New Toolkit Explores Local Policies and Initiatives to Reduce Food Waste Across the United States

New toolkit highlights policies and best practices to support local policymakers and advocates to reduce food waste, improve food security, and bolster resource circularity across the country.

By Akif Khan, Senior Clinical Fellow

In the United States, food waste continues to be the most common material sent to landfills. 70 million tons of food waste is generated annually across all sectors, including producers, manufacturers, retailers, food service, and residential. Combined, this is a waste of $380 billion every single year.

Policies across all levels of government play a role in reducing food waste, but local governments in particular (both city and county governments) are well positioned to facilitate solutions to this problem. Given their important roles in managing waste disposal for residences and businesses and in controlling land use within their jurisdictions through zoning and permitting processes, local governments are instrumental in shaping the food waste reduction landscape. Indeed, a significant number of local governments throughout the country have begun adopting policies specifically to reduce food waste.

To support this ongoing work at the local government level, the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, in collaboration with the Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, has released Waste Less, Feed More: A Local Food Waste Policy Toolkit. This toolkit outlines the unique and interesting ways that local governments in the United States have used their authority to establish laws, facilitate programs, and provide resources to reduce the amount of food going to waste destinations.

The Toolkit is organized into two parts. The first part of the Toolkit explains the legal foundation for local government action on food waste reduction. This includes a discussion of food waste reduction policies at both the federal and state levels, an explanation of principles of local governance, and the interactions between local and state government legal authorities.

The second part of the Toolkit explores an array of local food waste policy solutions, broken down into the following 8 sections:

1. Local Government Strategies for Food Waste Reduction
2. Requiring Donation of Safe, Excess Edible Food
3. Diverting Food Waste from Landfills and Incinerators
4. Using Special Event Permitting and Licensing Requirements to Drive Food Waste Reduction
5. Aligning Zoning and Permitting Requirements with Composting Goals
6. Market Development for Compost End Products
7. Tracking Progress and Compliance through Mandated Reporting
8. Government Support for Food Waste Reduction Infrastructure and Capacity Building

Each of these sections focuses on a specific food waste policy area, providing a short federal and state policy background, outlining a number of best practices for implementation (along with many real-world examples), and spotlighting a locality that demonstrates these best practices.

Finally, the Toolkit also provides links to model policies from partner organizations and, when model policies weren’t available, provides sample policy language for localities to utilize as they look to adopt food waste reduction policies of their own. All sample policies in the Toolkit cite references to the localities or resources from which the sample policies were developed, and each sample policy is designed to be adapted by localities to fit their specific goals and needs.

To hear more about this new resource, register to join FLPC’s official launch webinar on September 17^th from 3–4pm EST here. Alongside an overview of the Toolkit, the webinar will also feature local government stakeholders who will share their perspectives on how strategies, collaboration, and implementation can shape and influence food waste reduction policies.