Mandating it isn't enough — where the world's composting rollouts have stumbled

France's circular-economy law of 10 February 2020, known as the AGEC law, obliges producers of biowaste to separate it at source. A decree of 21 June 2023 removed the volume threshold, so that from 1 January 2024 every producer, households included, falls inside the obligation. Until then the duty had applied only to large operations generating more than ten tonnes a year, which makes this a substantial jump. Municipalities carry a matching duty: communes above 50,000 inhabitants had to offer a separation route from January 2024, the rest by the end of 2026. The route itself is left open — individual or shared composters, kerbside collection at the foot of a building, drop-off points in public space, industrial composting, anaerobic digestion. The design says only that a household must be given somewhere to put food scraps that is not the residual bin.

The first year's figures came from ADEME, the French environment agency, in April 2025. Some 32.1 million people now have access to a separation route: three times the 2022 number, and roughly one French resident in two. The growth is real, but read the other way it means that a year after the obligation took effect, the other half still had nothing to use. The tonnage is heavier news. About 900,000 tonnes of biowaste a year is actually being separated and handled. In the household survey, 56 per cent say they sort food waste and 37 per cent say they compost it, while only 12 per cent use a municipal separate collection. The duty covers everyone; the quantity that travels through the system and comes out as compost or biogas remains a small fraction of what is generated. That gap is the first shape a stumble takes.

What follows dissects four systems against the same three bottlenecks. The first is the household's own hand: willingness is not enough when the obstacles are where to keep the scraps, the smell, the extra work, and whether a container exists at all. The second is the receiving end — whether the vehicles, sites and plants that must accept the separated material and turn it into compost or biogas exist in the quantities the mandate implies. The third is the incumbent's ledger: incinerators and landfills were built against an assumed input and are serviced by debt and by gate fees. Pull the food waste out and that economy shifts. However firmly a statute is worded, if any one of the three is blocked, the compost does not appear.

Sorted that way, the four cases separate with unusual clarity. France is jammed mainly at the first and second points; New York at the first; California at the second; China at the second and third. What matters more is that none of the four measures the distinction for itself. The 32.1 million France announces is a count of access. What California requires of its jurisdictions is ordinances and collection services. What Chinese cities publish is separation rates. Not one of these systems has adopted, as its headline indicator, the quantity that became compost and went back onto soil. What is not measured does not improve — that sentence is the spine of this article.