Maryland Is Burying Food While Children Go Hungry. A New Bill Could Change That.

Every year, hundreds of tons of food are thrown away across Maryland. That wasted food gets trucked to one of the state’s 48 landfills, where it rots and releases methane — a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term. In 2023 alone, Maryland’s landfills emitted methane equivalent to over 3.1 million metric tons of CO₂, the same climate impact as 720,500 gas-powered cars. Meanwhile, one in six Maryland children doesn’t have enough to eat. It’s a crisis hiding in plain sight.

And it’s not just a climate problem. Maryland’s two waste incinerators cause nearly $100 million in health damages each year to residents of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. More than half of the state’s landfills sit near communities with cancer or asthma rates above the state average. Nearly 60% are located in or near low-income neighborhoods. The people breathing in the toxic byproducts of our throwaway food system — nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, toluene — are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and low-income Marylanders who had little say in where these facilities were built.

A bill now before the Maryland General Assembly offers a real way forward. HB0429, the On-Farm Organics and Wasted Food Reduction and Diversion Grant Programs Act, would create three targeted grant programs to build the infrastructure and support the programs Maryland needs to get food out of landfills and into the hands of people who need it.

The first program, administered by the Maryland Department of the Environment, would fund food waste reduction initiatives, composting infrastructure, and food rescue programs statewide. The second, run through the Department of Agriculture, would help farmers invest in on-farm composting, cold storage, and food preservation — reducing waste before it ever leaves the field. The third would send flexible block grants directly to every Maryland county, letting local communities design solutions that fit their own needs. Schools, nonprofits, farms, and local governments would all be eligible to apply.

Maryland has already taken important steps, including a 2021 food waste law, stronger landfill methane standards in 2023 — but good policy without funding doesn’t build compost sites or refrigerated trucks for food banks. This bill, shaped through four years of collaboration with state agencies, environmental advocates, and community groups, is designed to close that gap.

The urgency is real. In 2025, aerial surveys identified five large methane plumes over a single landfill in Upper Marlboro, indicating that the scale of the problem is almost certainly bigger than official estimates suggest.

If you live in Maryland, now is the time to contact your legislator and ask them to support this bill. Composting our food waste instead of burying it isn’t a radical idea — it’s a common-sense investment in cleaner air, a healthier climate, and a Maryland where no child goes hungry.