https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recover...
Illustrating that the next best existing option after composting is landfill, says nothing of the delta separating the two on the efficacy axis. It only speaks to a lack of altnernatives separating composting and landfill.
I'd argue that burying your food waste in any land that food will potentially be grown in is infinitely superior to sticking it in a landfill where food will never be deliberately grown.
From my perspective, living on a rural property with an outhouse where all food waste and human waste is buried and eventually grown food from your comment strikes me as ridiculous. I add obvious value to my land burying this waste, it completely escapes reuse, effectively exiting the system, when I put it in the dumpster.
On my property in particular, runoff is not an issue (desert). From what I've seen there's mostly increased insect activity in the compost area. I view it as more generally increasing the fertility of the area from waste using minimal effort.
Most of it is consumed by other lifeforms before I grow anything there. But those lifeforms are residents of my land and will continue to multiply (and die) here. Their increased activity effectively locks up the resources and I can leverage that with a large garden when time permits.
You might make your distributed practices even more efficient with vermicompost / bokashi; by selecting an organism with known beneficial outputs to metabolize the waste you'll end up with a higher conversion to usable nutrients and beneficial microbes for your plants.
Have you got any sources for the usually?
Any ex landfill I've seen just has vents to the open air, and mentions of landfill gas never give the impression its mainstream.
But as others have been saying, it makes much more sense to simply bury the food in your garden. Or collect food waste on a municipal level, which has, for example, been the law in Germany since 2015.
The "dry fermentation" system used in Munich is a particularly good example. They collect food waste in the city, compost and ferment it in a big sealed hall near the soccer stadium, wait 12 weeks for the bacteria to work, collect the resulting biogas to put into their gas network (or power garbage trucks), and sell the leftover organic compost and fertilisers to local residents and farmers. A closed and sustainable cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0gU9ljHo4
https://www.awm-muenchen.de/fileadmin/PDF-Dokumente/awm/Fold...
Disclosure, I work for a startup that turns this into a circular food production system, from food waste, via insects to fish and vegetables via aquaponics.
[1] EU rules say eggs should be marked “Best before date” as 28 days after they have been laid, but stored propperly they are good for at least double that time. (Swedish) http://www.svenskaagg.se/?p=19895 In the UK supposedly 720 million eggs are thrown away each year. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/eggs...
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