(Bloomberg) -- In a bid to curb food waste, a handful of US states have banned grocery stores, restaurants and other commercial waste operators from trashing uneaten food in landfills. But a new study in Science finds that most of those bans have been ineffective — except one.
In Massachusetts, a ban started in 2014 led to a 7% average annual reduction in total landfilled and incinerated waste in its first five years of implementation, according to the study. By contrast, bans in California (started in 2016), Connecticut (2014), Rhode Island (2016) and Vermont (2014) did not meaningfully reduce landfill waste. Programs in New Jersey (2021), New York (2022), Maryland (2023) and Washington (2024) proved too new to evaluate.
The researchers identified three likely reasons for Massachusetts’ success. Of the states evaluated, it has the highest density of food waste processing facilities. It also used the simplest language in its program, with the fewest exemptions. Lastly, Massachusetts focused on enforcement: Where inspections or fines were rare in other states studied, its number of inspections per generator per year was 216% higher than the next highest state, Vermont.
“We don’t think that the states should completely abandon these laws, but find ways to make them successful,” says Fiorentia Anglou, an author of the study and a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Massachusetts’ success highlights the “potential to decrease waste and decrease greenhouse gas emissions,” she says.
Most wasted food ends up in landfills, where it releases methane during decomposition. Globally, food loss and waste accounts for around 8% to 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, making it a bigger source of emissions than aviation or trucking. In the US, households generate plenty of food waste, while schools, hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses collectively waste about 80 billion pounds of food each year.
“To give you a sense of that scale, that would be about 310 full-scale [National Football League] stadiums you could fill up each year,” says Robert Sanders, a study author and an assistant professor of marketing and analytics at the University of California at San Diego.
The Science study is the first to evaluate the efficacy of US state programs, a process that is itself made more difficult by messy data. Researchers started by calling, emailing and putting in records requests to state officials to amass all available figures. Then they had to decide how to compare them. Some states report waste at a county level, while others do at a facility level, and some states export their waste to other states.
The study’s authors were ultimately only able to evaluate the first five bans put into place, and only through 2018. To determine whether changes in landfilled and incinerated waste could be attributable to the bans, they used a “placebo analysis” that involved reviewing and comparing the waste outcomes of several states with bans to those without. The researchers found that the five state bans resulted in a roughly 3% reduction in landfill waste across the five-year period.
“I’m excited about this study. We need evidence to inform policy change,” says Jillian Fry, an assistant professor at Towson University who studies food and sustainability and who was not involved in the research. The big takeaway for policymakers is that it’s “not enough to pass a food waste ban,” she says. “That’s the starting point.”
(Corrects total reduction in landfill waste across all five state programs in eighth paragraph.)
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