Cutting food waste would lower emissions, but so far only one state has done it
A study out in Science this month finds that states' attempts to cut the amount of food waste going into landfills are rarely succeeding
Kay Masterson has always wanted to make her Boston-area restaurant more sustainable, partnering with an organic farm to get some vegetables close by and offering reusable containers for customers' takeout. When Massachusetts was weighing whether to block restaurants from dumping food waste into landfills, her restaurant started composting without waiting on a law.
Right away, there were challenges: $3,000 a year for bins and pickup. Busy dishwashers could contaminate an entire bag of compostable materials by missing a single butter packet. And customers in the habit of just chucking their leftovers needed signage to get uneaten food into the right place.
Masterson's operation figured out those problems, but she knows not everyone will.
“What’s hard is knowing that the restaurant industry is such a difficult industry, it’s been such a challenging few years. Our costs are constantly going up,” Masterson said. “People give up.”
The difficulty of cutting food waste has spoiled several states’ attempts to ban it, and only one — Massachusetts — has actually succeeded, according to a study this month in the journal Science. Massachusetts did it by building one of the most extensive composting networks in the country, inspecting more often, keeping the rules simple and levying heavy fines on businesses that don’t comply, the study found.
That matters because food waste contributes over half the planet-warming methane emissions that come from landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Ioannis Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of
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