Roadmap to Tackle Methane and Biowaste at Scale

As climate change advances more rapidly than projected, society must come together to respond quickly and decisively.

Because we need to slow warming quickly, it has become imperative to prioritize investment into tackling specific greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have higher global warming potentials than others—buying our global community more time to build the low-carbon infrastructure and carbon removal solutions needed to stop and then reverse climate change.

The “super pollutant” methane is responsible for approximately 40% of human-caused global warming, and reducing its release into the atmosphere provides one of the highest returns on climate cooling investment today. In fact, it is estimated that addressing methane emissions alone could reduce global warming by 0.5º Celsius by the year 2050. In comparison, the entire energy transition is expected to deliver just 0.1ºC in cooling over the same period. And yet, methane has attracted less than 4% of climate investment, demonstrating a lack of investment attractiveness to date.

One important source of methane emissions is biowaste (solid waste, wastewater treatment, and manure), which represents approximately 20–25% of total methane emissions. Methane is released due to improper treatment and can be almost entirely prevented—in particular at landfills (>11% of total methane emissions).

Unfortunately, while biowaste is 100% recyclable through composting or anaerobic digestion, less than 10% of it is properly recovered and biologically treated. In the global south, less than 1% is properly managed; the remainder is landfilled.

Most biowaste ends up in landfills because waste management is handled by local municipalities, which often lack the financial, technical, and technological resources to manage it. Waste handling costs are distributed unfairly across taxpayers and provide no incentives for participating in high-performance sorting and recycling; in fact, they put those who do at a competitive disadvantage because of higher costs. Policies have not encouraged the private market to offer high-performance recycling services, including biowaste treatment.

We need new ideas.

For this reason, we propose the following roadmap, built on three proven solutions that can be implemented in a phased fashion to address biowaste recycling and prevent related methane emissions:

Phase 1 | Catalytic: Carbon Financing (Methane Prevention at Landfills)

Solution: Carbon finance uses the sale and delivery of carbon credits—certified units representing prevented or removed GHG emissions—to attract private investment into climate solutions. For biowaste, credits can be issued for preventing methane emissions at landfills through composting and anaerobic digestion. This creates an immediate revenue stream that can be reinvested into recycling infrastructure and used to attract outside investors to expand capacity. Importantly, offtake agreements—forward purchase commitments for future carbon credits—can provide the revenue certainty needed for developers and financiers to break ground on new projects.

Why it is necessary: Municipal budgets are rarely sufficient to fund large-scale biowaste treatment facilities. Carbon markets, which already exist globally, provide a catalytic funding mechanism to kick-start infrastructure development quickly and at scale. By securing off-take agreements from organizations leading the push to Net-Zero, projects can de-risk investment and accelerate deployment, catalyzing the industry’s development while presenting a clear path to transitioning away from carbon finance toward other funding mechanisms once the market is established.

Phase 2 | Hyperscale: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Organic Waste

Solution: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requires producers to finance the recovery and recycling of their products after use. While EPR is already common for packaging, plastics, and electronics, it has not yet been applied to organic waste. By recognizing the certified co-benefits of recycling biowaste independently—recovered waste mass, reduced pollution, improved local health, clean energy, compost production, soil restoration, fertilizer replacement, etc.—we can create Biowaste Recycling Credits to address biowaste recovery and management. These credits are systems that give money back to people and businesses that recycle properly, encouraging them to participate and rewarding actions that help the climate.

Why it is necessary: Carbon finance can catalyze projects, but it is not enough to sustain them over time. EPR-backed Biowaste Recycling Credits create a reliable and durable revenue stream by shifting responsibility to the industries generating biowaste (agriculture, food, and consumer goods). This policy layer provides the scale needed to ensure organics are consistently recycled rather than landfilled, while also rewarding those who contribute to circular solutions.

Phase 3 | Zero Waste: Pay-As-You-Throw (Utility Model)

Solution: Pay-As-You-Throw (PAYT) programs charge waste generators (e.g., food producers, restaurants, bars, businesses, and households) by weight, making service costs proportional to behavior and encouraging waste reduction, much like a utility bill that charges for power and water usage. When combined with rebates from recycling credits, PAYT can be started at a reasonable cost to waste generators when compared to landfilling, while the service fees support local recycling service providers. In practice, this combination turns PAYT into a balanced reward system: those who reduce waste and recycle more pay less.

Why it is necessary: On its own, PAYT can face resistance if it increases household or business costs, making it a non-starter. But when layered with recycling credits that provide direct financial rebates, PAYT becomes a fair and effective driver of behavior change. Together, these two revenue streams—crediting systems and PAYT—make recycling financially viable, self-sustaining, and scalable for municipalities, producers, and communities.

Additional benefits

The additional benefits from treating biowaste include reducing discharge to land and water; generating clean energy and nutrient-rich compost to restore depleted soils; lowering the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides; enhancing carbon capture; and creating green jobs for vulnerable communities worldwide.

Conclusion

Reducing methane released into the atmosphere is one of the single most effective levers to slow climate change and buy us more time.

This plan, using carbon finance to boost investment in biological treatment facilities, EPR-supported biowaste recycling credits to expand the market and involve producers, and PAYT to promote behavior change—offers a practical, market-focused strategy along with policy to transform biowaste from a global issue into a useful climate solution. It accesses climate capital from investors in a phased fashion and ultimately shifts the cost to consumers from an ineffective tax to an outcomes-based model that incentivizes biowaste recycling and waste reduction.

We are convinced that this is the best, if not the only, way to solve this global problem, and we invite everyone to join us on this road—beginning with catalytic investment into building composting and anaerobic digestion infrastructure.

Next Up

We are excited to work with industry leaders on additional roadmaps related to tackling methane emissions in other segments, including oil & gas, agriculture, and enteric emissions, as well as super pollutants in general.