Waste and recycling services in Los Angeles
Providers serving Los Angeles, United States. An independent listing for packers, growers and traders.
Nearest port
Los Angeles ships through the Port of Los Angeles (USLAX).
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.
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.
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.
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Common questions
Can a waste and recycling provider in Los Angeles handle hazardous or regulated waste streams?
Not automatically. Hazardous and regulated streams need specific licences, storage conditions and transport documentation on top of general waste and recycling capability, and not every provider in Los Angeles holds them. Ask which categories a provider is licensed to handle in the United States, request the relevant permit or certificate, and check it covers the exact material you need moved rather than a broader waste category it happens to sit within.
Do I need to sign a long-term contract with a waste and recycling provider in Los Angeles?
It depends on the provider, not on Los Angeles. Some offer one-off or short-term collections, others require a standing agreement covering a minimum term or volume. Ask directly about contract length, minimum commitment and exit terms before agreeing anything, and get whichever arrangement you settle on in writing, since verbal understandings about contract flexibility are a common source of later disputes.
What proof should I ask for that waste collected in Los Angeles was actually recycled or processed as agreed?
Ask for a certificate of destruction, recycling or processing tied to the specific consignment, not a general statement about the provider's practices. It should reference the material type, quantity and date, and ideally name the facility that carried out the processing. A provider unable to produce consignment-level documentation on request is worth treating with caution regardless of what else they claim.
Why does a provider without a badge marking it as based in Los Angeles still appear on this list?
Listings on this page are matched by where a provider actually operates, not only by registered address. Some providers cover Los Angeles from a nearby base, run scheduled routes through it, or serve it as part of a wider territory in the United States. The absence of a city badge simply means their presence there is regional rather than a dedicated local office, so they remain a genuine option worth contacting for work in Los Angeles.
How does this Los Angeles page relate to the country page for the United States above it?
The country page for the United States gathers every provider working anywhere within it, across every category, while this page narrows that same pool down to Los Angeles specifically. Think of it as a filtered view rather than a separate dataset. If a search here comes up thin, the country page is the right next stop, since it will surface providers whose coverage reaches Los Angeles without being centred on it.
What should I do if the provider I need is not listed in Los Angeles yet?
Start with the country page for the United States, since a provider covering Los Angeles without a dedicated local presence may be listed there rather than here. If nothing suitable turns up, check neighbouring city pages, as providers often serve overlapping areas. You are also welcome to point us to a provider you know operates in Los Angeles so it can be reviewed and added for others searching the same route.
How does a provider get listed for Los Angeles?
Providers are added after their operations in or around Los Angeles are checked against publicly available information, such as their own website, registration details, or other verifiable records confirming the work they do in the United States. This keeps the list something buyers can rely on rather than a self-reported directory. A provider already known to serve Los Angeles that is missing here can be flagged for review and added once that basis is confirmed.
What being based in Los Angeles actually changes
A provider based in Los Angeles keeps people, vehicles and handling capacity sitting inside the city rather than dispatched into it for each job. In practice that shows up as shorter notice periods, a site visit that happens the same week rather than the same month, and a quote built against what someone has actually seen rather than a description relayed over the phone. A provider covering Los Angeles from elsewhere in the United States can reach the same outcome, it simply carries an extra leg of travel before work starts and sometimes a second one before a quote is confirmed.
That gap matters most at the edges of a job, not in the middle of it. An unscheduled collection, a load that turns out to be mixed when the paperwork said sorted, a query that needs someone to walk the site rather than read a photo: these are the moments where a local base pays for itself, because the answer is a short visit rather than a booking. Recurring, well-specified work behaves differently. A fixed collection day, a stable material stream, and volumes large enough to justify a standing route absorb distance into the schedule itself, and at that point a provider working Los Angeles from a base elsewhere in the United States performs no differently from one sitting inside it.
The honest way to use this is to match the question to the job rather than assume presence always wins. A single irregular collection or a first engagement with unfamiliar material both reward proximity, because the cost of a wrong assumption is highest when nobody has been to the site yet. A long-running contract with an agreed rhythm rewards reliability and pricing over geography, since the provider has already built Los Angeles into how it plans its week regardless of where its own premises sit. Ask what changes if the job goes wrong on a Tuesday afternoon: how long before someone can be there, and what that costs against the quote on the table.
Working through Los Angeles's own port
Working through Los Angeles's own port changes the shape of the handover. Because the waste and recycling provider and the seaport sit in the same place, the leg between collection or processing and the terminal gate is short and largely within one provider's control, rather than passed between two separate hauliers who never speak to each other directly. That has a real effect on cut-off handling: a late booking, an amended container number or a documentation correction can often still be actioned same-day, because the distance between a phone call and a physical fix is measured in minutes rather than hours. It also means fewer parties touch the consignment between origin and vessel, which is usually where damage, mislabelling and paperwork mismatches creep in, and it shortens the chain of people who need to be reached if something needs to change at short notice.
What this proximity does not remove is the need to agree the handover properly. Confirm in writing who is responsible for the cargo at each point: the provider's yard, the haulage between yard and terminal, and the terminal itself, since local presence can tempt both sides into treating the boundary as informal on the assumption that everyone is close enough to sort it out later. Ask specifically how the provider books terminal slots, whether they hold a standing relationship with the port operator or arrange access shipment by shipment, and how they handle a missed cut-off when one occurs. Also check who carries the customs and inspection formalities at this stage, and whether the provider's local presence extends to representation at the terminal itself or stops at the yard gate. A short physical distance is only an advantage if the responsibility for each part of it is written down rather than assumed, and confirmed again once a booking is actually placed.
Comparing providers who are all genuinely local
Where several waste and recycling providers all genuinely operate in Los Angeles, the useful comparisons start after you have confirmed that each one really does. Local presence alone is not the differentiator once more than one provider clears that bar, because they have all already demonstrated it: what separates them from here is the detail underneath, not the fact of being present at all. Look at the material streams and handling processes each one actually runs on the ground, rather than lists on a homepage, and ask how each treats the specific waste stream you need moved, since capability at this level varies more between providers in the same city than it does between cities in the same country, and a general description of services offered rarely predicts how a specific stream is actually handled.
Also worth comparing is how each provider documents its work: the traceability records they issue, how they handle a consignment that fails to meet the agreed specification, and how quickly they respond when a query is raised outside a scheduled collection. Response time, documentation quality and the specific match between what you need handled and what a provider is set up to handle tend to matter more, once local presence is established for everyone, than anything to do with size or visibility. A provider with a smaller footprint that answers precisely is usually a better fit than a larger one that answers vaguely and refers you elsewhere for detail. Treat local presence as the entry requirement, not the decision itself, and put the comparison effort into the things that actually differ between providers who have all already cleared that first bar. It is also worth asking each provider what happens when demand spikes or a scheduled slot falls through, since that is where a genuinely comparable local operation and one that is merely adequate tend to show the clearest difference.
Confirming a provider actually works where it claims
A claimed location is easy to state and not always easy to verify from the outside, so it is worth checking directly rather than assuming it is accurate. Ask the provider a specific, answerable question: what does it currently operate at that location, what equipment or vehicles does it run from there, and how long has it been active in that particular market. A provider genuinely working the ground gives a concrete, confident answer without hesitation. A provider that is really extending a route from somewhere else tends to answer in generalities, redirect to head office, or take unusually long to confirm basic operational detail.
Small commitments test this more cheaply than large ones. Before offering a standing volume, it is reasonable to ask for a single trial collection or a site visit first, and to treat a provider's willingness to do this without resistance as a useful signal in itself. A provider that is genuinely set up locally has little reason to avoid a first small job, since it costs them almost nothing extra to run. Reluctance, delay, or an attempt to skip straight to a larger commitment is worth treating as a flag rather than dismissing as caution.
It is also worth asking, plainly, who else nearby has used the provider recently for comparable work, and following up if a name is offered. A provider with real local presence usually has something to point to. One without it tends to answer that question with the same generalities as the location question itself, and the pattern across both answers together is more informative than either alone.
None of these checks need to feel adversarial. Framed as ordinary due diligence rather than suspicion, they are questions any established provider expects to be asked and answers without friction. It is precisely the providers who treat routine verification as an inconvenience, or as something to be talked around rather than answered, who deserve the closer look before any volume changes hands.
How service providers are distributed across the United States
Scale is the defining fact of trade-services geography in the United States, and it means comparisons between cities have to account for genuinely different regional systems rather than one national pattern. Coastal gateway cities on the east, west, and Gulf coasts each anchor their own cluster of forwarders, warehousing, and customs expertise oriented toward the ocean and air trade passing through them, while a separate set of inland hubs has grown up around rail and trucking networks that move goods across the interior. A provider in Los Angeles is typically embedded in one of these regional systems, and that system, more than the city itself, shapes what kind of work it is set up to do well.
Because the country is so large, reach is inherently more limited relative to overall distance than in a smaller market: a provider serving a metropolitan area efficiently may still be several days' transit from a coast on the other side of the country. This makes the choice of gateway, and the corridor connecting a given city to it, a bigger factor in comparing locations than it would be elsewhere. Two cities of similar size can differ substantially depending on which coast, border, or rail corridor they are oriented toward.
For someone comparing two American cities, it is worth asking which gateway a provider's business is actually built around, since a location's position on a map understates how specialised its trade infrastructure can be. A city with strong rail and trucking links inland may be extremely well served for domestic distribution while having comparatively thinner direct expertise in ocean freight, and the reverse holds for many port cities. Matching the corridor to the trade lane matters more than matching the city to a rough sense of the country's size.
City snapshot
Los Angeles is close to the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market (City Market), a hub for exporters and packers in the area.
Los Angeles's listed providers cover Organics collection, Composting, and Recycling.