Just One State Has Managed to Cut Food Waste

Kay Masterson has always wanted to make her Boston-area restaurant more sustainable, partnering with an organic farm to get some vegetables close by and offering reusable containers for customers' takeout. Right away, there were challenges: $3,000 a year for bins and pickup. Busy dishwashers could contaminate an entire bag of compostable materials by missing a single butter packet. And customers in the habit of just chucking their leftovers needed signage to get uneaten food into the right place. Masterson's operation figured out those problems, but she knows not everyone will, the AP reports. "What's hard is knowing that the restaurant industry is such a difficult industry, it's been such a challenging few years. Our costs are constantly going up," Masterson says. "People give up."

The difficulty of cutting food waste has spoiled several states' attempts to ban it, and only one—Massachusetts—has actually succeeded, according to a study last month in the journal Science. Massachusetts did it by building one of the most extensive composting networks in the country, inspecting more often, keeping the rules simple, and levying heavy fines on businesses that don't comply, the study found. That matters because food waste contributes to over half the planet-warming methane emissions that come from landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Ioannis Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study's authors, said organic waste laws in the other key states examined—California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont—appeared to have little effect. To get a picture of how a state's waste ban was working, the researchers corresponded with state agencies and filed public record requests to gather information about what was sent to a landfill or burned in the years before and after legislation was phased in. Then they used statistics to predict the amount of waste that should have been generated, and compared that to reality. (Click for more details from the states studied.)