America loves to eat. But a third of its food still goes in the trash : NPR

New York City – America has a food waste problem.

In a country famous for its large portion sizes, Americans throw away about 30-40% of the food produced.

“We think American families are wasting about a third of their edible food,” said Ted Janik, a professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University who studies food waste and consumer purchasing behavior.

“In visual terms, this means buying three bags of groceries at the supermarket and putting one in the trash on the way out the door.”

Experts say the holiday season exacerbates the problem.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, 200 million pounds of turkey meat is thrown away each Thanksgiving day—the largest day of food waste of the year.

Most of the discarded food ends up in the country’s landfills, where food waste represents about a quarter of the solid waste in those facilities.

environmental impact

“If (food) goes into the landfill instead of being eaten or composted, that’s a really big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions,” Jaenicke said.

“Food waste in landfills decomposes into methane. And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”

The EPA says methane is about 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

“If food waste had its own country, it would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter,” Jaenicke said.

In addition to the amount of food consumers throw away, another significant contributor to the country’s food waste problem occurs at the production level.

This is sometimes due to Americans’ carelessness when it comes to cosmetic standards for produce, but it also results from environmental factors that can damage or destroy crops.

A recent report from the American Farm Bureau Federation on Thanksgiving prices said yields of commodities like sweet potatoes increased by 37%, which the lobbying group attributed to storm damage on North Carolina farms.

The effect is a vicious cycle: As wasted food goes to landfill and breaks down into powerful methane gas, it contributes to extreme weather events known to create additional waste at the production level.

fertilizer is key

One way to solve the problem of waste food going to landfill is to repurpose the product instead.

That’s what New York City hopes to do with its newly expanded Staten Island compost facility.

There, huge piles of food waste are turned into useful compost, which residents can collect for free and businesses can collect for a fee.

“Compost is amazing,” said Jennifer McDonnell, deputy commissioner of NYC Solid Waste Management.

“It works really well. We make it here in New York City. We can use it here in New York City. So it’s an example of the circular economy, and we need all the materials coming to the front to make our products.”

Composting is a natural recycling process that relies on microorganisms to eat organic matter – such as food scraps – and convert it into plant fertilizer.

The Staten Island compost facility is located above a retired landfill, where several seagulls live, taking advantage of the steam rising from the mass of product in various stages of composting.

McDonnell said the landfill formerly operated at the Staten Island facility is part of why the US deals with its food waste so poorly.

“There’s limited capacity,” he said of the landfill.

“The great thing about a facility like this is you never use up its capacity. It’s always taking on new things and producing products. It’s a manufacturing facility. It’s not an end-of-the-road facility.”

Challenges of composting on a large scale

New York is one of a handful of cities that seeks to address the problem of solid waste rotting in landfills through a municipal composting program.

Its city council last year mandated that residents begin separating their food and lawn waste from inorganic waste — a historic move for the country’s most populous city.

“This is unprecedented. I think we have a lot of potential to continue to grow over time,” McDonnell said.

Although participation has not yet reached 10%, the city has said it will begin issuing fines for noncompliance in an effort to boost resident participation.

But there are structural challenges in getting these types of programs off the ground. First, there’s the infrastructure. It is expensive to locate and manage the facilities required for large-scale composting.

McDonnell says another issue is education and participation.

“We’ve studied other jurisdictions, other municipalities and typically when they start a program like this, it takes about ten years to mature to that participation rate,” he said.

To help, the city is constantly providing guidance on the proper way to dispose of food scraps and other organic waste, including the city’s Waste Academy, which bills itself as a “crash course to a sustainable city.”

Still, even if not every New Yorker shops, small increases in proper waste practices can have a big impact on the amount of food reaching landfills, McDonnell said.

“In our culture, where we generate a lot of waste from existing waste, we have to be thoughtful about how to take a long-term sustainable approach to managing all that stuff properly,” McDonnell said.

“About 30-35% of the total waste generated in a typical New York City household is food waste and household waste. So if you remove and recover that third, it can make a big difference.”