Food Waste Volume Begins to Decline, But Remains High

The good news is that the U.S. has made progress on reducing food waste. The bad is that the sheer volume of unsold and uneaten food bound for landfills and other sites remains high.

That is according to a new study from ReFED, a nonprofit focused on the issue of food waste. The study, “Progress on the Plate: 2026 U.S. Food Waste Report,” found that the U.S. accounted for 70 million tons of surplus food in 2024, about 29% of total food supply, but a 2.2% reduction from the 2023 level.

The decrease marked the first year-to-year reduction in the total amount of food that wound up unsold or uneaten since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report. The decrease was led by a nearly 950,000-ton reduction in residential food waste.

“With higher food prices, Americans are looking for ways to extend their grocery dollars,” ReFED President Dana Gunders said in a statement. “Using up more of what they’re already purchasing and wasting less is proving to be one of the most accessible ways to do it.” Private and public sector funding for waste-reduction initiatives also helped drive the decrease, the report found.

Even so, more than one-third of the food produced nationwide is never eaten, wasting both the resources that were used to produce it and creating environmental issues, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Food waste is the single most common material landfilled and incinerated, contributing to a significant portion of methane emissions.

In Connecticut, more than 516,000 — or one in seven people — are food insecure, according to Connecticut Foodshare, one of several food banks in the state. This includes more than 122,000 — or one in six children — said the organization, which distributes food to more than 480 food pantries, community kitchens, and shelters.

“Food waste is a big problem,” Jackson Somers, a UConn environmental economist who focuses on the waste industry, told The Goshen News. Both the volume of food that goes uneaten and the environmental costs are staggering and impact the entire supply chain, he said.

“About 40% of our food is wasted in some manner so imagine that, for every apple that is produced, you’re cutting out 40% from consumption,” he said.

On the national level, several bills have been introduced in Congress aimed at tackling the issue. These include the Zero Food Waste Act that was reintroduced in December by Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). The legislation aims to create an EPA grant program to fund planning, measurement, and implementation efforts of food waste reduction projects for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as nonprofits.

Another bill, the Food Date Labeling Act, reintroduced last year with bipartisan support by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), would standardize date labels on food packaging to make them less confusing to consumers.

“Current labels lack clarity about when products are safe to eat — discouraging donations and contributing to food waste and insecurity,” Blumenthal said in announcing the legislation.

Somers agreed that U.S. food labeling confuses the average consumer and should be made clearer: “But I would say that, if you only get one bullet to fire regarding food waste policy, the big thing is commercial donation where you get supermarkets, distributors, and farms to donate their [surplus] food to food banks,” he said.

Adjacent to that, he said, would be for states to back large food-sourcing programs that work with regional food banks. He pointed to New York’s Feeding New York State (Feeding NYS) program, part of the national Feeding America hunger-relief organization. Feeding NYS is a network of 10 regional food banks that support more than 5,000 community-based organizations, including food pantries and soup kitchens.

“They basically have a system where they go to farmers and say, ‘Look, you have all this unpicked food. Let’s agree on a price at which we can buy it and we’ll collect it,’” Somers said. The upshot is that the food banks wind up acquiring food for a fraction of the usual cost — around 16 to 20 cents a pound, he said.

When it comes to taking action, much of the work is being done on the local, city, or county level rather than the national level, Somers said.

One of Connecticut’s local initiatives can be found at UConn’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering where engineering student Caitlin Noonan is using food scraps gathered from the school’s dining halls to help fight air pollution.

Her independent research project involves converting food scraps into activated carbon-based material, a porous charcoal product, that can be used to capture carbon dioxide from air and energy generation emissions streams.

“The objective is to turn food waste, which is an otherwise pretty useless waste source, into something valuable that can remove greenhouse gasses to prevent the effects of climate change,” Noonan told The Goshen News.

She noted that UConn already sends a portion of its food waste to Southington-based Quantum Biopower, which runs the state’s first commercial food waste recycling facility that uses anaerobic digestion to convert it into methane.

“Ultimately, we need many solutions to handle the large amounts of food waste generated,” Noonan said. “My research and these other initiatives are great beginnings.”