with composting specifically being an area where, as detailed above, its mobile screening and windsifting equipment has demonstrated real-world contamination removal rates above 90% in live facility trials.

As organic diversion mandates push more tonnage into the system, eFACTOR3 has been pointing to a pattern worth watching heading into 2026: diversion volume alone doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, because pretreatment quality is what actually determines downstream performance. The company has cited its own work supporting biogas and anaerobic digestion applications, where integrated depackaging and separation systems, not the digestion biology itself, turned out to be the deciding factor in whether a facility hit its output targets. That pushed the company’s role toward full system engineering rather than single-machine sales: evaluating how shredding, screening, separation, and conveying work together over time, including through a recently announced partnership with Broadview Group International to expand access to mechanical separation technology in the U.S. market.

The practical takeaway for anyone planning a composting project: the equipment and system-design conversation deserves the same attention as the funding strategy, not a follow-up call after the grant clears. Companies like eFACTOR3 offer demos, material trials, and consultations specifically so a facility design can be pressure-tested against real feedstock before capital is committed.

A few practical notes for municipalities, tribal governments, and private composters currently working through a funding strategy:

SWIFR, USDA’s CFWR agreements, and FPEP (if the project leans into the fertilizer/nutrient-alternative framing) sometimes can be layered on a single project to check overlap and matching-fund rules carefully before assuming so.

Reviewers increasingly expect a real contamination-management plan, not just collection logistics, especially as curbside organics programs scale into denser, messier feedstock streams.

Funding cycles for SWIFR and CFWR open and close fast and have shifted with administration priorities over the past two years usda.gov/urban and epa.gov/circulareconomy are the pages to monitor directly.

Organizations like Closed Loop Partners’ Composting Consortium are actively looking for shovel-ready local projects to co-fund alongside public dollars.

through demos and material trials rather than spec sheets alone.

Composting in 2026 sits at an unusual intersection: aggressive state mandates pushing volume in, federal funding that’s real but politically volatile, and an equipment layer that’s quietly becoming the determining factor in whether all of that turns into working capacity or stalled projects. Companies focused on the mechanical side of that equation eFACTOR3 included are likely to matter more, not less, as the gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground processing capacity gets more attention. For composters, municipalities, or processors evaluating where their own equipment and decontamination strategy stands, eFACTOR3 offers demos, material trials, and consultations to pressure-test a system design before committing capital.