Americans waste more than 300 pounds of food per person per year, study says.
In September 2015, the U.S. set an ambitious target of reducing its food loss and waste by 50 percent. The idea was to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfills, where it emitsResearchers at UC Davis looked at state policies across the country and estimated how much food waste each state was likely reducing in 2022. They found that, without more work being done at the federal level, no state is on track to achieve the national waste reduction goal.
These figures indicate that even our best strategies for eliminating waste aren’t enough to meet our goals, said Sarah Kakadellis, lead author of the study Composting will always have a role to play in diverting food waste from landfills — because those operations can accept spoiled or rotten food, which food banks, for example, cannot. “It’s not an either/or. They have to go hand in hand,” said Kakadellis. “But we’re skipping all these other steps and we’re going straight to the recycling too often.”
Composting, of course, serves more than one purpose and has environmental benefits beyond lowering food loss and waste. For example, it replenishes soils. But Leonard notes that if more work were done on the prevention side — like, making sure farms aren’t overproducing food — then soils wouldn’t be so depleted in the first place and wouldn’t need so much remediation.
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