Antioch, CA Landscaping Rules: Composting (2026)

Antioch Municipal Code Sec. 06 opens with a broad ban: no person, firm, corporation, or entity may discard, burn, or bury solid waste on any private or public property in the city except at a landfill licensed by the County Health Department. The same sentence carves out composting, stating the ban does not prohibit composting when accomplished consistent with criteria and standards of the County Health Department, so a resident piling yard trimmings and food scraps in a backyard bin is not burying solid waste as long as the setup meets the county's standards.

Chapter 3's definitions section, Sec. 01, separately recognizes COMMUNITY COMPOSTING as an activity that combines green material, agricultural material, food material, and vegetative food material, capping the feedstock and finished compost on-site at any one time at 100 cubic yards and 750 square feet, tracking 14 CCR Sec. 17855(a)(4). Antioch's mandatory-service rule at Sec. 02 reinforces the point for individual households: nothing in that section stops a generator from managing organic waste on-site or using a community composting site instead of subscribing to the organics cart for that material, citing 14 CCR Sec.

9(c). Composting therefore sits outside the city's franchised three-cart system rather than replacing a numeric bin-size ordinance of its own; a resident who wants a backyard pile only needs to keep it sanitary enough not to trigger a nuisance or Health Department violation. The burning/burying ban traces to Ordinance 711-C-S in 1988 and was last amended by the 2022 SB 1383 rewrite, Ordinance 2200-C-S.