Republic Services opened its newly expanded compost facility at Forward Landfill in San Joaquin County on October 12, nearly tripling the site's footprint and boosting its capacity to recycle food scraps and yard waste from homes and businesses across the region. The facility can now process up to 147,000 tons of organic material annually, up from 95,000 tons before the upgrade.
The compost site grew from about one acre to nearly three, according to Stocktonia, which reported the expanded footprint allows the facility to handle food scraps, yard trimmings and food-soiled paper from more than 1,000 homes and businesses in Stockton and San Joaquin County. The opening was also announced by Republic Services, which operates 17 organics facilities across California, including green-waste processing sites, compost facilities and commercial food-waste operations.
A state grant helped pay for the buildout, though the exact amount is in dispute. CalEPA's recycling arm, CalRecycle, posted on social media Thursday that $5.1 million in state funding helped support the Forward Landfill expansion, a figure that matches what Republic Services' own announcement says the company received through CalRecycle's Organics Grant Program in 2023. Stocktonia, however, reported the grant totaled $5 million. Either way, the money went toward construction, equipment and administrative costs tied to the project, according to Waste Today.
Cutting Methane at the Source
Beyond sheer capacity, the upgraded facility is designed to curb emissions. The site now uses biofilm-covered compost mounds paired with a new aeration system, a combination the Stocktonia report says will allow less methane to escape as organic material breaks down. That matters because landfills are the largest source of methane emissions in California, per CalMatters, and organic waste rotting in landfills is responsible for roughly 20% of the state's methane output, according to CalRecycle, a pollutant the agency says heats the climate 84 times more intensely than carbon dioxide.
The Forward Landfill expansion arrives as California continues to fall short of its own organic-waste diversion targets. The state diverted 11.2 million tons of organic waste from landfills in 2022, less than half the amount needed to hit its 2025 goal, the Stocktonia report notes. CalMatters previously reported the state missed its 2020 diversion target entirely and was on track to miss the 2025 benchmark as well. California had recovered around 203,000 tons of edible food by 2022, per the same Stocktonia report.
Part of a Statewide Push
Republic Services says its California organics network processed 884,000 tons of food and yard waste in 2025 alone. The Forward Landfill upgrade is one piece of a broader statewide effort, funded through CalRecycle's Organics Grant Program, to expand and build new organic recycling facilities so more waste gets composted instead of buried, according to Agromin, a composting company that separately received a $10 million grant from the same program to expand its facility at Limoneira Ranch in Santa Paula.
Other operators are scaling up too. GreenWaste's Z-Best Composting Facility in Gilroy now receives up to 1,500 tons of yard trimmings, municipal solid waste and food waste daily, according to Waste Dive, and the company runs six total California facilities offering anaerobic digestion, mulching and composting services. For San Joaquin County residents, the Forward Landfill expansion means more of what gets tossed in the green bin now has somewhere to go besides the dump.
