On January 22, 2026, nearly 170 people gathered in Durham, North Carolina for the Rethinking Food Waste – Duke Climate Collaboration Symposium. Harvard Law professor and food policy researcher Emily Broad Leib’s keynote address kicked off the two-day symposium sponsored by the Duke Climate Commitment and organized by the Duke World Food Policy Center. Day two of the event featured a research workshop of panels and breakout ideation sessions that drew 80 faculty and students from diverse academic backgrounds, community food organizations, foundations, and businesses.
The Food We Throw Away - What It Means for Climate, Communities, Policies, and the Law
A typical US household of four typically throws away roughly $3,000 worth of edible food each year. With no federally mandated standard for labeling food freshness and expiration, consumer confusion over food date labels is a big part of the problem. And when in doubt, most people throw food out.
“We call this Cash in the Trash,” said Harvard lawyer Emily Broad Leib. Broad Leib is the Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.
“An estimated 31 percent of the US food supply becomes surplus. That’s a difficult number to see given that 13.7 percent of US households are food insecure,” she said. The environmental impact of food waste is equally stark: nearly 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions at landfills come from food waste.
Food loss and waste is a complex problem because it occurs at every step of the food supply chain: at the farm (23.8% loss), through manufacturing (17.8% loss), at food retail (6% loss) and food service (17.2% loss) outlets, and finally, in our homes (35.2% loss). But it’s also what Broad Leib calls a ‘triple bottom line opportunity.’
“When we treat food as a resource rather than something we can throw away, we actually make money,” she explains. “So, reducing food loss and waste helps people, the planet, and profit. And the good news is that since 2015 there’s been consistent government attention on this issue. Although we lose some momentum during administration changes, food loss and waste is a bipartisan issue.”
States are also taking up the cause, she said. In 2025 alone, more than 94 state bills were introduced for consideration covering topics like animal feed, clarification about composting, research, waste bans, tax incentives, liability protections, donation programs, and building awareness. Nineteen of those bills were enacted.
Broad Leib’s key takeaways emphasized the need for better quality data on food loss and waste and for more coordination and collaboration between different sectors along the food supply chain. “Conversations and conferences like this are essential,” she said, while also drawing attention to the Zero Food Waste Coalition as a hub of policy education and activity.
“There is also a role for each of us as individuals. Household food waste is one of the top categories of concern. Everyone can take steps within your own home, and educate family and friends,” she said.
Research Workshop
Day two of the symposium was a private research workshop, including four discussion panels, and breakout sessions to identify issues of concern and brainstorm researchable ideas.
A consumer food waste panel focused on barriers, assumptions, and the possibilities for helping consumers thinking more carefully about food waste. “We have ‘unrepentant wasters’ who don’t care if they waste food and those who care a great deal,” said Brian Roe of Ohio State University. “We are identifying segments of people to understand what would motivate them to change their behavior.”
Fuqua’s Gavan Fitzsimons said businesses need to understand the unconscious drivers that make people do the things they do. “For people who care about food waste, it would be pretty simple to give them some nudges to do new things. But if people don’t care about food waste, and I would say most of the world’s population doesn’t have saving leftovers in top of mind, it’s very hard to motivate this group to change. But if we can drive motivation at the individual level, we can get folks to reduce food waste and generate businesses that cater to that need, make money on it, and reduce waste.”
The panel discussed the challenges of getting the right message to people at the right moment. “I do a lot of work tracking social media,” said North Carolina State University’s Ben Chapman. He gave an example of a ‘successful’ social media messaging campaign and expressed frustrations because the message is inaccurate. “You’ve probably seen videos out there saying don’t use leftover rice because it’s not safe. And it’s based on a little bit of evidence that someone ate rice that had been sitting on the counter for three days and then got sick. As a researcher, there has to be a way for us to contribute evidence-based information to this dialogue. How do we help people understand what is risky and what is not?”
There have been numerous educational campaigns in the past, but they tend to be for short periods of time, said Roe. “If we want sustained change, we need sustained messaging” he said. Roe is part of an EPA-funded project to develop a national education and awareness campaign. Panel members also emphasized the need for messages delivered at the point of a person’s decision, and floated ideas such as reminder fridge magnets and ‘don’t waste’ food packaging messages.
Panel: The Business Connection - Financial, Social, and Environmentally Sustainable Solutions
A business-focused panel explored the bottom line of financial, social and environmentally sustainable food loss and waste solutions. From a business perspective, food is relatively inexpensive, but employees are very expensive. In the absence of policies mandating edible food donation or for food waste to be composted as opposed to dumped at a landfill, etc., cost consideration drives the way many businesses react. And how they might divert or handle food waste.
“I strongly recommend a Waste Characterization study for any point of the supply chain—from national suppliers, to retailers, to end users, to food rescue, to waste management facilities to individuals. We can all benefit from learning how to prevent waste by looking at what we throw out first. ” said said Muriel Williman of Durham City Solid Waste Management.
In any supply chain, matching supply to demand is always challenging, said engineer Lauren Davis from North Carolina A&T State University. “We need an infrastructure to recover food. Food pantries may not have refrigerators or cold storage such that they can received donated food. They may not have trucks or transportation to collect such food. May not have the workforce to sort through the food to make sure it’s still good to distribute. And we need to better understand what people who use food pantries actually need – what their health problems are,” she said. “Matching supply and logistics support – that’s such a challenge.”
Duke Master of Environmental Management candidate Rachel Surtshin, a former sustainability expert at Kroger grocery stores talked about how that store chain is approaching the food donation challenge. “Kroger is using empty trucks coming back to distribution centers to “back haul” edible food that needs to be diverted. It can then be picked up by food banks/food pantries.”
That solves one business problem, she said. But retailers can also more effectively mark down foods to get consumers to buy foods at risk of being thrown out. “Mark downs can really drive consumer engagement,” she explains. “But are we then just moving the burden of such foods to the consumer and driving up household food waste generation?”
Food pantries and food banks are largely staffed with volunteers, said Williman. With donated fresh food, “processing sometimes needs to happen – pulling off the outer leaves of a cabbage, for example. This is another layer of opportunity to prevent food waste, but should it happen at the retailer side or the food pantry/food bank side?”
Picking up on the food spoilage challenge, food safety expert Leonard Williams of North Carolina A&T State University said, “People don’t tend to understand the perishability of the food products they buy and don’t sort foods in ways that reduce food spoilage. For example, fruits that are high producers of ethylene will cause other foods to spoil more quickly. This leads to higher food wastage. The message is that consumers need to better understand the food safety and perishability requirements of the food they buy and grow.”
Panel: Harnessing Humanistic Insight to Solve Household Food Waste
A third panel focused on harnessing the insight of humanities analyses. The ways we use language shape our world in subtle and not so subtle ways, said Duke Divinity professor Matthew Whelan. “Framing food purely as a commodity can prevent us from seeing its many interconnections. If, instead, we understand food as a gift—as it is often regarded within theological traditions—then that ontology, that sense of giftedness, invites different practices. It encourages intentional eating, the sharing of food, and reflection on the many lives and relationships bound up in what appears on our plates. Taken together, these practices can cultivate a deeper awareness of our interconnectedness within the larger food system.”
Renaissance scholar Saskia Cornes of Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute wrote: “What’s striking to me about earlier meanings [of the word waste] is that waste is not the acceptable, inevitable result of getting the things we want. Instead it points to what we haven’t sufficiently cared for—what we haven’t made fruitful, haven’t brought fully into the realm of our concern, haven’t properly maintained or attended to.” Cornes is the director of the Duke Campus Farm.
Michael Binger, the director of North and South Carolina operations with the Society of St. Andrew gleaning organization said everyone can benefit from seeing the connection between food and the field where it was raised. “We cannot lose track of the value of fresh healthy food to human beings. As someone who works in food recovery through gleaning, and who actually takes that food to someone else, you can see and touch and feel every aspect of that foods’ journey. We would all value food more if we recognized all the people involved in getting food to our tables.”
“The education piece is a consistent through line in everything that has been said so far,” said Jarvis McInnis of Duke’s English Department. “In saying grace, honoring the cook, maybe we also need to honor the person who grew the food. This needs to be part of a more expansive way of saying grace. How can we bring a fuller acknowledgement of all the hands that have contributed to our food so that we care more – and care not to waste it.”
“How do we manage the life and death of the foods we eat so that we do not cheapen it,” said Norman Wirzba, an agrarian theologian with Duke Divinity School, who moderated the panel.
Panel: Navigating Trade-Offs in Food Waste Solutions - Costs, Capacity, and Consequences
The final panel of the morning focused on the trade-offs inherit in food waste policy solutions. For example, policy incentives encouraging businesses to send food scraps and surplus edible food to composting might be in conflict with diverting food for human or animal consumption.
“It’s a very technocratic decision to move waste to a landfill,” said Ned Spang from the University of California, Davis. “But with food, we have to maintain food safety and the human connection, and it’s a very meaningful thing. From the policy perspective, it’s easier to pursue the technocratic solution. But from the human perspective, it’s very difficult to come up with policy solutions.”
“There are monetary and time tradeoffs in every decision and no policy can really do it all. But as we think about where to intervene, we need it all. And that’s not a very satisfying answer,” said Nina Sevilla of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s very hard to measure the impact of policies, but we do need to understand the unintended consequences of interventions so that we can adjust. That is part of the policy process.”
Sharing lessons learned is how we avoid unintended consequences. “Food rescue should not be treated as a dumping ground,” said Sevilla. “Those organizations (nonprofit volunteer run) can’t handle the volume of food to serve as the only “solution” for a corporation's excess food. Can food pantries/food banks refuse a load of food if they need to? What would the consequences of that be for them? How can we make not wasting food the easy choice. The norm. What infrastructure do we need to make that happen?”
Duke Sanford School of Public Policy's Mathew Johnson talked about a neighborhood composting pilot project he conducted in partnership with the City of Durham. “In many cities like Durham, it’s cheaper to send a pound of waste to a compost facility than to a landfill. We found that giving people access to curbside composting led to really big reductions in trash volume.” But scaling up isn’t necessarily an easy thing to accomplish.
“We still need a better understanding of what makes a solution work in one location but not others. And clearly the power of narrative is really important to say what individuals can do, how states and local regions can get traction,” he said. “A lot of news happens online now – through social media. We have to leverage those channels. I love the idea of educating our kids and sending them home to drive change in their households.”
Christine Wittmeier, an organics recycling team lead at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality comes to the conversation around food waste armed with waste tonnage data and landfill capacity trends. “The two largest regional landfills in North Carolina – accepting 25% of the state’s waste – will fill up in the next decade,” she explains. “We need to think job creation. Composting creates 2x as many jobs as landfills and 4x as many jobs as incinerators. We have to think about creating a circular economy. Compost has value. We need to create the policy stick requiring composting and then incentives and support for composting businesses.”
”As soon as you scale up composting you start to see contamination issues,” said Spang. “Bits of plastic or aluminum foil, or glass, etc. There is a lot of room for better sorting technologies to help with this.”
About the Event Series
The symposium is a part of the Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia series, designed to accelerate climate solutions by developing new collaborations among Duke scholars and external partners. Each symposium focuses on identifying opportunities for Duke University to make the most of its interdisciplinary expertise and convening power for meaningful impact on climate challenges.
This symposium is hosted by Duke University’s World Food Policy Center at the Sanford School of Public Policy. 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.