How sewage treatment plants could handle food waste, sparing landfills and the climate

Treatment plants can capture over 95% of methane from food waste, compared to about 50% at landfills. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Every day, food scraps disappear into trash bags, are hauled away and forgotten. But that waste could be turned into something productive.

Across the United States, about 97 million metric tons of food waste are discarded each year, of which about 37 million metric tons end up buried in landfills.