In 2015, food and agriculture sustainability advocates succeeded in pressing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency to commit to a goal of cutting national food waste in half by 2030. This would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from methane released by organic waste in landfills and help bridge the gap between food surplus and the national hunger crisis, in which 44 million people in the U.S. face hunger.
Without any specific strategy for how to meet this goal, however, the problem has grown. The amount of surplus food produced in the U.S. in 2021 was 4.8 percent higher than it was in 2016. Now, nearly a decade after the commitment, there is finally a national road map. In June, a coalition of government agencies unveiled the National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics, that aims to concretize and make actionable the goal set in 2015.
