The Food We Throw Away: What It Means for Climate, Communities, Policies, and the Law

This lecture by Harvard law professor Emily Broad Leib lays out the state of food waste in the U.S. and then focus on systems-level approaches to reduction using law and policy initiatives. She examines recent policy developments and policy trends across the U.S., including federal efforts to coordinate food loss and waste reduction and strengthen food donation, as well as state trends in policies such as organic waste bans, food donation incentives, and improved date labeling rules. She also places these developments in an international context, sharing findings from a global comparative food waste policy analysis and highlighting notable policy approaches from other countries around the world. Importantly, she discusses where we are and where we need to go in our policy approaches to food waste reduction, as well as open questions and gaps that need to be addressed by researchers, policymakers, advocates, and the public. This presentation was given on January 22, 2026 at the Rethinking Food Waste – Duke Climate Collaboration Symposium event at Duke University, organized by the Duke World Food Policy Center.

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.

Presentation Transcript

Thank you. Good to see everyone. Let me briefly just explain what I do, which I like to do especially in audiences that are not mostly law students and law faculty, which I think is probably not the majority of the folks here. As you heard, I direct the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, which is a center at Harvard Law School where we’re really focused on improving health and food for society through using law and policy as tools and through educating and training law students to do this work. So, my day-to-day is really on the food law and policy side, which I started. And then the other half of our program really focuses on health, law and policy. And then as you heard, some of the work I do is really at the intersection of the two, especially in food access and in food as medicine.

But I’m going to talk mostly about the work that I do in food. And especially the work that I do on food loss and waste, and food recovery. But it’s part of a broader set of work that we do in the Food Law and Policy Clinic on all aspects of the food system. We really focus on these four pillars of work. Really understanding and helping our partners and clients understand the laws and develop policy solutions while we’re training law students to do this work. And we look at food access and nutrition, climate and sustainability, food system justice, which is sort of broad ranging. A lot of like community-based work, really empowering and supporting communities and coalitions with the law and policy expertise that they otherwise wouldn’t have. They have the local expertise and the knowledge on what they really want to see change, and then of course food waste and recovery.

And so, here’s like my little roadmap. I’m going to talk about what is food waste, what are we wasting, and why it’s a focus of my work. A couple sort of ground setting of what’s been going on around the country on this. Thinking about it from a policy side, I’m going to focus really most of the time on two hot topics: date labeling and food waste deterrence policies. And then briefly touch on some of our global work and then some takeaways. So just to give you a sense so starting from food waste in the US and I should say it’s a global issue.

I’m going to come back to some of the global findings we have, but I think for today we’ll really focus primarily on what’s going on in the US. And what we can see here is data from our partners at ReFed, which is a wonderful organization we work with closely. And I’m going to cite them a few times because they’ve been really a hub of a lot of data on how much food we waste, where it’s happening and some of the solutions. So, this is their data from their 2025 report, which I think was 2023 data. And what they found was about 74 million tons of food is surplus each year. It’s about a third of the food supply in the US. The value of that food is $382 billion. And then they have really helpful data on where this is happening.

And so, as you can see here, one of the primary places where we’re wasting food in the US is at the residential level, which is really tricky for a lot of reasons. There’s been a lot of focus on this household waste. When I think about it from a policy perspective, you can require lots of like businesses and entities to do things. It’s very hard to require households to do things. So, we have to use different set of tools. And then a combined about 24% on farm, which is known as food loss. And I’m not going to get into the definitions in that much detail. But food surplus that happens earlier in the chain is considered food loss. And then the rest is split between manufacturing, food service, and retail.

So why do we care about this issue? Well, there’s a lot of reasons. One big one is the household economic impact of this. This is data from the US EPA from last year, which found that a household of four wastes about $3,000 a year on food that they throw away for various reasons. And of course, that is always an issue, but even more so in this moment when we’re talking a lot about food prices. We’re talking a lot about households having challenges having enough food to eat, and a lot of that waste is because of confusion. It’s confusion of date labels, which I’ll talk more about. It’s confusion about something. Your lettuce is wilted. What can you do with it, you know? What are the foods that are okay to eat if they don’t look exactly as they were when you were going to use them in one way, and now you need to use them in another way.

And then of course, another big issue is the environmental impact of food waste. And there’s a lot of components to that. There are all the natural resources that go into that food. About 20 to 25% of the water that we use in the US goes to water crops that we then throw away. And then there’s the climate impact, which I know is a really big factor in this series around the climate side of this. This is from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They found that food waste is responsible for about eight to 10% of climate change globally. The EPA in the US found that nearly 60% of emissions that come from landfills, which are methane emissions, is caused by food waste rot in landfills. And then Project Drawdown, which regularly keeps up lists of what are the sort of technologies we can apply to reduce climate impact, has ranked food waste as number three on their list of dozens and dozens of different solutions. And so, I think there’s this really big environmental impact to this climate and otherwise.

And bringing some of this together, one of the reasons that although we do things across the food system that we’ve spent a lot of our resources and time on food waste and food recovery is because it’s really a triple bottom line opportunity. So obviously the environmental pieces I talked about on the people side. Not only the aspect of waste in the household and the cost to individuals, the cost throughout the supply chain that means that businesses must charge more for that food because they’re accounting for the shrink or waste along that supply chain. And then also the fact that much of the food that’s wasted is safe and edible and could make it to those who need it. And right now, the most recent data is that about 13.7% of US households are food insecure. And so of course not all of that food can get to those people, but a surprising amount of it is actually safe and edible and it’s just surplus.

And then lastly, on the profit side, and I think this is surprising to a lot of people, but when we treat food as a resource instead of wasting it, we actually make money. So, Massachusetts, which enacted a food waste deterrence policy which I’ll talk about a little later, by banning large businesses from throwing away food. After two years of that ban, they found that it created 500 new jobs, sustained a number of other jobs, and created $175 million in new revenue for the state. And that was literally all just by treating food as a resource rather than throwing it away in the quantities we have been. Creating all these knock-on effects of that.

What do you think are causes of food waste. So why is this happening?

Cosmetic imperfections. So, the double carrot or, you know, your apple’s not totally red or whatever. What else?

Date labels. And we’ll get more into this. But most foods have these various different labels. Actually, Walmart did a study and found that there were 47 different date labels being used on food. Best By, Use By, Sell By, Enjoy By. And most people either don’t really think about it too much, or if they do, they think that’s really about safety. So, they’re throwing that away.

What else? What are some other causes?

Time. So, you know the amount of time it takes to prepare the food. There’s a lot of aspects to that. People buy food they think on Sunday, they’re like, I’m going to cook all this food this week. And then they get busy and order out or for whatever reason don’t make it. They throw it away.

And the other stuff, that’s a great one. And, ReFed has added a lot of data on that, just portion sizes themselves being so large and that leading to a lot of waste. Like plate waste, which also is really difficult because once it’s served to people, it’s very hard to then do something with that food. You know, you of course can send it somewhere other than the landfill, but it’s harder to get it higher up the chain.

So, there are others. Does anyone have one on why you think food might not be donated if it is surplus in the back of house?

Yes. Thank you. I love that you put a rational there, Brian (Roe). That was that. Agree completely. Yeah. So, a lot of concern. Food is heavily regulated. That’s why as a food lawyer, like I’m never going to not have a job. There’s like regulations upon regulations and then there’s all this fear that if someone donates something, they’re going to then get someone sick and get sued. Even though we in the US have some of the strongest liability protection that we even recently strengthened, that really says that businesses and nonprofits that donate food, that meets the food safety regulations won’t be held liable if someone does get sick.

So, there’s like a bunch of reasons. I captured a bunch of the ones we said. I think the two, maybe just to say that that we didn’t talk about were lack of awareness. Just, you know, people don’t realize how much is wasted. The individual in their household, it’s so easy to put it, it goes somewhere and it’s not in your face, it’s not like smelling up your house. Businesses too. It’s not really visible necessarily how much there is, what the impacts are. Insufficient incentives to change. In addition to the fear of the liability or what I put, you know, uncertainty about the legality of interventions, just not incentives. I mean, it costs. There’s rub. There’s inertia to change. There’s cost to retraining. There’s cost to figuring out where that food goes. There’s sorting it. And then I think the last, and again, this is hard to say right now because food prices have been consistently high for the last five years, but food in general in the US costs less than it does anywhere in the world, you know, as a percentage of our income. And less than it has at other points in history. And so, in businesses and things like that, the food is the cheap part. The labor costs way more. All the other things cost more. It’s a lot easier to throw that food away.

All right. So, what are some solutions? So, compost. And I think maybe building on that, so there’s places that food can go. So, getting the incentives aligned that make it so that businesses send it to, let’s say, compost for anaerobic digestion. Which are better outlets than sending that food to the landfill because it reduces the emissions, it allows it to be reused.

What else? Education. And I’ll mention there’s work now afoot to really do this kind of large-scale education, which has been shown in peer countries to really help consumers reduce the amount that they’re wasting and increase that awareness. And the interesting thing when you educate consumers, like everyone is a consumer, so consumers are also business owners. And heads of universities and have these other roles so that education then could lead to also benefits in the business world and throughout society.

And I’m going to show in a moment, you know, one of the top things we can do with food besides preventing that surplus in the first place is getting it to people. Which means supporting businesses and donating that food if it’s edible and safe. And then supporting the food recovery organizations and rescue organizations that need to do that work.

There’s a lot. like we talked about liability and I think protection, which we have. But then education about what those protections are. You know, the incentives all the things we talked about. There are solutions to them. And again, I’m going to tell you about the policy solutions. It does not mean those are the only solutions. They’re just the ones that I know the best. But luckily tomorrow there’s going to be a lot more discussion on some of the other ones.

So let me start by showing this EPA Wasted Food Scale, which is a really nice starting point because it shows us what we should do with that food in the first place.

So, it starts from the left side and, you know, as I mentioned, start by preventing that wasted food. Like doing better ordering, doing better planning. Businesses really monitoring when they’re over ordering and creating too much. That’s the best thing because it reduces the amount of time that that food needs to travel around and the risks of it not getting to someone. And then after that is donating. So local food rescue getting it to people. Upcycling the food, which means taking that food that isn’t going to be used for one purpose or the byproducts of food that aren’t going to be used for the purpose where they were, you know, originally harvested or purchased for, and getting them, turning them into other food products that can be that can be sold. After that is feeding animals or if it’s on farms, leaving it on the farm rather than taking it off and sending it to the landfill. Compost or anaerobic digestion. And then we start getting towards the bad end of this, which is getting it into a landfill, which we want to stay away from.

And so, these are some of the solutions. These aren’t every solution, but some of, when I think of like the policy toolkit, these are some of the ones that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and monitoring across the US and now across other countries. So I can say these are things that have come up in global work that we’ve now done in 27 countries around the world.

So, date labeling, which we talked about a little bit. And we’re going to get into more detail because I think that that’s like a hot area right now in the US. Food safety. A big question that comes up is what the food safety are rules around donating or distributing food. Let’s say there’s a problem with the label. A common one is the net weight is incorrect. You can’t sell a food if you say that it weighs a certain amount and people are getting a certain amount, but it’s actually another amount. So having good guidance and good clarity on that. The liability protection that we mentioned. We have great protection in the US but making sure that people know that, that businesses know that the US government wants them to donate when they have surplus food. Tax incentives. Getting resources to businesses that donate. Requirements and penalties mean that things like I talked about in Massachusetts, not allowing food to be wasted. And then lastly, the funding. The supply. So that can be for adoption of technology. It could be for like food rescue, for compost, for anaerobic digestion. Building these other pathways out.

We’re working on these issues because policy can be done at all these different levels. There are some things that states are really good at and we’ve done a lot of work tracking states. I’m going to show you some of that. At the federal level, I want to mention the Zero Food Waste Coalition, and I’m happy that my buddy Nina (Sevilla) is over there. Nina’s NRDC, which is one of the four organizations along with the Food Law and Policy Clinic that launched Zero Food Waste Coalition really as a hub for sharing awareness and education and advocacy opportunities around food waste policy. And then we put out a lot of like policy briefs and recommendations for things that can happen at the federal level. And then on the global level, we’ve been now working hand in hand with nonprofits in now 30 countries around the globe to really document their policies on food waste, lift up the global best practices, and then help countries implement better policy.

So let me give you a little snapshot of what’s going on. The point here is that there’s been consistent federal attention on food waste since 2015. And why is that important? It’s important because it shows that this is a bipartisan issue, that across the past four administrations, starting from 2015, which was Obama through Trump One through Biden and through the current administration, there’s been consistent focus and attention on reducing food waste. And I think it’s because there’s, you know, that sort of triple bottom line I talked about earlier. In some cases it’s been a climate focus. In some cases, it’s been, you know, food access and a food security focus. In some cases, it’s been really like this economic focus. There’s a lot to love here and we’ve seen consistently this goal. We saw the last Farm Bill was the first time the US Farm Bill had funding for food waste reduction. The launch of a federal inter-agency collaboration, which I have a little snapshot of that here, which is USDA, FDA, and EPA, working together to reduce food waste. And then moving forward at the end of the Biden administration there was a national strategy on food waste reduction, which I’ll talk a little bit about. And then in the fall, EPA announced a new Feed It Onward initiative and has sort of indicated that they’re working on an EPA agency MAHA strategy that will include food waste among whatever else will be included. And then Congress as well. There are multiple bills. These are all bills that right now are pending in Congress, that are bipartisan in one or both houses of Congress. I think that that shows like the sustained interest in the topic. And where there are good ideas there are policy makers that are willing to take them and move them forward.

I want to take a moment on this national strategy because I think it’s really a nice roadmap for things that the federal government can and should be doing. It took basically the whole Biden administration to put this out, which was great because a lot of thought went into it. I think on the not-so-great side, it ended up being put out in 2024. And it’s not really like this administration’s strategy so much. But what we know is that a lot of the things in there are things that the administration’s already doing. And I think you can look at this to see what some of those commitments across these objectives are. Prevent food loss, so that’s really on farm and early in the chain. Prevent food waste, increase recycling, and then supporting policy development. And then I think the other point here relevant to the discussions for tomorrow is that the strategy itself really points out the gaps in data. And the need for more information about not only where waste is occurring, but also on where solutions are actually impacting that. And where some of these policies and other interventions are actually having an impact.

And then when we look at states, we’ve now been tracking state policy for probably 10 years. This is our 2025 tracker. And what we look at every year, like how many bills are introduced, what are the topics that they’re focused on, and then where are we seeing the most traction. This was 2025: 94 state bills introduced. 19 of those were enacted. And you can see here some of that hot topic. So funding, there was a lot of state legislation looking at like how we fund the interventions we need for food waste reduction. Tax incentives have continued to be something a number of states have passed, but have continued, you can see the second highest in terms of the number of bills introduced. So that would be like tax benefits to farmers in a lot of cases and smaller food businesses. There’s also a federal tax incentive. When you look at some of the places, we’ve seen a lot of things enacted. Waste bans. More and more states adopting or improving upon their organic waste bans. We saw last year New York, Washington, a couple other states expanded upon waste bans that they had and really incorporated more businesses that now are required to make sure food doesn’t go to landfill.

All right, so I want to shift it to talk about a couple of the hot topics that I think are things I’m really watching and where I think we’ll see some action.

And I’m going to start with date labeling, which is both an exciting and also sad tale. And sad because this is really like what got me started on working on food waste reduction. I mentioned I work in a clinic and every project we do starts with a client coming to us and saying, can you help us either understand the law better or figure out how to improve it?

And so, our first client in the food waste space was a nonprofit called Daily Table that was started by the former head of Trader Joe’s, Doug Raugh. And he said, I know from Trader Joe’s we’re wasting all this food and I want to start a nonprofit where we are selling at a very, very low price. It meant to kind of increase food access. Food that would otherwise be wasted. And, I’m really concerned about food being wasted because of the date labels and I want to incorporate that into what I do. So, we started looking at this issue and kind of came up with some recommendations for him. Because he had been told in Massachusetts that it was illegal to sell food past the date, which is not completely true. But Massachusetts does have a very strict law around basically requiring like any food to have a date label on it and making it really difficult to sell or even donate food past that date. And so let me talk a little bit about where we are and why it’s been frustrating, but why I’m kind of hopeful about that.

So, what’s the problem with date labels? The first, which we talked about already, is people are confused. The majority of consumers, I’m going to show some data on this, don’t understand them. They don’t know what they mean, and they’re kind of like, when in doubt, throw it out. And they don’t have the ability to engage more with the type of food. And for most food the label’s really about quality, it’s about freshness. We’ve talked to companies who have said, we actually just like picked a date label out of thin air. Because we started, you know, a lemonade company, we’re required to have a date in Massachusetts, and we don’t have any resources to do any research around what that should be. We came up with a date and we put it on our products. And we can tell you for sure that date has like no scientific basis and is not related to food safety.

There are a small handful of foods where they increase in risk after the date. It’s things like deli meats, unpasteurized milk, or cheeses. And then, you know, some like deli counter prepared salads or things like that, that have more of a risk of being contaminated with listeria. And since we don’t heat them up before we eat them, unless you’re heating your deli Turkey before you eat it which most people are not, there’s no kill step. So doesn’t mean they’re unsafe or riskier, we shouldn’t eat them. But there are foods where they could increase in risk over time.

So, consumers are confused. The US at the federal level has never required any standard language of these. They don’t prevent you from using them. They have recommended that businesses use the term Best If Used By, if they’re trying to convey quality. But they don’t really have any requirements behind that and companies can do what they want. And so, what we looked at for our work with Daily Table, and then ended up publishing with NRDC in a report, was no two states have the same laws. This is an old map, but it’s mostly still true. Every single state requires dates of different foods. The dates they require say different things. And this can’t be based in science because it’s impossible that the dates in New York, which has no requirement, would be different from Massachusetts. The science is the same. The foods we’re eating are the same. I can assure you that. And so, what’s the issue here? It’s costly to consumers. ReFed has found they waste $3 billion worth of food a year. And standardizing these labels and educating people could divert 425,000 tons of food waste every year.

What do we think this should look like? Okay, so this is an image from a law that was recently enacted in California, which became the first state in the US to actually require standard labels on food which will go into effect later this year. And just to say you know, the federal government can do this. But because they haven’t, states can do what they want. So that’s sort of where one of the challenges are. So, what we think should be the best path forward is that foods should have one of two labels: Best If Used By on foods that are labeled for freshness, for quality, for taste, or because the lemonade company couldn’t figure out what a label was going to be. And Use By on foods where there is more risk, where they really want to communicate that we should throw that away.

And I’m happy in questions to get into more why this proposal, I think, this is a great example of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good because we’ve had date labels on foods. They’re on so many foods. We’ve had them for so long we can’t start from a blank slate. We’re really starting from like consumers are expecting to see these and then how can we communicate? We are going to need education and awareness. This is not going to be self-explanatory. And then I think being really clear that if one of these dates is really just about freshness and may not be based on any science, that food should be allowed to be donated or sold after that. And I include sold there because I think we want to reduce the stigma. Like, this isn’t food for people who can’t afford food. This is food for all of us who, you know, want to eat food that is still safe and delicious in most cases.

There’s been a little bit of progress. There was an industry voluntary standard that used those two labels in 2017. We can get into how well it’s worked. California enacted a law that I just showed that image from, which is pretty exciting. Congress has introduced legislation in the last five congresses, the last 10 years. They would attempt to do this, but for the first time it’s bipartisan in both the house and the Senate.

And USDA and FDA last year put out a request for information. And that’s what this image is, saying we’re thinking about doing something on date labels. Members of the public and the research community, tell us what you think. And that was due in March of this year. So that really spurred us to action. One of the things we talked with them, and they said, we want updated data on consumer perceptions. We had done a survey in partnership with Roni Neff at Johns Hopkins in 2016. At the time, it was really to say what are the best labels so that industry and Congress could include the labels in their proposals.

But we really wanted to get updated data. That was, you know, almost 10 years ago. It was a long time. We ran a national survey last January. We ended up surveying a little over 2000 people, which was great. Please don’t ask me any statistical questions about the survey because I am a lawyer.

But I’m happy to give you Roni’s email address or Dana Gunders at ReFed, who also collaborated with us. And what we did was we asked people about what did these labels mean to you? Do you throw food away past that date? Do you think these are regulated? And we looked at eight labels, which you can see here, which included two icons. And disappointingly, the icons didn’t do very well. But I’m not done with the icons because I think that with education, they could be amazing.

And so let me tell you what we found. And this is where this story is like a sob story for me. On every single metric we looked at, the consumer understanding of these is worse than it was, you know, nine years earlier. Despite, like we’ve talked about this, we made a film about date labels. We have, you know, there’s an industry standard, like all the things that have happened, consumers are doing worse. So now 43% of the consumers said that they always are usually throw food away just because of the date with no other thinking behind it. Up from 37%. 88% of people up from 84% say that they do that occasionally, but again, just based on the label. More people than last time believe these are federally regulated, which is fascinating. But was actually really useful. And this is the benefit of this sort of cross-disciplinary collaboration. We know from the legal standpoint, if we want the agencies to regulate these, they’re going to be able to do that if they’re false or misleading. And one way to show that they’re misleading is if people think that they’re regulated. Because that means people think FDA is telling me that this food is labeled for a reason and that label has some scientific basis. So, the percentage of people that believe these are regulated, I think is really useful in the agencies potentially taking action.

This chart is really complicated. I’m not going to go into so much detail. Let me give you like two kind of data points here. The first was that we started by asking people do you understand date labels? And 87% said, yes, I do. I actually do. But actually 57% got them right across all the labels. And what you can see is there is, you know, variation in terms of what people thought was related to safety versus quality.

On the positive side, the terms Best If Used By and Best By, people pretty clearly believe those to be a quality label. Which built on the data we had before, you know, that there’s been a lot of coalescing around those as being the quality labels. On the negative side, the term Use By which is the standard label in that voluntary industry initiative, it’s supposed to be for safety. And people were the most confused about that. 44% thought that it was safety, which is less than half, 49% also less than half, but slightly more thought it was about quality. Which means if that is used on foods that are actually increasing in risk, consumers might actually be taking risk. So, we have a double issue here where people are both wasting food and wasting money, and also potentially eating things. Like, there’s a lot of people who responded and said, I know about those date labels. They don’t mean anything. I eat everything until it starts to walk away. You know, grows legs and takes off. But those people are taking risks too.

And then I think lastly, and again, important in this moment, was that we found that those were the most economically vulnerable were the most likely to throw food away on the date no matter what the food was. No matter the label. And I think this is really important to keep in mind as we think about, you know, what action we can take. So that was young adults, parents with young children, Black and Hispanic consumers, and then those in the lowest income and education groups.

I think last thing to say on this, we took all that, we wrote comments to the agencies, we wrote model comments, we got lots of people to submit comments. And we’ve now been in a holding pattern. And part of it is that the Administration put out this request before the new Trump Administration received it. And I think it’s not totally clear what will happen and when. In December my colleague and I put together a report looking at what the comments to the agencies say. There were 7,000 comments. We looked at a hundred of them. We looked at all the ones that were submitted by organizations, by trade associations. And then a sample of 15 of the consumer or individual ones. And it’s surprising how much agreement there was in the comments that we need standard date labels. It was very hard to find anyone saying, please keep this system, it’s working well. Or even anything else that was like, here’s another solution that’s not standard labels. There’s a lot of iteration on that, like how it should work, how it should function. There are some folks thinking about should some foods not have a label at all, which I think is maybe even the next generation from where we are now. We put out this report that really says there’s a lot of agreement. People really pointed to all the ways this could save food, save money, help people. And for industry really align things with what our global counterparts are doing.

Okay. I’m going to talk a little bit about another hot topic which is food waste deterrence policies.

And so, what I mean by this, and I’m not going to go through all of these, is just this is a phrase we’ve been using to refer to policies that make it financially difficult for businesses to continue wasting food. So sometimes that’s a ban on food waste where you’re penalized if you keep wasting food. It can be a requirement that you donate for certain businesses. We’ve seen in other countries things like usually you can claim a tax credit for inventory that you throw away. You can’t claim that if that inventory is food that could have been donated. Things that really are changing the bottom line for businesses, moving away from like incentives or education, which are wonderful and needed but might not on their own really get us there. And kind of like shifting the narrative to you are not allowed to throw food away and you’re going to be penalized if you do.

And we’re seeing this growing. This map is from the ReFed policy finder, which we help update. It looks like not a lot of states, but it’s 12 states now and a number of cities have enacted these. And it is a lot when you think about how quickly this has happened, because they’ve almost all been in the last 10 years. And we sort of map out like whether we think they’re strong. And a lot of that relates to like some of the states have different exemptions. If you’re too far from a compost facility, then you don’t have to abide by the law or only really big businesses. We’ve mapped it out along that so you can see that.

So, we gave you two examples. California, which has a bunch of components of their law. They require businesses to ensure that food goes to compost. And then for certain businesses, which are all the ones listed here, now, they’re required to donate all of their surplus edible food. And the state has really delegated all of the counties in the state to make sure this is actually happening. There’s reporting required. They’ve invested in wrapping up the infrastructure. There are challenges to be sure. There are like questions they get from businesses on like is this actually edible? There are questions they get from the food recovery organizations about scaling up and how much this is really taking for them to do it. But on the whole, it’s really doing this at scale. Really preventing food from going to waste and making sure that safe edible food gets to people who need it.

And then New York has done something similar. The main thing is they’re similarly requiring businesses to separate their food from other waste and make sure it goes somewhere other than a landfill. And even before that, make sure that food that is safe and edible gets donated. And so, they started with businesses that have more than two tons of surplus food a week. The next phase will be businesses with more than one ton of surplus food a week. And then eventually in 2029 businesses with more than a half a ton of surplus food a week will be required to do this.

So, one of the challenges, and I put this out partly for the discussion tomorrow, has been we really want good data on these policies, like these food waste deterrence policies. They seem like that it would work. The states that have looked at them. And the study of science that looked at this found that the states that really are implementing them in a strong way, like Massachusetts, have been successful at both reducing food waste, reducing emissions, increasing donations. But there’s not really good data on, as more and more states have implemented this, how this looks across states. Part of the big issue is that there’s not any consistent state level data on food waste. States have great data on solid waste, but it’s very hard to disaggregate what of that solid waste is food.

And so, we’re involved in two different studies right now trying to really look at this. So one is working with ReFed and Ned (Spang) is involved so you can direct your questions to him. Looking at states that have done these waste characterization studies before and after a policy to see did they see a difference?

And then the other, we’re working with two different programs across Harvard that have access to satellite data and trying to figure out can we, from the satellite data on methane emissions, see a difference. Or from, you know, other EPA methane emissions data, are we able to see a difference? And I think the goal here is really to not only show that these policies work but show that like some of them are better than others. And if you have a stronger policy without a lot of exemptions, you’re actually going to get a lot of bang for your buck. So that’s something… just a call to action.

So, the last segment that I want to talk a little about is global food waste. And I’m happy to expand on any of this, but just to give a sense of like where we sit in the world.

We have been working over the last six years in partnership with the Global Food Banking Network and now FEBA, which is the European Food Banks Federation to really map out and analyze and compare laws on food waste and food donation across country.

The goals of this are really to identify and analyze the laws. We have sort of a standard set of laws we look at, although in various countries where there’s like a unique law that’s come up, we’ve really elaborated on that a little bit. We recommend policy change. We now know a lot. We can say, if you want to improve the concerns about liability, here are some of your peer countries that have taken action. Or if you want to really move towards a food waste deterrence policy, here are your neighbors that have a policy like that. We share these across a platform where you can kind of view different policies and see which countries have them. And through webinars that we’ve done for food banks, food businesses, and government. And then through technical assistance to countries, which has been really fun because, you know, they’re sort of come back and say, all right, we want to take action. Can you help us actually implement, you know, one of these policy changes?

We have on our Atlas site, this is like a snapshot. You can click on a policy area and the countries will light up based on how strong their policy is.

And then if you click on a country, you could get a snapshot. And this is the UK, which I’ll give an example from. Like food safety for donations: strong. Date labeling: strong. Liability protections: they don’t have. And then you can click through to get to the resources on that country, which include a very detailed guide. We’re sitting on like a lot of information and trying to figure out how to get it out to people in like bite size ways and then deep dives if they want to go deeper.

So, on the two issue areas I talked about, what does it look like. So let me talk about date labeling. This is our global map. Green, which you only have a few. Although as we’re increasing our reach around Europe, there’s going to be a lot more green. That’s strong policies. Yellow would be moderate policies. Usually those are ones that distinguish between safety and quality on labels, but they’re not very clear around what does that mean. What can you do with food past that quality label. Orange is they distinguish, but we think they’re very unclear or they allow a lot of exceptions. And so, as you can see, there’s not a lot of green. The other thing you can see is there’s only one country that’s red. Which means no policy, and that’s us. So, I think this has been really helpful for us in as we’re thinking about a national standard. I mean, not everyone’s doing it as well as they could, but everyone’s doing something and trying their best. I think it’s a real call to action for us.

And an example of that is the UK. And again, this is very similar to the example I gave from California. They have a very clear standard that food that’s labeled because it might increase in risk has a Use By label. Food that’s labeled because it is freshness or taste, or quality is Best Before. They’re very clear with lots of guidance for industry about which label to use on which foods. And then very clear that food can be eaten and donated past the date. So, they’ve done a lot of campaigns around, you know, if you have a food with that Best Before date, look at it, smell it, taste it. It’s unlikely that it’s going to have one of these foodborne illnesses. If it’s spoiled, it’s going to smell or look or taste bad, and you’re going to know that right away and not eat it. And I think the idea here is really to free people to use their senses where that is an appropriate response.

And then on food waste deterrence policies. So, this is what the global perspective looks like. We’re starting to see some, where France is one of the countries we’re working on now, so you’ll see green there. And a couple other EU countries. And then Ecuador and Peru are countries and Columbia now all have pretty strong food donation requirements or food waste bans. We’re seeing this and this is moving through time.

And one thing we’re seeing actually is because a number of countries in the EU, starting from France in 2016, have really strong food donation requirements. The EU wide passed a directive or amended their waste framework directive last fall and said that now every single country in the EU has 18 months to implement policies that they have to meet binding food waste reduction targets. 10% in processing and manufacturing, and 30% from retail food service and households. The other interesting thing is they said every country in the EU is now going to have to require that businesses that generate a lot of food waste create agreements with food recovery organizations to regularly donate that. We’ve been really working on it. We’ll have some guidance coming out for them, looking at every state in the US and every country so far that has required donation. Because every country in the EU has to decide which businesses to apply this to. We’re saying, here’s all the options that are out there so far, if you want to see what those are. And then each country has to work with their food banks or food recovery organizations to implement that. We’re working through them to say, you know, here’s some of the ways you might consider what you want to have included.

What does this look like? This has been fun to do and I actually was preparing for this and thinking we need to do this for the US, for states. Like we have these static snapshots, but what we’ve now done for our global work is we’ve said in our 25 countries, what does this look like over, you know, the 10-year period? And we’re seeing a lot of momentum on policy. So, these are all enactments. A couple things to note. I think one big one is the two areas we’ve seen the most growth over this 10 year, I guess 11-year period, is liability protection for food donations and food waste deterrence policies. These bans, these requirements for donation. Some of the other areas, there’s a lot of tax incentive policies. We’ve seen countries iterate on those in this time period. So, some of this includes countries that have passed something and then updated it over some time period. And we’re working on putting this together in an article that we’ll really share, like where we’re seeing the momentum and what that’s looking like to kind of share that as, you know, a snapshot of what the policy evolution looks like.

And then I think the other thing I’m doing some writing on right now has been fascinatingly a number of countries tying food waste reduction to their right to food. For those who are following, the US does not recognize a right to food. That in itself could be a subject of a whole other talk. But most other countries do. And a growing number of those countries have now said that the right to food is violated when we waste a lot of food. So, what I have on the screen here is a court decision from a court in Pakistan that said government was violating the right to food because so much food was being wasted and there were no plans in place to reduce that. And then a law from Mexico that was passed in 2023 that was a right to food law and included a whole section on food waste, including a requirement that businesses donate. I think there’s a lot of discussion about, and I would say, you know, I agree with the premise that food donation on its own cannot fulfill the right to food. That said, when you really think about all the food we’re wasting, the fact that most of it is safe and edible, and the fact that we’re destroying the climate by throwing that away and making it thus hard to produce food into the future, it’s really easy to show that there’s a violation there that’s occurring.

Okay, my last two slides are my takeaways.

So, a couple things. What do we have on tap? The Zero Food Waste Coalition this year we’re focusing on date labels for all the reasons I said. We’re seeing momentum. If you want to join in, you can. Please do. And we’re talking a lot about like continuing the support of the Administration both in projects they’re doing, and then through funding through congress for food waste reduction. We’re doing a lot of state technical assistance. You know, we see all these state bills coming out. We see a lot of state efforts. We’re really working on those. And I have a couple states we’re focusing in. We have a local food waste policy toolkit that’s going to come out this summer. So really looking at what cities across the US can do and are doing. We’ve interviewed and talked to stakeholders in a number of cities. We have new countries coming out for the Atlas project mostly in Europe has been we’re really building there, which is cool because there’s a lot of interesting best practices. And then guidance on that waste framework directive. And then takeaways for you.

So, first food waste is a bipartisan issue. I think we talked about that. We showed, you know, there’s interest. This is continuing to be an interest. I think the important thing there is we lose momentum every time there’s a turnover in government. So even though every administration has ended up focusing on food waste in one way or another, whatever the last one was doing, they stop all of that. They go back to the drawing board. They make new plans; they make new strategies. And so, I think even though it’s a consistent engagement, we’re not seeing as much progress as I think we hopefully would like to see because they keep having stops and starts.

We need more research showing the impact of policies. I talked about this with the food waste deterrence policies, but I think it’s true for all of the policies. Like it is really hard. We are trying to do this and on the global level, we participated in an OECD conversation in the fall where they brought together governments and researchers from around the globe totally on this question: how do share data on the impacts of these policy changes. It’s an open question that I can’t solve. We need coordination and collaboration. This convening, the discussion tomorrow, are really big parts of that. And then also the Zero Food Waste Coalition, which I mentioned is where we’re really, you know, circulating information about policies to help keep people abreast of what’s going on.

And then lastly, on the individual level, each of you can hopefully take something from this in what you’re doing at home. What you’re doing at work. If you lead an organization or a student group or a business or a coalition. You know, really thinking about how this can be implemented in that setting as well. And taking steps to educate your family and friends.