The USDA and the EPA are funding campaigns to cut at-home food waste, but a trash bin full of challenges remains.
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The USDA and the EPA are funding campaigns to cut at-home food waste, but a trash bin full of challenges remains.
October 16, 2024
Canned goods and other foods found during a Denver waste audit. (Photo courtesy of Denver Department of Public Health and Environment)
Over the last five years, Lesly Baesens and her team have been enthusiastically digging through Denver residents’ garbage cans. They call the practice “waste auditing.” And with each unopened bag of pasta, jug of expired milk, and clamshell of wilted spinach tallied, Baesens deepens her commitment to figuring out the most effective way to ensure groceries end up eaten rather than trashed. Education is all well and good, she says, but, “we are trying to provide actual material that people can use to very concretely help them reduce food waste.”
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To that end, she’s launched and tracked the results of three consumer-focused campaigns to date. Each is structured similarly: measure how much food is being wasted, provide households with various materials and tools to reduce food waste, and then measure again.
Baesens, food waste czar for the city of Denver, is one of many public officials who have embraced this approach to keeping food out of trash. For about a decade, other countries as well as cities, states, and nonprofits in the U.S. have been experimenting with campaigns that target home cooks, and tracking progress along the way.
Because 40 percent of food waste happens within American homes, experts are especially excited about preventing waste through consumer awareness and education campaigns.
Food waste, after all, is a mountain-of-trash-sized problem. In the U.S., about 35 percent of food is thrown out before it’s eaten. Even before that food gets to the dump, its production—involving fossil fuel–based fertilizers and pesticides, nitrous oxide released in fields, and energy use—results in annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 42 coal-fired power plants.
Once piled to rot there, food waste produces 58 percent of the methane emissions from landfills. And despite a 2015 national goal to cut waste in half by 2030—a pivotal year for slowing warming enough to avoid climate catastrophe—food waste has actually increased, with just a slight dip in 2022.
That lack of progress is one reason why the Biden administration in June unveiled a national strategy to reduce food waste, including plans to prevent waste in grocery stores and schools, increase composting infrastructure, and promote food donation.
Because 40 percent of food waste happens within American homes, experts in the field are especially excited by the strategy’s emphasis on preventing waste through consumer awareness and education campaigns. The federal government is getting on board in a big way: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is investing $34 million to develop a campaign and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is simultaneously spending $2.5 million to fund a research project. (There is precedent for this: During WWI and WWII, the federal government ran various campaigns to encourage Americans to reduce food waste to contribute to war efforts.)
During WWII, the USDA presented reducing food waste as part of the war effort. (Image courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries)
At the annual ReFED conference in June, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the USDA would draw from what it’s learned helping farmers adopt climate-friendly practices, which can benefit their bottom line in the long run. “We can do the same thing with folks in their homes,” he said. “We can make the case that by being conscious of food loss . . . you can actually save money. ”
It’s a tall order. Because while ReFED estimates consumer campaigns have the greatest potential to cut food waste and related emissions, the evidence to support that is still coming in. Furthermore, even if campaigns do work, experts are still unsure which messages are the most effective and how to tailor those messages to different populations. Finally, to truly move the needle, many say, campaigns will have to be rolled out in tandem with efforts to fix structural causes of food waste at home, like confusing expiration date labels—many of which require policy change.
“We’re at a point now where food waste is a commonly understood issue,” said Nina Sevilla, a program advocate at the environmental NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “People agree wasting food is bad, but there are social barriers preventing people from reducing it.”
In 2016, NRDC launched Save the Food, the most well-known consumer food waste campaign in the U.S.. Its messaging materials ran the gamut, with tips on meal prep and better food storage, a dinner party calculator for more accurate portioning, recipes using “past their prime” ingredients, and a tool that could estimate how much money a family was wasting on uneaten food based on household size.
Since the official campaign ended in 2019, the organization has used those resources as a tool within in its Food Matters program, which focuses on helping partner cities cut food waste using multiple interventions. Denver is one of those cities, and in 2021, Baesens launched her first campaign with NRDC as a partner. They called it “Busy People Love Leftovers.”
“We landed on eating leftovers because they’re one of the most frequently wasted items,” she said, and it’s one simple behavior change that’s easy to build a campaign around. The team chose 300 families to receive packets that included a booklet with information on eating leftovers, a fridge magnet that functioned like a mini white board for listing leftovers, and cling wrap declaring “Eat This First” to be affixed to containers.
These are the kind of active campaigns that excite Brian Roe, a researcher and professor at Ohio State University who is now running the USDA research project to evaluate food-waste campaign strategies. Roe said many consumer campaigns are built on a behavior change model called MOA: motivation, opportunity, and ability.
“You have to pump up that motivation with awareness, and then you need to show them where the opportunities are, and then give them that one skill or that one technique—or maybe it’s one item, like the cling wrap—that actually gives them a chance to not forget about that really expensive salmon sitting in the back corner,” he said.
Still, there’s not enough research on how to best tackle the process, and that’s what his project is meant to address. This month, his team is finalizing three municipalities where they will launch and then study the impact of consumer campaigns.
Roe agrees with almost every other food waste researcher on one point: So far, all evidence points to the fact that the most motivating messages are about the dollars and cents thrown away with every moldy block of cheese. The lesson seems clear: “Don’t talk about the environment, talk about money,” he said.
Many campaigns take this tack. Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s “Don’t Let Good Food Go Bad” campaign features a “bad apple” villain who kicks a resident’s wallet into the trash. “Spoiled food costs each household in Oregon over $1,600 a year on average,” the campaign’s website states at the top.
Oregon’s “Don’t Let Good Food Go Bad” campaign (left) focuses on a “Bad Apple” stealing money. In Baltimore, NRDC partnered with the city on a campaign (right) that also featured money as a motivating factor. (Images courtesy of Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Baltimore Office of Sustainability)
The EPA’s food waste experts are also keen on this point of entry. Behind the scenes, the Office of Research and Development has been working to update the national number—$1,500—that’s typically used to illustrate how much families typically waste on uneaten food. At the ReFED conference, one expert told Civil Eats the number is much higher now, since it was calculated many years ago and food prices rise over time. (A spokesperson confirmed the agency is working on the stat but couldn’t provide a timeline for when it might be revealed).
On September 13, the agency put out a request for proposals (RFP) offering up to $34 million to a partner organization to develop and implement a national “consumer wasted-food reduction campaign.” The EPA’s spokesperson said the agency will collaborate with the selected applicant on the campaign and closely monitor the performance. The RFP specifies that the campaign should be organized around consistent messages while allowing for local customization.
Deciding how deep to go on customization will likely be one challenge. While it’s clear that some form of customizing is worth it, there are so many ways to slice and dice demographics—by income, age, or household size, for example—and the research so far is unclear on how much is gained from extra precision, Roe said. “Everybody is trying to understand what is the payoff from tailoring and customization.”
In Denver, after “Busy People Love Leftovers” ended, Baesens organized focus groups to plan her second campaign. For her, the biggest takeaway from those conversations was that “it doesn’t matter your income level, everybody wastes food. They just waste food for different reasons.”
For instance, one might assume someone pinching pennies would waste less, but she said some low-income individuals in the focus groups had grown up in situations where hunger was prevalent. As a result, when they cooked for their families, they often overprepared, because of a deep-seated fear of not having enough.
Cultural differences may also be a factor. Spend enough time with food waste experts, and the U.K.’s long-running “Love Food, Hate Waste” campaign is bound to come up. But in an interview at the ReFED conference, Secretary Vilsack said the USDA research project was necessary to understand how American habits and motivations might be different.
“I really do think there’s a different relationship with food in different countries and different cultures,” he said. “So, you can’t assume that what works in Britain or what works in France or what works wherever is going to work in the U.S.”
And no matter how tailored or effective the messaging, other systemic barriers remain.
“It doesn’t matter your income level, everybody wastes food. They just waste food for different reasons.”
Take expiration dates as an example. In her second campaign, Baesens included educational materials around interpreting expiration dates, since people often throw good food away due to a date stamped on the package.
Sevilla, at NRDC, said she’d love to see a national campaign to help Americans understand what food date labels mean. But what would be even better, she said, is if policymakers also acted on the issue. To that end, NRDC has been pushing for the passage of a California bill that would mandate standardized date labels on packaged foods.
The law would require food date labels to use standardized phrases and would eliminate the confusing “sell by” dates that are intended for retailers, not customers. The California legislature passed the bill at the end of August, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law on September 30.
Since California is such a big state, Sevilla said, the legislation will have national implications; many experts celebrated the passage and called it game-changing for the whole country. At the federal level, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) has been repeatedly reintroducing the Food Date Labeling Act for years.
Understanding date labels was one element of the “Save More Than Food” campaign Roe evaluated in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in 2023. The campaign, which was developed by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, involved newsletters, social media, webinars, and even some backyard composting support and materials. After the campaign, his team found composting in the area nearly doubled, participants in the study reported wasting less, and significantly less food was thrown in the trash.
These stickers (left) were distributed as part of Denver’s “Busy People Love Leftovers” campaign. Lesly Baesens (right) shows off a container provided as part of Denver’s second consumer waste campaign. (Photos courtesy of Denver Department of Public Health and Environment)
The results of other campaigns have been less clear. The U.K.’s “Love Food Hate Waste” campaign, for example, has been running since 2007. Evaluators have found positive indicators such as an association between those who recognize the campaign and those who say they’ve changed specific behaviors to try to waste less food at home. From 2007 to 2018, household food waste there did fall significantly and consistently, from 91 kg per person per year down to 67 kg—but then it started rising again and was back to 75kg in 2021.
And in Denver, Baesens’ results confound her. After all three campaigns, surveys indicated an extremely high percentage of participants used the materials provided. Many reported changing their behaviors and wasting less. On paper, the campaigns were a slam dunk. But out on the curb, there was no significant reduction in the volume of food waste the team’s gloved hands pulled out of the cans.
With the first campaign, there were clear limitations to their audit methods that might explain the gap between survey results and waste reductions. But the same thing happened on the next campaign, leaving Baesens puzzled. “It just leaves the door open to a lot of different theories. Is it that we just need to sample way more trash? Is it that we need to be more granular? We don’t actually have an answer,” she said.
For now, Baesens has hit pause on her consumer campaigns. She’s waiting eagerly for the results of Roe’s USDA-funded studies, and is hopeful—especially now that he’s got the resources of the federal government behind him—that his research will point to the most effective direction going forward.
Plus, in addition to his USDA work evaluating consumer campaigns across different cities, Roe is also working on a study that will attempt to quantify the discrepancy between how much people say they’re wasting and what actually ends up in the trash.
That could help make implementing and tweaking campaigns much easier and faster in the future, since it would allow those working in the field to simply apply a formula to what people report, to land on an estimate of real waste rather than having to handle endless rotten bananas.
“We all want to believe that we’re doing so much better than we are,” Baesens said. “But I think the first step is having an honest look at what we’re really doing and then recognizing that, ‘You know what? Yeah, I’m wasting food. But I can do better, and I can save money.’”
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