These states tried, and failed, to cut food waste. One succeeded.

Nearly every state-led effort to ban food waste analyzed by researchers appears to be failing — except one, according to a new study. The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, singled out Massachusetts for reducing the amount of food that gets tossed in the trash. Of the millions of tons of food in the United States, more than 30 percent goes unsold and uneaten, according to ReFed, a research and advocacy group that works on food waste. Researchers studied the first five laws and found that from 2014 to 2018, Massachusetts reduced its solid waste by an average of 7.3 percent. “What was surprising to us is, despite the political support for these bans, and their importance, they seem to not be working as policymakers would have expected — and as they would have hoped,” said Fiorentia Zoi Anglou, a PhD candidate at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, who co-authored the study. Advertisement First, the state had built the most extensive network of food-waste-composting sites, making it relatively simple and affordable for businesses to divert food from landfills and incinerators. “By contrast, there is almost no enforcement in other states,” the study’s authors wrote. The effect of other four bans, or lack of effect, “suggests widespread noncompliance with US food waste bans — i.e., that food waste is still being landfilled despite the bans,” they wrote. The Massachusetts example shows states’ food waste bans hold potential, Anglou said. They need to support the laws with sufficient composting infrastructure and enforcement.” Advertisement By changing businesses’ behavior, researchers found, Massachusetts also significantly lowered its methane emissions, which fell about 25 percent per ton of disposed waste in the post-ban years. “In Massachusetts we pride ourselves on being leaders,” Healey said. “Kudos to the team at MassDEP for the hard work they’ve put in to make this initiative so successful and a special credit to our state’s businesses and institutions that have stepped up to the plate to innovate and reduce their waste,” she said, referring to the state Department of Environmental Protection. The study compared those results to actual outcomes, using states’ own reports of their municipal solid waste disposal. The study also did not analyze the laws’ results after 2018 because of pandemic-related data complications, which left out states’ more recent efforts. Two years ago, California began formally requiring jurisdictions to enforce the state’s food waste ban, a change that could improve its effectiveness in the long-term, she said, but which was also outside the scope of this study. Dana Gunders, head of ReFed, said the study confirmed Massachusetts’ approach. “There are laws on the books in Connecticut and Rhode Island, but I’m not sure how much attention is going to this overall,” Gunder said. Both states exempt businesses from having to keep food out of the trash if there’s no composting facility nearby, she said, which may have made their bans less effective. Advertisement Terry Gray, director of Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management, acknowledged the state’s ban has not worked as intended. The law’s passage was supposed to encourage developers to build new composting facilities, he said, but “for a number of reasons those investments have not happened yet, and the infrastructure has not been developed.” Gray said Rhode Island and other states got new funding from the Environmental Protection Agency this year to tackle the problem. The average restaurant owner doesn’t always pay attention to new laws, she said, adding: “Very extensive outreach needs to happen to get businesses to participate, and I think in the early days Massachusetts did a lot of that.” Massachusetts still fell short of its 2020 goal to keep food out of landfills, advocates noted. Advertisement Gunders said she was surprised to see Vermont’s food waste ban, which covers both businesses and homeowners, listed as ineffective. Josh Kelly, the solid waste program manager for Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, also took issue with the study’s conclusion. Although food scraps still make up a large portion of the state’s waste stream, Kelly said, the tonnage has decreased by 13 percent since 2018. Kelly noted that Vermont has collected data on how much food waste is now being composted, used for animal feed or “digested” by microorganisms, and “their tonnages have risen.” – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/12/food-waste-bans-massachusetts/