State ban on commercial food waste largely ineffective, study finds: NPR

In the United States, more than a third of the food supply goes unused. Waste occurs at multiple levels in the production and supply chain, and is a major contributor to climate change.

Food that decomposes in landfills produces methane – a powerful greenhouse gas.

Some states have taken steps to try to reduce food waste, but a new study finds that state bans on food waste in landfills have had little effect, with one exception.

Search, Published in the magazine sciences On Thursday, we took a look at the first five states to implement food waste bans: California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts. Between 2014 and 2024, a total of nine states will ban commercial food suppliers like Whole Foods and Applebee’s from dumping food waste in landfills.

Laws require them to compost or donate food scraps instead. Food scraps can be sent to composting facilities or to digesters specifically designed to better capture or reduce methane emissions.

But new data finds that these laws have done little to help.

“We can say with confidence that the laws did not work,” said Robert Evan Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study. “They certainly did not achieve their intended goals.”

On average, the five state laws reduced landfill waste by 1.5 percent between 2014 and 2018, Sanders told NPR. The researchers determined that regulators expected the laws to reduce total landfill waste by 7 to 18 percent, based on public documents and statements made by regulators to the press.

“The laws had no clear impact on total landfill waste,” said co-author Ioannis Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers compared the five states in question to a group of other similar states that had not implemented food waste bans. By comparing the states, they were able to predict the total amount of waste they would have generated had the ban not been implemented. They gathered the waste data from reports filed by state environmental protection agencies.

The researchers said they couldn’t directly measure food waste because the data didn’t exist. But because organic waste makes up a large component of total landfill waste, they concluded that states could expect to see a significant reduction in total waste.

According to the study, Massachusetts stood out as the only state to meet its goal of reducing the amount of waste ending up in landfills, reaching an average 7 percent reduction over five years, Stamatopoulos said.

Massachusetts’ success may be due in part to specific steps the state has taken to make it easier for individuals and businesses to comply with the law, the study authors said.

Massachusetts had the largest network of food waste processing facilities, creating easy alternatives to landfills. In addition, Massachusetts’ law had the fewest exemptions. “That makes it easy for people to understand the laws,” Sanders said. The law was also enforced through inspections and fines, Sanders added. By contrast, “there is virtually no enforcement in other states,” the researchers wrote.

Sanders notes that some of the states the study evaluated have improved their waste management programs since 2018, the year the study stopped collecting data. For example, in 2022, California has begun providing all residents with And companies that offer organic waste collection services. “They’re trying to enforce the law and do the things we know work,” Sanders said.