Waste and recycling services in North America
Waste and recycling services serving growers, packers and exporters in North America, including global operators active in the region.
A1 Organics is a family-owned organics recycling company headquartered at 16350 WCR 76 in Eaton, Colorado, that composts yard trimmings and other organic material collected from residents, landscapers, agriculturalists, and municipalities across Colorado's Front Range.
Alameda County Community Food Bank operates an Oakland warehouse-based Food Recovery Program that collects unsalable but edible food, including fresh produce, from retailers and redistributes it through partner agencies.
American Reclamation operates a chipping and grinding facility in Los Angeles that processes green waste and diverts collected post-consumer food waste and food-soiled paper toward anaerobic digestion for compost and renewable natural gas.
Regional Southern California waste and recycling hauler with a dedicated Los Angeles customer service office, providing commercial and residential food-scraps/organics collection and recycling diversion under the state's mandatory organics-recycling program.
Atlas Grinding & Recycling Group is a Florida DEP-registered yard trash and vegetative waste recycling facility operating in Miami, FL.
Baker Commodities operates a rendering plant in Vernon, CA, a small industrial city surrounded by Los Angeles, converting animal byproducts into meat-and-bone meal and tallow and processing used cooking oil and restaurant grease-trap waste.
Nonprofit operating community composting sites and curbside food-scrap collection programs in Brooklyn, New York, converting food waste into finished compost.
BTS Bioenergy (formerly known as Bioenergy DevCo, renamed in a May 2025 rebrand that aligned the U.S. business with its European parent brand BTS Biogas) operates the Maryland Bioenergy Center, an anaerobic digestion facility in Jessup, Maryland, that recycles commercial food waste and organic residuals from food manufacturers, beverage producers, and distributors into renewable natural gas and digestate.
Waste and recycling company headquartered in Oakland, providing residential and commercial recycling collection, materials-recovery-facility processing and organics collection for the city under its municipal contract.
Regional composting company operating a Seattle facility that processes residential and commercial yard and food waste into bulk and bagged compost products.
Cedar Grove operates a commercial composting and organics-recycling facility in Seattle that processes food scraps and yard waste into bulk and bagged compost products sold wholesale and retail.
Circular Services operates organics collection, de-packaging, composting and anaerobic digestion sites alongside a recycling business across the United States. Its Vero Beach, Florida de-packaging facility separates packaging from damaged or out-of-date food and beverage products and sends the organic contents to a co-located composting site.
City Harvest is a New York City food rescue organization that schedules pick-ups of surplus food from supermarkets, wholesalers, restaurants and other food businesses and redistributes it to community food programs. Its food rescue and delivery hub is in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
The Community FoodBank of New Jersey operates its primary warehouse in Hillside, in the Newark metro area, collecting and redistributing donated food, including fresh produce, to partner agencies statewide.
Compost for Life collects food scraps from homes and businesses in the Miami area and processes them into finished compost, which it donates to community gardens and local farmers.
Corridor Recycling operates a Long Beach recycling facility processing cardboard, paper, metals, electronics, glass and plastic for commercial and residential customers, and has operated as an independent recycling broker in the Western U.S. since 1995.
Darling Ingredients operates rendering plants in the United States and Canada that process by-products from animal agriculture and food manufacturing into animal-feed proteins, fats and fertilizer inputs. Its DAR PRO Solutions unit collects used cooking oil, grease trap waste and meat by-products from commercial kitchens and food businesses.
Denali collects food waste from supermarkets, restaurants, food manufacturers and distribution centres and operates depackaging and composting facilities across the United States. Recovered material is processed into compost, animal feed and biofuels.
Divert, Inc. operates integrated food-waste facilities that use depackaging equipment and anaerobic digestion to process unsold food from retailers, distributors and manufacturers into renewable natural gas and fertiliser. It also runs edible-food donation programmes on behalf of its customers.
Farm Share is a Florida food-rescue organization headquartered in Homestead that gleans and collects surplus fresh produce directly from farms and redistributes it statewide via a refrigerated-truck fleet.
Operates a large-scale food distribution and food recovery center at Hunts Point in the Bronx, redistributing surplus and donated food, including produce, to hundreds of community partners across New York City.
The Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia and the Eastern Shore operates a Norfolk warehouse that receives donated and rescued food, including surplus produce, and distributes it to partner agencies across the region.
The Greater Chicago Food Depository operates a Chicago warehouse that receives donated and surplus food, including produce, and distributes it through a network of food pantries and partner agencies across Cook County.
A Chicago recycling and material drop-off center on the city's West Side offering business recycling and food waste management services alongside construction-debris recycling.
Living Earth Technology operates multiple green-material composting and mulch-production facilities in the Houston area, converting organic waste into commercial soil, compost, and mulch products.
McGill Environmental Systems operates the Bees Ferry composting facility in Charleston under contract with Charleston County, processing over 80,000 tons per year of food waste and yard waste into certified compost.
Organic waste recycling facility in the greater Houston area that converts green waste into compost, soil blends, and mulch products for retail and wholesale customers; operating since 1993.
Palma Environmental is a Florida DEP-registered vegetative waste and recycling processing facility operating in Miami, FL.
Philabundance is a Philadelphia-based hunger-relief nonprofit, recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3), that operates warehouses at 3616 South Galloway Street and 302 West Berks Street in Philadelphia to collect and redistribute food to community partners across southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.
Portland Disposal & Recycling, Inc. is a family-operated waste and recycling company, established in 1936, that provides commercial composting collection services for businesses in Portland, Oregon.
Recology Inc. is an employee-owned resource recovery company that collects and processes yard trimmings and food scraps into compost at facilities across California and Oregon, including South Valley Organics in Gilroy, California.
Australian subsidiary of the global REMONDIS Group providing commercial food organics collection and processing. It uses sealed tunnel composting to turn food and garden waste into compost, mulch and fertiliser for parks, agriculture and gardens.
Restaurant Technologies delivers bulk fresh cooking oil to commercial kitchens and collects used cooking oil for recycling, working from a network of company depots across the United States. The company lists 41 depot and oil recycling locations, including sites in Dallas and Houston.
Ryland Environmental Services provides commercial and construction waste removal, dumpster rental, and recycling programs from its Savannah, Georgia location.
Sanimax operates a rendering and by-product collection facility at 545 Hardman Avenue South in South St. Paul, Minnesota, reclaiming meat by-products and used cooking oil from the agri-food industry and processing them into proteins, fats, oils, and animal-nutrition ingredients for livestock and pet food.
Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia operates a Savannah warehouse that receives truckloads of donated and rescued food from grocers, farms, and businesses and redistributes it through a network of partner agencies across coastal Georgia.
Nonprofit redemption center and community hub in Brooklyn that processes container-deposit bottle/can recycling for local canners and also runs composting and gardening programs.
Food rescue nonprofit that collects surplus perishable food, including produce, from donors across northern New Jersey (Bergen, Essex/Newark, Hudson, Morris, and Passaic counties) and delivers it free to agencies serving the hungry.
Curbside and commercial recycling processor serving the Hampton Roads/Norfolk region of Virginia from its materials recovery facility in Chesapeake.
The Grease Company collects and buys used cooking oil in bulk from restaurants and foodservice operations across Southern California, recycling it into yellow-grease feedstock, from its Long Beach base.
A Chicago composting company offering residential and commercial food-scrap and organics collection, processing material at the Harbor View composting facility.
Vanguard Renewables operates depackaging facilities and farm-based anaerobic digesters that take pre-consumer packaged food and beverage waste from manufacturers and convert it to biogas. Separated packaging materials such as glass, cardboard, plastic, steel and aluminium are sorted for recycling.
Australia/New Zealand arm of the global Veolia environmental services group, providing food organics and garden organics (FOGO) collection and processing. It uses in-vessel composting and forced-aeration to make compost and soil conditioners, and runs anaerobic digestion converting commercial food waste to electricity.
Developer and operator of on-farm anaerobic digestion and food waste depackaging facilities headquartered in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, including the Rockwood Ag-Grid facility in Granville, Massachusetts that processes commercial and pre-consumer food waste into renewable energy.
Composting company operating a Pennsylvania DEP permitted windrow composting facility in North Strabane Township, Washington County, processing food waste, soiled paper, yard waste and waxed cardboard into finished compost products.
Rendering operator headquartered near Birmingham, Alabama, trading as BHT ReSources, that provides sustainable rendering, used cooking oil recovery and grease trap services across the southeastern United States and has operated continuously since 1900.
Food scrap collection service connecting homeowners, businesses, municipalities and events to composting facilities across Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.
Nonprofit gleaning organization based near Boston, Massachusetts that organizes volunteers to harvest surplus crops from area farms and distributes the produce to food banks, pantries and hunger relief agencies in Greater Boston.
Waste and recycling hauler in Dallas, Texas that opened its own food-waste composting facility in 2022 after 15 years of commercial organics collection, and runs a residential food-waste drop-off subscription program.
Composting operator running a 52-acre facility in the Tampa Bay area of Florida that processes organic material into topsoil blends and OMRI-listed compost under Florida waste management guidelines.
Food rescue organization based near Detroit, Michigan that operates a fleet of refrigerated trucks collecting surplus food from grocery stores, restaurants and other venues for distribution to hunger relief agencies across Metro Detroit.
Food waste processor in Old Lycoming Township near Williamsport, Pennsylvania that collects food scraps from households and restaurants and converts them to compost using black soldier fly larvae under a state DEP permit.
Food bank headquartered in Duquesne, Pennsylvania that collects and distributes surplus and donated food through a network of over 380 member agencies across eleven counties in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Composting service founded in 2009 that hauls food and organic waste from households, restaurants, businesses and the Indianapolis Zoo for curbside composting collection in the Indianapolis, Indiana area.
Idaho-based agribusiness that runs two active custom cattle feedlots, one near Grand View, Idaho and one near Burbank, Washington, incorporating potato processing byproducts from its own food plants into grain-based cattle rations.
Composting operator based in Fresno, California that accepts food waste, green waste, and clean wood material and produces OMRI-certified, CDFA-approved finished compost sold to agricultural and landscaping customers across Central California and the wider western United States.
Food-waste recycling operator based in Orlando, Florida that runs residential, commercial and event organics collection with weekly bucket pickup, serving Orlando, Tampa and several other central Florida cities, and supplies finished compost to local farms and schools.
Hunger relief organization headquartered in Portland, Oregon that distributes rescued and donated food, including surplus produce, through a statewide network of 21 regional food banks and roughly 1,200 food assistance sites across Oregon and southwest Washington.
Worker-owned cooperative in Cincinnati, Ohio offering organics collection and food scrap drop-off composting services to residents and organizations since 2020.
Used cooking oil recycling operator based near New Orleans, Louisiana that collects waste oil from restaurants and food stores for conversion into biodiesel, and also provides grease trap cleaning licensed by the Orleans Parish Sewerage and Water Board.
Organics collection operator in Dallas, Texas that describes itself as the leading collector of post-consumer food waste in North Texas, diverting roughly 150 tons per month to certified composting facilities.
Dairy farm in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania that operates two anaerobic digesters permitted for co-digestion, taking in food waste from grocery stores and food manufacturers alongside farm manure to generate renewable energy.
Food bank headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana that leads hunger-relief and food-donation distribution across 23 South Louisiana parishes through more than 700 community partner programs, providing the equivalent of over 32 million meals a year.
Upper Midwest hunger relief organization based in Saint Paul, Minnesota that recovers surplus food and distributes it through more than 1,000 partner food shelves and hunger relief programs across Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Food rescue nonprofit headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia that recovers surplus food from donors and delivers it to partner agencies within 90 minutes across ten metro Atlanta counties, having rescued over 26 million pounds of food since 2004.
Food rescue nonprofit based in Houston, Texas that retrieves surplus prepared and perishable food from retailers, venues, hotels and distributors and redistributes it to shelters, soup kitchens and nonprofits, having rescued over 22 million pounds of food since 2015.
Phoenix, Arizona food bank founded in 1967, recognized as the world's first modern food bank, that rescues produce and other food from more than 440 retail stores and partner growers and distributes it through 650-plus partner agencies across ten Arizona counties.
23-acre organics recycling and composting facility in Wenatchee, Washington operated by Stemilt Growers that accepts yard debris and processes about 40,000 tons of organic material a year into roughly 16,000 tons of compost used on regional orchards.
Windrow composting facility in Dos Palos, California operated by Synagro that processes about 100,000 tons per year of biosolids and green waste into agricultural and horticultural soil amendment, serving municipal clients including Fresno and San Francisco International Airport.
Organics collection company operating residential and commercial food scrap drop-off and curbside composting service across Columbus, Ohio, and surrounding communities since 2018.
Tools that can help
Need a provider in North America?
Send one request and we will pass it to relevant providers here.
Run a facility in North America?
This is an independent listing compiled from public information. Listings are not endorsements, and Fernable has no commercial affiliation with the providers listed.
Common questions
How do I check whether a waste and recycling provider in North America is properly licensed?
Ask the provider directly for the permits or licences relevant to the material streams you need handled in North America, and confirm these against whatever national or local waste authority issues them. Requirements and the issuing body vary by country, so it is worth asking the provider to explain how their documentation maps to local rules rather than assuming a single standard applies.
Can one provider in North America handle multiple waste streams, such as plastics, metals, and organics?
Some providers in North America do cover multiple material streams, while others specialise in one, such as scrap metal or electronic waste. It is worth confirming directly which streams a given provider actually processes itself and which, if any, it passes on to a separate partner, since capability can vary significantly even among providers offering a broad service description.
What should I ask a waste and recycling provider in North America about how material is tracked?
Ask what records are kept from collection through to final processing or disposal, such as weighbridge tickets, transfer notes, or processing confirmations, and whether these are available to you as the customer. Traceability practices differ between providers in North America, so confirming this upfront avoids gaps later if you need to demonstrate how material was handled.
How do I check whether a provider listed for North America is actually reliable?
Look for a working address and contact details, and ask for references from businesses that have shipped through North America recently rather than relying on a listing alone. Confirm the specific service you need, storage, freight forwarding, or customs handling, since a general logistics listing does not always mean deep capability in the one service that matters to your shipment. A provider willing to explain what happens when something goes wrong is a stronger signal than any credential.
Should I use a local provider in North America or an international one with a presence there?
It depends on what matters more for your shipment. A local provider in North America usually has deeper knowledge of ground conditions, relationships, and paperwork specific to that market, while an international provider offers a single point of contact and consistent processes if your goods also move through other countries. Many exporters combine the two: a local provider for physical handling in North America, and a wider forwarder to manage the rest of the route.
What should I ask a provider in North America before committing to work with them?
Ask what happens to your goods at each handover point, who is responsible if something is delayed or damaged, and what documentation they produce and when. Ask for a quote that breaks out individual charges rather than one bundled figure, so you can see what you are paying for at each stage. It is also worth asking directly how they have handled a shipment that ran into difficulty in North America, since that answer tells you more than a general pitch.
Sourcing waste and recycling across the Americas
Waste and recycling in North America is shaped first by distance. The Americas cover enormous stretches between population centres, and material recovered in an interior region often has to travel a long way by road or rail before it reaches a coastal facility or a processing hub. This makes logistics planning, rather than sorting technology, one of the biggest practical differences between markets in this part of the world. A provider's footprint in North America is often defined as much by its haulage network as by the processing equipment it owns.
The region also mixes highly organized, well-capitalized municipal and industrial waste systems with informal recovery networks that remain significant in many countries, particularly for materials like scrap metal, cardboard and certain plastics. Agricultural and extractive industries generate their own distinct waste streams, from packaging and processing residues to material tied to mining and forestry, and providers serving those sectors often operate quite differently from those focused on urban municipal contracts. A buyer sourcing in North America should expect this split and ask directly which side of it a given provider sits on, since capability, equipment, and reporting standards can differ substantially between the two.
Cross-border movement of recyclable and hazardous material is a live and evolving area across the hemisphere, with countries applying their own permitting and notification requirements independently of one another rather than through a single shared framework. Providers active in North America need to work within whatever domestic rules apply there, and those rules can change how straightforward it is to move material between neighbouring countries. Labour practices and formalization also vary considerably, from highly regulated corporate operators to smaller family businesses and cooperatives that play an important role in collection and initial sorting. Understanding which of these a provider represents, and how it fits into the wider chain from collection through to final processing or export, is central to sourcing well in this region.
How trade moves through North America
North America's food and agricultural trade runs on some of the most integrated cross-border logistics in the world, with the United States, Canada, and Mexico connected by dense road and rail networks that treat many agricultural supply chains as effectively continental rather than confined within national borders. A significant share of trade within the region moves overland rather than by sea, and produce, grain, and processed food products routinely cross one or more of the region's land borders as part of a single supply chain before reaching final processing, storage, or retail distribution. This overland integration is arguably the defining feature of the region's trade geography, and it means border crossing efficiency and customs coordination between the three countries matter as much as, or more than, port capacity for a great deal of the region's food trade.
Port infrastructure remains substantial on both coasts and the Gulf, handling major bulk grain, meat, and produce export volumes to markets outside the region, and these systems are generally mature, well documented, and used to meeting demanding international food safety and traceability standards. Inland, an extensive cold and ambient storage and distribution network supports both domestic movement and export preparation, with major agricultural regions typically well served by rail and trucking links to processing and export points. Seasonal patterns matter less as a structural feature here than in some other regions, since production spans a wide range of latitudes and climates across the three countries, allowing sourcing continuity across much of the year for many commodities if the right regional combination of origins is used.
The provider landscape includes large, well-capitalised logistics and cold-chain providers operating across all three countries, alongside a substantial base of regional and specialist operators focused on particular commodities, corridors, or border crossings. Customs brokerage is a mature, well-regulated specialism in its own right here, reflecting how much cross-border movement the region handles, and providers with strong customs brokerage capability at the specific land border relevant to a shipment are often more valuable than a larger generalist without that specific border experience. Regulatory frameworks in each country are well documented and consistently enforced, which gives sourcing across the region a degree of procedural predictability that is genuinely useful for planning.
Someone sourcing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico at once should pay particular attention to which land border a supply chain actually crosses and how many times, since multiple crossings each carry their own documentation and inspection requirements even within a broadly harmonised trading relationship. Regulatory standards for food safety, labelling, and phytosanitary matters differ in specifics between the three countries even where overall frameworks are aligned, so assuming full equivalence across borders can produce compliance gaps. Because so much of the region's trade is genuinely continental in structure, a provider's ability to coordinate a shipment's movement across more than one of the three countries, rather than handling only a single national leg, is a real point of differentiation worth asking about directly.
Working across North America as a sourcing area means treating the three countries as a connected logistics system with its own cross-border specialism, rather than as three separate national markets that happen to be adjacent, while still respecting the real regulatory distinctions that persist beneath that integration. It also rewards planning that takes advantage of the region's wide production range: knowing which growing areas cover which season lets a buyer sequence origins across the year rather than treating any one country as a year-round default.
Comparing waste and recycling providers in North America
Fernable lists a wide range of waste and recycling providers across North America, and the practical challenge is not finding one, it is narrowing the field to the ones worth a call. Start with what the provider actually handles day to day: the waste streams they collect and process, whether that is general commercial waste, packaging, organics, construction debris, or specific recyclable materials, and whether they separate at source or rely on downstream sorting. Two providers can look similar on a listing page and diverge sharply once you ask what happens to material after collection: one may route it to a local materials recovery facility with visible onward buyers, another may bundle it for export or landfill with far less transparency. That distinction matters more than almost anything else when you are trying to meet a client's compliance or sustainability commitments, and it rarely shows up unless you ask directly.
Some differences are meaningful and some are cosmetic. Fleet size and branding say little about whether a provider can actually service your site reliably. What matters is licensing and permits for the specific waste categories you generate, documented chain of custody, and whether they can produce the paperwork a shipper or regulator will eventually ask for, such as waste transfer notes, recycling certificates, or evidence of final disposition. Geographic coverage within North America is also worth checking properly rather than assuming: a provider might list a national presence but subcontract collection in outlying regions, which changes both price and accountability. Ask how they price, whether by weight, volume, or container size, since a like-for-like comparison across providers is only possible once you know which basis each one uses.
Run the comparison in stages rather than trying to hold every provider in your head at once. First filter by the waste streams and volumes you actually generate, which usually cuts the list substantially before you have spoken to anyone. Then request the same information from each remaining provider: permitted categories, collection frequency options, reporting format, and contract terms including notice periods. Treat responsiveness during this stage as a real signal, since a provider that is slow or vague before you are a customer tends to behave the same way afterwards. Finally, weigh flexibility on collection scheduling and contract length against the reporting depth you need. A provider offering rich sustainability reporting is only useful if the rest of the service, timeliness and reliable collection, holds up in practice, so treat marketing language about capability as a starting point for verification rather than a conclusion.