Research shows state bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective: NPR

Waste is unloaded at the Pine Tree Acres landfill in Lenox Township, Michigan, on July 28, 2022. Researchers found that state bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective.

Paul Sancya/AP

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Paul Sancya/AP

In the US, more than a third of the food supply goes untouched. The waste occurs at multiple levels of the production and supply chain and is a major contributor to climate change.

Food that ends up in landfills produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

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

The research, published in the journal Science on Thursday, looked 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 banned 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. Sending food scraps to composting facilities or specially designed digesters can better capture or reduce methane emissions.

But new data shows that these laws have had little effect.

“We can say with certainty that the laws did not work. They absolutely did not achieve their intended goals,” 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 paper.

On average, the five state laws resulted in a 1.5 percent reduction in landfill waste between 2014 and 2018, Sanders told NPR. The researchers found that regulators expected the laws to reduce total waste going to landfills by 7-18 percent, based on public documents and statements made to the press by regulators.

“The laws had no appreciable effect on overall waste in landfills,” said co-author Ioannis (Yannis) 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 combination of other comparable states that had not implemented food waste bans. By comparing the states, they were able to predict how much waste they would have created overall if the ban had not been implemented. They collected waste data from what state environmental agencies reported.

The researchers said they couldn’t measure food waste directly, because that data doesn’t exist. But because organic waste is such a large part of total landfill waste, they reasoned that states would expect to see a measurable reduction in total waste.

According to the study, Massachusetts was the only state that managed to minimize the amount of waste going to landfills, averaging a 7 percent reduction over five years, Stamatopoulos said.

According to the article’s authors, Massachusetts’ success may be due in part to certain measures the state has taken to make it easier for citizens and businesses to comply with the law.

Massachusetts had the most extensive network of food processing facilities, which provided 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 with inspections and fines, Sanders said. In contrast, the researchers wrote, “there is almost no enforcement in other states.”

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, California began providing organic waste pickup services to all residents and businesses in 2022. “They’re trying to improve enforcement and do the things that we know work,” Sanders said.