NEW YORK — America has a food waste problem.
In a country famed for its large portion sizes, Americans toss out some 30-40% of the food produced.
"We think of U.S. households wasting about a third of all their food that could be eaten," said Ted Jaenicke, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State who studies food waste and consumer purchasing behaviors.
"Visually, that's buying three bags of groceries at the supermarket and putting one in the trash on your way out the door."
Experts say the holiday season compounds the problem.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, 200 million pounds of turkey meat is tossed each Thanksgiving — the biggest day of food waste of the year.
Much of that discarded food winds up in the country's landfills, where food waste represents nearly a quarter of the solid waste at those facilities.
Environmental impact
"If [food] ends up in a landfill, instead of being eaten or composted, then it is a really big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions," Jaenicke said.
"Food waste in a landfill decomposes into methane. And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide."
The EPA says that methane is some 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
"If food waste were its own country, then it would be the third largest greenhouse gas-emitter in the world," Jaenicke said.
In addition to the amount of food that consumers throw out, another significant contributor to the country's food waste problem happens at the production level.
Sometimes that is due to Americans' pickiness when it comes to cosmetic standards for produce, but it also happens as a result of environmental factors that might leave crops damaged or destroyed.
A recent report from the American Farm Bureau Federation on Thanksgiving prices noted that produce items like sweet potatoes were up 37%, which the lobbying group attributed in part to hurricane damage to North Carolina's farms.
The effect is a vicious cycle: As wasted food goes into landfills and breaks down into powerful methane gas, it contributes to the kind of adverse weather events known to create additional waste at the production level.
Compost is key
One way to address the problem of wasted food winding up in landfills is to instead reroute the product to be composted.
That is what New York City hopes to do with its newly expanded Staten Island Compost Facility.
There, massive heaps of food waste are churned into usable compost that residents can collect for free and businesses for a fee.
"Compost is awesome," said NYC Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management Jennifer McDonnell.
"It works really well. We make it here in New York City. We can use it here in New York City. So it's an example of the circular economy, and we need all of that material coming in on the front end to make our products."
Composting is a natural recycling process that relies on microorganisms to feed on organic materials — like food scraps — and convert it into plant fertilizer.
The Staten Island compost facility sits atop a retired landfill dominated by scores of seagulls taking advantage of the steam billowing out of the masses of product in various stages of compost.
McDonnell said that landfills like the one formerly operated at the Staten Island facility are part of why America deals so poorly with its food waste.
"There's limited capacity," she said of landfills.
"The coolest thing about a facility like this is you never use up its capacity. It's always taking in new stuff and producing products. It's a manufacturing facility. It's not an end-of-the road facility."
Challenges of composting on a massive scale
New York is one of a handful of cities looking to address the problem of solid waste rotting away in landfills through a municipal composting program.
Its city council last year mandated residents begin separating their food and lawn waste from inorganic trash — a historic move by the nation's most populous city.
"That's groundbreaking. I think we have a lot of potential over time to continue growing," McDonnell said.
While participation has not yet reached 10%, the city has said it would begin issuing fines for noncompliance in an effort to boost resident engagement.
But there are structural challenges to getting these types of programs off the ground. First, there's infrastructure. It's expensive to find and manage the facilities needed to compost on a massive scale.
McDonnell says another issue is education and participation.
"We've studied other jurisdictions, other municipalities, and usually when they start a program like this, it takes about ten years to mature to get to a participation rate," she said.
To help, the city is constantly providing guidance about the proper way to dispose of food scraps and other organic waste, including the city's Trash Academy, which bills itself as "the crash course for a sustainable city."
Still, even if not every New Yorker buys in, McDonnell said, modest increases in proper waste practices could have big implications for the amount of food that winds up in a landfill.
"In our culture, where we produce so much waste from just existing, we have to be thoughtful about how to have a long term sustainable approach to properly managing all those things," McDonnell said.
"Food waste and yard waste make up about 30-35% of all the waste generated in a typical New York City household. So if you carve off that third and recover, it can make a big dent."
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