BOSTON -- About half of the material dumped by restaurants is food waste, and now many eateries are turning that waste into valuable compost.

Trashed Food Transformed Into Rich Compost

"Everything from bread to lettuce to peelings of onions and things like that," said Kelly Armetta, the executive chef at the Hyatt Regency in Boston.

That's just the beginning of the list of food waste that the Hyatt dumps every day.

Every day 1,200 to 1,500 pounds of food scraps get thrown out. But now, almost nothing gets wasted -- it gets recycled.

"We have a lot of stuff we need to throw away -- all from biodegradable foods to plastics and bottles and cans. We felt we needed to do something that would help the environment and kind of treat it the right way," Armetta said.

Andrea Lord and her mother have been carting away tons of food waste from area restaurants and universities. Her great-grandfather, Herb, was a trash collector and today his name is associated with one of the most respected recyclers of food waste.

"We started the pilot program probably 15 years ago, trying to recycle the different organics and take it out of the mainstream waste stream. It's a sin to see all the organics thrown away in the landfills," said Valerie Savage, of Herb's Disposal.

Once the food waste is picked up, the biodegradable trash is separated and combined with nitrogen and yard waste, a source of carbon.

"One part nitrogen, three parts carbon. In about six months, six months of heating and turning, it's turned into nutrient-rich compost," Savage said.

As micro-organisms thrive inside the waste, enzymes are secreted that break down all the food into organic matter.

"From what people think is trash, we take in thousands of yards of waste and turn that into thousands of yards of quality material every year," said Butch Goodwin, of Groundscapes Compost Farm.