As we work toward reducing food waste, a critical question arises: Does diverting food at risk of being wasted for human consumption hinder our ability to reduce food waste and loss more in the first place? Are both goals compatible from a policy perspective? This panel examines the complex relationship between food security initiatives, policies, and environmentally sustainable organic waste solutions. While efforts to redirect surplus food to those in need are vital, they examine whether such practices distract from more systemic changes that could reduce food waste across the supply chain. As municipalities and states, like those with composting programs or California’s laws on date labels, push for sustainability, we’ll discuss whether these efforts might conflict with broader goals of reducing waste more efficiently. Can we balance the need for food security with the environmental imperative to minimize waste, or does one inadvertently undermine the other? Panelists:
- Ned Spang, University of California-Davis
- Christine Wittmeier, NC Department of Environmental Quality
- Nina Sevilla, Natural Resources Defense Council
- Matthew Johnson, Duke University
This panel discussion was held at Duke University on Friday, January 23, 2026, as part of the Rethinking Food Waste – Duke Climate Collaboration Symposium event, organized by the Duke World Food Policy Center. The moderator is Mary Muth of North Carolina State University.
This symposium is the sixth of the Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia, a series of convenings designed to accelerate climate solutions by developing new collaborations among Duke scholars and external partners. The series is funded by a gift from The Duke Endowment in support of the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations, and public service missions to address climate challenges. The Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability manages the symposia series.
Transcript
Mary Muth: I’m Mary Muth. I’m with North Carolina State University. And I’m pleased to moderate this final panel where we’ll be talking about some of the trade-offs involved in food waste interventions. There were a lot of discussion already this morning about some of the trade-offs, so we’re going to try to consolidate some of that and add some additional information from the work of some of our panelists.
I’m going to ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves as they talk about their response to the first question. One of the critical issues for food waste interventions is understanding the trade-offs and focusing on upstream food waste interventions versus reuse recycling of food waste downstream.
In a lot of cases, we have twin goals with food waste reduction. One is improving food insecurity, and the second is improving environmental sustainability. The question is, can these two goals be at odds with each other? For example, if you have programs to distribute surplus food, could it reduce the incentives to reduce food waste upstream?
This panel is going to talk about the objectives, trade-offs and inherent values that are associated with a lot of food waste interventions. Our first question for the panelists is based on your experience and your work in this area. When agencies and organizations undertake programs to address food waste, what objectives most drive those efforts? And what are the trade-offs associated with some of those objectives, particularly when you think about food waste efforts, upstream versus downstream, redistribution, composting, digestion, and all the other things. We’ll start off with Ned.
Ned Spang: Thank you so much, Mary, and I just want to thank Duke and Norbert for bringing us all together. I’ve really enjoyed the discussions today and Emily’s talk last night, so it’s been a fantastic event. Thank you, guys. I’m Ned Spang. I’m an associate professor of Food Science and Technology at UC Davis. I’m also the director of the Wine and Food Science Institute, the Robert Mondavi Institute, and it does have its perks. Yes, it does. It’s nice to be in Northern California sometimes. But also, being in Northern California, I’ve had a front row seat to our legislation, Senate Bill 1383, which is a major food waste diversion law. But it’s a climate law. The actual title of the bill is reducing short-lived climate pollutants, another way of saying we’re going to really focus on methane reduction. And within this bill we have a number of different goals, but there is a huge waste diversion component for food waste and organic waste. 75% reduction by 2025. Yes. That’s last year. And no, we did not achieve it. We also, in that bill, we have some language that’s saying we have to have a 20% reduction in edible food.
We do have these two goals built into the legislation and it’s been really interesting to see how this legislation is rolled out. I did, shameless self-promotion here, I just recently wrote a paper called Divert or Donate, so relevant to this discussion today. We looked at interviews with stakeholders across the state, understanding how they interpreted the law, where they found opportunities, and where they found some real challenges. And in looking at that, the question is about the objectives. We had the environmental objective. For us, we really lead with the climate component, but there’s also, you know, just keeping this material out of the landfill, which is important. Emily also mentioned last night the economic benefits of this: creating jobs, creating some revenue for waste haulers. There are some benefits to this, but then there’s this other piece. It’s like, well, are we also addressing food insecurity? Should we be addressing food insecurity? And I think, in the rollout of 1383, we did hear confusion from stakeholders saying is this the right place to put how California is addressing food insecurity in this kind of climate bill that’s also waste diversion? Where should we sort of direct our grants that are going to help support this legislation? How do we decide how much money we’re giving to diversion? How much do we decide we’re giving to recovery? The trade-offs were real. The stakeholders were feeling those trade-offs. And there’s definitely some feeling of some folks are feeling a little left behind saying all the money is going to diversion efforts and not enough to recovery.
We also felt that there was a rural and urban divide where in the rural areas it’s more expensive to move this material around. They also didn’t have this social kind of connections you might have in a more urban area where people can lean on each other for ideas on how to put this legislation into practice.
And so we did see some real sort of trade-offs there that were not kind of lined up and basically we also followed the money. And we did find that more money was going to diversion, less money was for recovery, was going to the most disadvantaged communities. There was some real kind of pieces that were not what you want to see in the rollout of the policy. But I do think it started the conversation. I do think we’ve learned a lot. I do think the other states, once again, can sort of learn from California’s mistakes when we have our aggressive policies. And so happy to dig into some more details here but wanted to give sort of that overview of Senate Bill 1383. It’s come up a few times in our discussion so far and yeah, I’ve had had the inside scoop on that. So happy to share more ideas there.
Nina Sevilla: Hi everyone. Great to be with you here this morning. My name is Nina Sevilla. I am a policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is an environmental advocacy organization. And we work on all things food waste policy from the local to the state, to the federal level. So really excited to be with this group today. And I think Ned gave a really great overview of some of the motivations behind why people address food waste that we’ve been talking about. There’s a mix of economic drivers, environmental climate change goals, landfill space, social, and like the last panel was talking about. Food is deeply cultural and spiritual too. And at its base essential for our life. And so that’s why this topic I find so important and super exciting and interdisciplinary too. I’m going to get into the trade-offs a little bit because I think this is such an important discussion. Like Ned was saying, there are monetary and time trade-offs in every decision, and no policy really can do it all. And when we’re trying to figure out where to intervene, I think I would say that we’d need it all, which is maybe a hard, not a very satisfying answer. But that’s why it’s important for all of you in the room here. And what we see, I would say, is on one hand, if you’re focusing on the prevention side, and a lot of that sometimes is educational campaigns and other things that we’re talking about. Those things are super important and often really hard to measure the impacts of. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, kind of like the first panel was talking about. And when you’re focusing on the end-of-life cycle, food scrap collection and that sort of thing, you can really quickly see those impacts. You can see the food scraps that are not going to the landfill. You can see that much faster. And one of the things that we’ve seen that ties these kinds of different parts of the food system together are what we’re calling food waste diversion policies, or what Emily called deterrence policies last night. Where there’s these laws, which is what California SB 1383 is, saying that you cannot send food scraps to landfill. Which causes everyone else to have to figure out how to manage that food in different ways. And a lot of these policies are incorporating pieces on food rescue and recovery. Like the California bill mandates that I think 20%, whatever is still edible needs to be diverted to people to eat. And these kinds of policies tie the end of the cycle and start moving us upstream and figuring out how we can change the system as a whole.
Christine Wittmeier: Hey everyone. My name is Christine Wittmeier. I’m the Organics Recycling Team lead at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. I am out of the non-regulatory division of environmental assistance and customer service, and we do a lot of data gathering, education. We work with our local governments, colleges, universities, and actually have a private business arm called the Recycling Business Assistance Center. So, we work with a lot of different sectors across the state, and we also have our Food Waste Reduction grant, where we are able to provide funding to food pantries, food banks, composters, compost haulers. And that is a really wonderful program that we get to learn from boots on the ground projects. And as part of someone out of the state recycling office, a lot that I see that drives work is of course, tonnage and landfill capacity. According to our recent 10-year solid waste study, the two largest regional landfills in North Carolina could reach capacity within the next decade. And these two regional landfills accept 25% of the state’s waste. And once those landfills fill up, you know, all of the other local landfills across the state will start to fill up much faster. And it could definitely become a domino effect. I do come to this panel a lot with tonnage and numbers, and that’s what our DEQ leadership we like to report on is how what is diverted.
And then now with our grants covering helping food recovery, we also do. And fruits and vegetable servings are another metric that can help drive this work. But I agree too that, the prevention side is so important, but it is hard to measure. And we do have a statewide Use the Food and See Food Waste Prevention Campaign. I’m glad that that is going on in the background. But again, it is harder to measure those impacts. And so, a lot of times, tonnage and those numbers are what my leadership wants to see as well as job creation too is another important driver, the economic driver here in North Carolina. It’s a great way for us to speak across both aisles is just how composting creates jobs. It is interesting too to talk about, think about, the difference between composting and food recovery. And with a lot of our grant projects, we see so many food pantries, food banks, food hubs that are interested in starting composting projects. So, allowing them to be able to manage the material onsite and only send good food to the food pantries is something that we’ve seen a trend of. So definitely, seeing it all connected. We need all, all aspects, all.
Matthew Johnson: Hey everyone. My name is Matt Johnson. I’m an associate professor here at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. I’m a labor economist. I’m interested in studying the labor market and public policies to address it. So, a natural question is, what the heck am I doing here? When I moved here to Durham several years ago, I learned that I could drop off food scraps at the Durham Co-op, a market that got mentioned earlier. A light bulb went off. This was not something I had thought about much before. And I started learning about all the benefits of diverting food waste from landfills to compost facilities, things that everyone here is familiar with. The reduction in methane emissions, the ability to enrich soils, the pollution that comes out of food waste, the methane that affects communities near, near landfills. And I just very quickly became kind of a personal compost evangelist, and I went from kind of lugging my scraps to the Co-op to doing it in my backyard when we got a house. And then I quickly got connected to a team of researchers that was working with the City of Durham to explore the feasibility of introducing curbside composting here in Durham. This was with some colleagues in the solid waste management here at Duke, in Durham and the Durham innovation team. And then I quickly learned that actually in cities like Durham, it’s cheaper to send a pound of food waste to a compost facility than it is to a landfill. It was just, you know, ding, ding, ding. Everything seemed like it was lining up. Let’s go, we thought. And then quickly, when we started thinking about the feasibility, a lot of questions opened up. Will people actually, you know, if we introduce this to households, will people actually do it? Will contamination be an issue? You know, social license to increase food waste. In a city where food access is so unequal, will something like this just fall flat? What about when we get to logistics of the city? So very quickly we had to think about, you know, very intentional aspects of design. We first introduced a small scale pilot, then a slightly larger, but still small scale, randomized controlled trial to really think about how will this work in practice? I was working with some researchers who were really into human-centered design to thinking about how we can design aspects of this program to really kinda meet people where they are and achieve our goals. I’ll just very, very briefly mention this small-scale RCT. We introduced first in two neighborhoods of Durham, Walltown and Colonial Village, both of which are relatively diverse areas of the city. We recruited households to participate in an experiment. You know, kind of a pilot study about composting food waste. And about half of them got kind of randomized to receive curbside composting. Half of them got at a much later date. We were able to measure things like their trash weight via scales on trash trucks. Followed up with lots of surveys to ask about self-reported behaviors and attitudes. We found really promising results. We found that giving people access to curbside food waste pickup led to these big significant reductions in trash weights and to the landfills, self-reported reductions in kind of trash use. We also were able to weigh kinda the food carts and saw that people were actually participating. We also, you know. Had a bunch of self-reported attitudes where we, for example, did not find that people felt more sort of license to increase food waste as a result of this. If anything, it was the opposite. These were really promising results and it sounded like something that could be scaled up. And we’re thinking about these results were really promising, but if we want to scale this up to the whole city, there’s all sorts of new questions that open up. We had this pilot among people who kind of self-selected into this study. If we scale this up to the average population, you know, will the results hold? When we think about kinda the real logistics of a big city like Durham and a growing city like Durham introducing this, how can it actually be cost effective? These are of course, the questions that are going to be important for a stakeholder like cities to really introduce this in the long run. Happy to talk about more of those details as we go on.
Mary Muth: Thank you for all of that. Its excellent insights based on all of your really on the groundwork, working on reducing food waste. Reflecting on what you all know based on your work, what kinds of public values do you believe should shape food waste management decisions? For example, fiscal responsibility, land use, climate resiliency. From your own perspective, what should be the main focus of the values that drive those decisions?
Ned Spang: Thank you. I do have a few thoughts on this, and I think zooming out a little bit on. These two goals of waste diversion and food recovery, they’re structurally very different. And we heard a little bit about it in the last panel, sort of, valuing food a little differently than we value something like waste. It’s a much more technocratic solution to just move waste from one place to another. And not saying it’s easy, but you can get a truck and you can put it in a landfill or put it in a composting facility for food. We actually have to maintain food safety and we have to think about the human connection with the food. The Society of St. Andrew story about the peaches really sat with me. You know, that actually making that connection of handing the food from one person to another is a meaningful thing. And so all of a sudden now it has this human side to it for the recovery piece. From a policy perspective, it’s much easier to implement technocratic solutions. Especially if they show some economic returns, then you’re going to be very popular in your policy circles. However, the human piece is hard; it’s hard to create through policy. And we do see examples of this just in communities that have strong social relationships where they do come up with solutions on their own. Even where they might not have the logistical support for large scale recovery, people are driving out to their local farm, gleaning and bringing it to their neighbor. We do see those connections where people are just making it happen on the human-to-human connection side. And I do think that’s part of the reason why recovery lags a little bit in the policy space is that people don’t really know how to sort of increase and leverage those human connections as well as we can with technologies.
Nina Sevilla: Yes, I would just add to that. I do think it’s important to take a step back, like you said, Ned, and think about what is the food system that we’re working towards? What is our ideal food system? One that nourishes people and the earth, and then how do we get there? Like you said, it is a lot easier in policy to focus on some very like quick, tangible things. But how do we bring in these values of supporting workers and growing healthy food. And one thing I look at and think about is agricultural subsidies and what are we subsidizing? And I think that sometimes shows like the values that the policy makers are coming from. And right now, in the US we have a lot of subsidies for several commodity crops that leads to our current food system. And also, a food system that is very disjointed. That a lot of people are not in touch with. And what would it look like to subsidize the foods that have more of that bring people to together, that have that more nourishing value to, and how can we use policies to kind of try to address that?
Christine Wittmeier: Yeah. And, here in North Carolina, I think a lot that public values that I think can help support this work is just fiscal responsibility. I’m thinking about the first panel and how sometimes the environment doesn’t always resonate with everyone. And, so again, just how this can be a non-partisan issue with just talking about saving money, creating jobs. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that composting creates twice as more jobs in landfills and four times as more jobs than incinerators. So again, just always being able to highlight job creation, economic drivers, and how conserving these resources, considering a landfill space will have a strong circular economy in the future for North Carolina.
Matthew Johnson: Yeah. You know, to this question of what public values can help support these efforts, at least for the space I’ve been involved in with municipal composting, I have a kind of one practical and one lofty idea. The practical one, you know, to the fiscal sustainability is just a reality of that I’ve just come to realize through my conversations with the Durham City officials. You know, for a city like Durham, which is growing, but still of course cash strapped, like all cities. To do this, it just, it has to make fiscal sense. And while it is cheaper, like kinda the marginal cost of sending a pound of, like I said, food waste to compost facility than a landfill, actually doing this at scale for a city just really entails a lot more cost. It entails trucks kind of, you know, uh, maybe purchasing new trucks, more kind of like trucks driving around the city, which of course has its own environmental effects too, and also costs. A question is like, what else needs to happen for this to be fiscally sustainable? And that’s a conversation we’ve been trying to think about as we think about doing this at scale. For example, can we pair introduction of curbside food waste pickup with something that incentivizes lower frequency of actual garbage pickup. That’s a big, thorny question, but it’s one that we’re exploring. I think that having that front and center is something to actually make this feasible for more and more cities to adopt. A loftier one is that I think that if done certain ways, city level food waste pickup for composting has the ability to kind of recenter connection in the food system and connecting people to their local communities and environments. Of course, as we’ve all said, we live in a food system and a society that’s very fragmented because of the way our food is distributed. But also more broadly, you know, you can chalk that up to, whatever, you know, social media, neoliberalism, whatever it may be. One thing that we’ve talked about is if Durham has a municipal compost pickup, what do we do with the eventual compost that’s generated? Some of it has to be sold, like some money has to be made. But, you know, we’ve talked about can some of it be used to go to community gardens or help local farmers or things like that. And if, to the extent to which introduced something like this can actually, make people feel connected with their own actions, you know, diverting food waste. A different bin can actually help their neighbors and farmers can actually help enrich their local environment. I don’t know, you know, it sounds kinda lofty, but I think that actually could make people more excited and engaged with this and actually bring some more connection to the space.
Mary Muth: Great. Well, thank you. I have one last question for the group before we open it up. So, get ready with your questions. But, if you could talk about, based on your experience in the programs or policies you’ve been involved in, if there’s like one or two lessons from those that could inform a better design of food waste interventions going forward. If you could reflect on that based on some of your experience.
Ned Spang: Sure. That’s a good question. I would always advocate for the fact that we need to have more and more evaluation of what we’re doing. And I think with food waste, we have a much better understanding of the numbers these days than we used to. We have a better understanding of what solutions could be implemented, but we still need a lot more understanding of what are the best solutions and why do they work? And you know, also understanding which solutions might work in one location versus another. Thank you for doing a randomized control trial. That’s great evaluation that we need. Also, just in some of our work, having the interviews with different stakeholders has really revealed a lot about how people were interpreting Senate Bill 1383. That evaluation is really critical. I was also struck this morning about the discussion of social media and the story of the rice. We all are thinking about that after this morning. And I don’t spend a lot of time on social media studying it, but clearly the power of narrative is really important, and I do want to see some more work in that area. I think we can get messaging out, whether it’s working through influencers or just having a really great campaign that we can spread the word on what every individual can do.
How, states or cities can start mobilizing towards these efforts that would be great. I tend to think more about education through traditional K through 12 networks, but I do see, you know, a lot my kids, a lot of kids are getting their news from online and not just online, I mean specifically TikTok. I do think we have to leverage those channels since that’s where the information is moving in a big way. And someone else brought up the idea, I really love the idea of sending kids home to their households and affecting change. I mean, I remember that happening with smoking campaigns and littering campaigns when I was a kid, and I think we can do that with food waste. It there is such a moral component to this. I really truly believe that no one feels good about throwing out food. And if we can really leverage that into some of our strong messaging, I think there’d be a lot of improvements there across the board.
Nina Sevilla: Yeah, I’ll just add, I think there are a lot of lessons learned that come from this policy implementation and that’s one of the things we try to do at NRDC. And also, through the Zero Food Waste Coalition, which Emily mentioned last night, that is a group of now 300 plus organizations working to advance food waste policy in the us. So quick, shameless plug. We’d love for you all to join us. Check out our website, but so I think having these forums to share the lessons and best practices is super important. And some of the things we’ve seen from the now 11 states that have food waste diversion policies is, I think there’s a couple lessons. One that I’ll pull out is that I think as was discussed earlier, there’s often unintended consequences. And it is important to do your best to craft a strong policy that will try to minimize these, but unfortunately you can’t foresee everything. So that’s why I think stakeholder engagement is so important. And some of the things we’ve seen around stakeholder engagement is when, like I mentioned earlier around how some of these policies are addressing the food rescue and food recovery side of things, that it’s really important to have those people and all stakeholders at the table because food rescue is not a dumping ground. And one of the unintended consequences, I think that was mentioned earlier, sometimes when you’re saying, oh, you need to divert all this food from landfill. Then all the food ends up in the food rescue system. And some of those organizations aren’t fully supported to manage all of that because they’re often nonprofits and volunteer run. So how can we support those organizations too, through these policies? So again, important for them to be at the table.
And one piece of this discussion that we’ve seen in some of the newer policies that are coming up, like in Illinois, is this idea of including a right to refuse clause. Saying that food rescue organizations have the right to turn away a load and then hopefully that wouldn’t negatively affect their relationships and future donations. One other point I’d love to make is I think that at the bottom line, people don’t like being told what to do. And until we make composting the easy and cost-effective choice, it’s going to be really hard to change behavior, which is why we need policies that support infrastructure development and education. And just really how can we make not wasting food the norm and the easy choice, so we don’t have to rely on behavior change, education and nudges. And just, it’s just, there’s a compost or food scrap collection bin right there. I can throw or toss the rest of whatever I didn’t finish eating.
Christine Wittmeier: There’s like two thoughts going my mind right now. One is that North Carolina does not have a food waste deterrence policy right now. But I am glad that we recently finished a statewide waste characterization study. I think you mentioned last night that there could be a before and after. I’m glad that we do have that state specific data and it did find, that 22% of our landfills are comprised of food waste. And we also looked at, I think it was like 42 other categories. It was really extensive and that was made possible due to our SWIFR money with EPA. So glad that that was available. We now have that data that we can use for the future and maybe help drive future policies.
And then second, I’m thinking about our North Carolina Solid Waste Trust fund. That policy and how it allows us to not only grant to local governments, colleges, or local governments, but private businesses as well. I think that’s pretty unique to the state that we can do grant making for these businesses. And help, you know, find the gaps across the state and fund that infrastructure not only for composting, but for cold storage transportation.
And also, to extend the hours of food pantries. You know, there’s this one future grantee that they’re going to have a locker system where you can go pick up your food after hours from the pantries. You know, there’s those really cool, innovative projects and then there’s that infrastructure of just like, we need a refrigerated van and we need a concrete pad. So not as flashy, but I am glad that our solid waste trust fund does allow this grant making for that infrastructure. That’s one policy that I hope stays.
Matthew Johnson: Great. The only this has all been great. The only thing I’ll add is one thing I’ve learned over the course of being involved in this evaluation of this project in Durham. First just sort of appreciation of how I and everyone in this room are just kind of weird in the sense of like, you know, when I started this, I thought like, oh, obviously when we introduce composting, everyone’s going to do it. Because it makes so much sense and it’s so easy and we, you know, we just think about it. But like, but we have to, you know, to do projects of this, we of course have to meet people where they are. And part of what my colleagues who were really into this idea, I mentioned human-centered design, sort of centered very early was we had some in-depth qualitative interviews with people just to ask them about you know, what, what is your process, what goes through your head when you’re sort of putting food waste away? And that helped us inform ways of when we introduced curbside compost, weekly pickup, we also developed some like flyers and weekly kind of text message check-ins that were meant to sort of a kind remind people about kind of contamination. But also, kind of mention some of the aspects of hey, what you and your neighbors are doing has these really great benefits to the environment and the community. And one thing that actually kinda surprised us is we did these endline surveys where we asked people a bunch of series of questions about. You know, how much do you identify with someone who feels connected to your community and your local government? And we actually found that in giving people this opportunity to divert their food scraps to a compost actually boosted kind of pro community feelings. This was a small scale RCT, but to us it opens future questions. Was this a fluke or was this something about the way we designed it? And we want to kind of embed future evaluations. You think about how can the program design work here? Because the last thing I’ll say about program design is another thing I’ve learned is just kinda learning how different cities have introduced different kinds of curbside composting. I’ve just gotten the sense that there’s this huge variability in how successful they are. Like, you know, Portland, Oregon, which obviously is crunchy Portland, but it sounds like they introduced one several years ago and was just wildly successful. New York City, I think a two years ago, tried to introduce one, and at least initially it seemed like it was a spectacular failure. So just learning from the different ways, like a seemingly similar program in different contexts are being introduced, I think can help us learn about how to do this better going forward.
Mary Muth: Great. Thank you all for those, those in insights, those will be particularly useful when we turn to our afternoon discussion this afternoon and our kind of research question ideation. At this point I’m going to open it up for questions.
Speaker 7: Thank you. Great job everybody. I love this conversation so much. I hear you talking about capacity and collection and things like that. And I was at a US Composting Council conference a couple years ago. The statistic is there are 5,000 composting facilities in the us. 300 of them collect food. When we talk about the magic of being able to compost here or there and everywhere, the reason that composting is cheaper than landfill is because composting has to compete with landfills. With that being said, how do you foresee or think that we might be able to actually build composting capacity, knowing that it does cost? One of the reasons that they do have to sell compost is to make money. It is a not to help support the business throughout the industry. You never, ever, ever, ever want to give away compost. You have to understand that it has value. Landfill is a dead end, but nonetheless, especially in North Carolina, other places around the country, those tip fees are suppressed. It doesn’t actually, express the external cost of having to open a new one because it’s waste, the food isn’t valued. Like this is going into all of the things that we’ve all been talking about today, but how do you see building composting infrastructure? That’s the capacity where it is local. And affordable. Thank you.
Christine Wittmeier: Yeah. I’ll take this one and see if anyone has anything to add. I think it can be a factor of a couple things like policy. I know that there’s a lot of movement on that and having that more of a stick approach. What my team does is more of a carrot. We will give you money. We were a funder for a part of that Durham pilot. But as far as like competing against landfills, some of the tipping fee studies that I’ve looked at they’ve always been lower than landfills. But that is interesting to think is that actually true, is kind of what you’re asking, right? It’s not suppressed, yeah. So, I think policy is a big one. But again, will that policy actually pass in North Carolina? I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of different factors from education, grant making, policy enforcement, that can help, support the compassing in infrastructure and grow that out. But anybody want to add anything?
Ned Spang: It’s a really good point. I think one potential policy lever there, and it is built into Senate Bill 1383, is to have procurement mandates for the compost. Because we know we’re creating so much more of this material, we have to create a demand in the marketplace then for it to land and sort of build up a economic relationship. We do have procurement requirements for municipalities to buy back some of the compost and use it in parks and all, you know, local vegetation and that kind of thing. There are some mechanisms there, but the composting infrastructure really runs into nimbyism issues. You know, not in my backyard. We need more space for this, but no one really wants it right next door. I think that’s challenging. And it’s like many things, a lot of the greatest locations for composting are where the composting is now. The next place is always a little, you know, a little marginally not as good and it gets a little bit more challenging as you go along. That’s a real concern and it is something that we struggle with in California. 75% organics diversion is a great goal. We do not have the composting infrastructure to manage that amount, even if we were successful in diverting it. We have to figure out how to incentivize that infrastructure.
Nina Sevilla: And I’ll just add one more thing, very briefly, but when we’re talking about infrastructure, I think it’s important to think about all types and sizes of infrastructure. We do need these large industrial scale composting places that can handle a lot of waste. But it’s also important, to your point how people felt more connected when dropping off food scraps, that we also support local and smaller scale composting operations that are more decentralized, but can bring some of these benefits too, right?
Speaker 8: I’m Kai Robertson and I’m just really curious. This came up in the conversation recently about packaging requirements. So EPR is what it’s referred to, Extended Producer Responsibilities. And I’m wondering if there’s been any discussion that you know of about the combination between asking for different types of packaging that may or may not impact damages to food and or impact, on the other side, the desire to reduce food waste, if there’s any kind of connection between these policies being undertaken at the any level – city, state, federal – to, you know, balance out that we’re not like helping on the packaging side and creating more food waste.
Ned Spang: That’s a good question, Kai. We have an Extended Producer Responsibility Act in California as well. I don’t know how much the two have been coordinated. I haven’t really looked at the packaging legislation very closely. It is challenging. I know as part of, again, Senate Bill 1383, we have requirements about the level of contamination that’s acceptable for compost and that kind of thing. And it really is hard. As much as we try to educate people on sorting, I mean, if you look at most compost piles, they’re a little bit shiny because there might be a little bit of glass or plastic in there, or aluminum foil. And it’s rare that I see, you know, this perfect pile of compost unless it tends to be the smaller scale. Because I think, you know, certainly in our own gardens, we’re pretty good at sorting that stuff out. But as soon as you start to scale up, you do have these contamination issues. And if we can link together the food packaging piece with this end of life component, that would be great. But that there’s going to be a human education piece on the sorting for sure. Even when we have compost like bioplastics that are compostable, consumers are really confused about where to put that plastic container. Does it go in the recycling? Does it go in the composts or is the compost they’re putting it in going to be industrial recycling that will actually break it down? Or, you know, I hope they’re not putting it in their backyard recycling because they’re going to have to wait a long time for that plastic to break down. So, it is very challenging to mix those pieces together, but it’s one and the same. As soon as we start mixing this biological material with these plastics, we have to think about sorting and I do think there’s a lot of room for technological advancing and repackaging. And on that note, I’ll turn it over to you.
Christine Wittmeier: Yeah. Repackaging is something that my team has been following along because it is a great tool, but how reliant should we be on it? For example, Vermont. They passed a moratorium on repackaging for a while, and I think they’re going to release new rules about what is allowed to go to repackaging. And right now we don’t have that in North Carolina, so we may eventually have a repackaging notification where at least we know where all these depackagers are across the state. But there is that trade off of like should we depackage that material and produce potentially microplastics or send all that material to the landfill? I think there’s definitely needs to be more research with that. Especially as a state agency, we need that research to back up some of these rulemakings that we have. But I don’t know if that really answered your question, but it’s definitely something that we’re following along because if one thing that Vermont is doing is if it can be easily source separated, they are requiring that that material is done by that method instead of just sending it all to depackaging. There are really great companies, Divert is coming to Lexington, North Carolina. They are going to depackage. They have, you know, multiple filters. But there’s other companies here in the state that are depackaging and then sending it to composting. It is something that is, I think, a hot topic that we’re all going to follow along. And I really don’t want to end on that note, but okay.
Nina Sevilla: Just to add really quick, I’m glad you brought up wanting more research because that is something our team is looking into. Stay tuned for more. But I agree, it’s a hot topic that’s bubbling to the top and same with the intersections with EPR bills too. And there’s a lot more to explore there, I think.
Matthew Johnson: Yeah. I’ll just mention one related thing, again, kind of as an outsider here. That one thing that has absolutely drives me crazy is if I go to a restaurant and I get a leftover takeout container, every now and then there’s a sign that says compostable great. You know, that’s very obvious. Sometimes I get one that’s brown and looks like it’s made of paper, but there’s no sign. And to Ned’s point, it’s so confusing. Like, is this compostable? Is this not? You know, putting my economist hat on, I’m guessing there’s just not that much like incentive in the marketplace for packaging to make like at scale, like very compostable to go containers. This is one kind of minor thing, but hits people a lot where they are in food. And one sort of, you know, it may sound naive, but I think it’s probably true that if you know more and more localities kind of figured out how to do composting at scale, I would have to think that this would create a market opportunity to really expand the amount of compostable food containers that are out there. And I think, like an interesting question is what would enable that kind of market if we actually are able to implement these programs at scale.
Mary Muth: Do we have one more question? I think we can squeeze in one more.
Speaker 9: Hopefully this is a quick question. What I wanted to ask about was, I know social media’s come up a couple of times, but what about your thoughts on other types of tech that work with this? I’m thinking apps like Too Good To Go, or websites like Imperfect Produce that let people order that kind of thing.
Ned Spang: I appreciate your point, and I do think there are ways for this to be successful. There’s a lot of transactions that need to happen and the tools we have in our pockets now enable transactions much more quickly. They enable information flows much more easily. It’s easier to connect point A to point B and transferring some of this food. I have a student actually right now that’s investigating Too Good To Go in terms of they have been successful in terms of rescuing food. But the question we asked, which I just thought was interesting, who is benefiting from Too Good To Go? Is it actually food insecure populations or is it just people that are able to get a deal and are quick with an app to go check out and get a free piece of pizza or cheap piece of pizza. And so that, that work is yet to be done. But I do think it’s an interesting question and to their credit Too Good To Go is not saying that they’re meeting the needs of food insecure populations. They’re talking about avoiding food waste. And they are. But as soon as we start talking about food recovery, I can’t help but ask the question, well, who’s benefiting? Is it reaching the populations that really need some of these additional calories? And I think that piece is remains to be seen. But your point is correct. I think there are opportunities for solutions using improved information flows connecting people that can help enhance the connections that we need for that human connection I was talking about before. And we do see examples of this where just by some, especially in the Salinas Valley, where we grow a lot of produce and there are relationships between some of the churches we’ve seen and the growers where the growers will just text the church and say, I have an extra half load of tomatoes, do you guys want them? And they can say yes or no based on whether they have available people there. But in the past, that might have been a phone call. The phone call might not have been picked up, but if you can post that online, it’s just easier for that connection to happen. And so I have seen some success in that area.
Christine Wittmeier: I’ll add, I definitely think these could be great tools and I was thinking about colleges and universities, how they can send out a notification to their students that they have food free food here. And I think that seems to be really successful. So yeah, I definitely think that these apps are a great tool, but it’s interesting to see the study behind it. I would love to read that in the future.
Nina Sevilla: I’ll add, like Ned was saying, I think these apps are really helpful for creating secondary markets and like other ways to use food. But something that I’ve heard come up in conversations around this as it relates to food rescue and recovery is that when you’re diverted or when people can pay a little bit for that food, it kind of takes it out of the donation stream. And I think that ultimately food donation is not going to solve food insecurity. Like we need affordable housing and healthcare and livable wage. And so, I think there are ways for all of these kind of to work together in that, like we need more. Affordable and accessible food, these apps can help with that. And we need to be advocating and supporting our colleagues in other areas that are working on these other issues that are at the core of all of that.
Matthew Johnson: I’ll just mention, I think this is a great question. I always mention one idea that we’ve been talking about in this question of if we scale up curbside, compassing Durham, how can we do it effectively? And one thing that we’re going to definitely be doing is we’re going to again have scales in the garbage trucks and in the food waste pick up. Trucks that just measure and actually be able to pinpoint for specific households, what is their trash weight that week, what is their food waste that week. And we’ll be able to have all that data. And one thing that we’ve been talking about is it could be really compelling to not only just use that data at the city level, but also send it back to people to be able to use. Durham has these various apps that connect with different households to be able to tell people like, Hey, how many, how many pounds of food waste did you and your neighbors divert this week? Or how many pounds of food waste did you and your neighbors send to compost facilities? And, you know, maybe playing with the messaging to highlight the different neighbor community connections again. And I mean, it’s still very speculative. I think we’ll definitely have the infrastructure to do it, but to what extent will this sort of data that’s given to people kind of create more of a connection and make these efforts more successful? That’s something that we don’t know yet, but it’s something that we’re thinking about and kind of excited about.
Mary Muth: Right. Well, I’d like to thank our panelists for this.