By Arlene Karidis, Freelance writer. Originally published in Waste360 on February 18, 2025
About $1 trillion per year worth of food is either wasted at the retail or consumer level or lost before reaching either of those destinations. Most of it gets landfilled. What’s worrisome about this reality is that studies project, without robust diversion strategies, the world will see a 60 percent increase in planet-warming landfill methane emissions by 2050—most which comes from rotting food. Meanwhile, 2.3 billion people go hungry.
A major barrier to tackling this waste is that disposing food is often cheaper than donating or repurposing it. In answer, some countries are leveraging deterrence policies to change the economics to favor resource recovery.
“For a food waste deterrence policy to work, it must tip the scales so that it is more expensive to throw away food than to get surplus food to people who need it or to send scraps for recycling,” says Heather Latino, an instructor at the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.
“Policymakers can tip the scales by making it illegal to send food to landfills and increasing disposal costs, among other polices that help ensure that surplus food is not treated like waste, but as a valuable resource,” she says.
Latino is a co-author of a new report assessing the effectiveness of several deterrence practices in three countries that lead in this space: South Korea, France, and Peru. She and her co-authors from the Global FoodBanking Network share insights gleaned hoping to benefit policy- makers looking to shift a carbon-intensive problem into a solution.
Read the full article.
Food Law & Policy, Commentary
Policy to Reduce Methane Emissions and Feed More People
April 3, 2025