Some of Paris' top restaurants are spending tens of thousands of dollars to ensure leftovers from their lovingly-crafted meals do not end up in landfill sites.

Mollard, a restaurant built in Paris in 1898, pays as much as $27,000 to a private company to compost their waste. 

Stéphane Malchow, general director of Mollard, said this was expensive, "but the results are for the long term, for the planet. It is hard to quantify." 

Mollard is not the only business in the French capital putting the planet ahead of profit. Moulinot, a company that has been processing food waste for five years, told CGTN that 30 tonnes of waste arrives at their plant every day. It is transformed into compost and used to produce biogas.

Stephan Martinez, founder of Moulinot Recycling, said that he started his company after wondering where his food waste went at the end of each day. 

"We have been doing this now for four years. Sorting out our food waste is participating in stable development," Martinez added. In Paris, 30 specialized trucks pick up food waste throughout Paris, seven days a week, and take the food to a Paris suburb. 

"I wanted to know where it all went. I learned that it ended up in dumps or in incinerators. I thought, 'maybe I could do better.'" 

"By 2023, everybody will have to recycle their food waste," he added. 

The private enterprise is filling a gap left by municipal authorities who are only beginning to roll out their own collection schemes.

Paris has been testing a composting scheme for the past three years recently adding a third district to their trial. Between 1 October and the end of November, 84,000 residents in Paris' 19th Arrondissement (district) will be given compost bins to put their food waste in. 

The 12th and 2nd districts, which have a combined population of 165,352 people, started their trials in 2017. Paris intends to extend this scheme to their 17 other districts by 2025. 

The city produces more than 408,000 kilograms of food waste each year, most of which is not sorted out of Parisian's general waste and ends up in landfill. 

France is not alone in how they process their food waste. In the EU, 60 percent of food waste is simply thrown away with general garbage. 

Unprocessed food that ends up in landfill is a major contributor to global greenhouse emissions.

France has taken steps to stop food waste in the past -  in 2016, it was the first country to pass a law that says grocery stores should donate their 'ugly' food instead of throwing it away. 

As a result, the country was ranked as the most food sustainable nation in 2017 by the Economist Intelligence Unit.