State bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective, study finds

In the United States, more than a third of the food supply goes uneaten. Waste occurs at multiple levels in the production and supply chain and is a major contributor to climate change.

Food rotting in landfills produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

Some states have taken steps to try to reduce this food waste, but a new study found that state bans on food waste in landfills have had little effect, with one exception.

The research is published in the journal science Thursday, looking at the first five states to implement food waste bans: California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts. Between 2014 and 2024, a total of nine states have banned commercial food suppliers such as Whole Foods and Applebee's from disposing of food waste in landfills.

The law requires them to compost or donate food waste instead. Sending food scraps to compost facilities or specially designed digesters can better capture or reduce methane emissions.

But new data shows that these laws have done little to help.

“We can confidently say the law has not worked. They certainly didn't achieve their desired goals,” said Robert Evan Sanders, assistant professor of marketing at the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management and co-author of the paper.

On average, the state's five laws resulted in a 1.5% reduction in landfill waste between 2014 and 2018, Sanders told NPR. The researchers determined that regulators expected the laws to reduce total waste going to landfills by 7–18% based on public documents and regulators' statements in the press.

“The laws had no clear impact on total landfill waste,” said co-author Ioannis (Yannis) Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business.

The researchers compared the five states in question to a composite of other similar states that had not enacted food waste bans. By comparing states, they can estimate how much total waste they would have produced had the ban not been in effect. They have collected waste data from environmental state agency reports.

The researchers said they couldn't measure food waste directly, because that data doesn't exist. But because organic waste is such a large component of total landfill waste, they argued that states should expect to see measurable reductions in total waste.

According to the study, Massachusetts stands out as the only state to meet its goal of reducing how much waste ends up in landfills, achieving an average reduction of 7% over five years, Stamatopoulos said.

The paper's authors say Massachusetts' success may be due in part to some steps the state has taken to make it easier for individuals and businesses to comply with the law.

Massachusetts had the most extensive network of food waste processing facilities, creating an easy alternative to landfills. Additionally, Massachusetts' law had the fewest exemptions. “So it makes it easier for people to understand the law,” Sanders said. The law was also enforced with inspections and fines, Sanders said. In contrast, the researchers wrote, “there is almost no application in other states.”

Sanders notes that some of the states the study evaluated have improved their waste management programs since 2018, the year the study stopped collecting data. For example, in 2022, California begins providing organic waste collection services to all residents and businesses. “They're trying to implement and do what we know works,” Sanders said.