Plastic Pollution Footprint of Food-waste Strategies Remains Unstudied at National Scale

Plastic contamination should be a central concern in efforts to deal with food waste, which campaigners call one of the most overlooked problems of the climate crisis, researchers have said. This is despite the fact that, as the chef, author and activist Max La Manna puts it, food waste management is one of the few climate problems where everyone wins. About one-third of all food produced worldwide is wasted each year, according to UN data.

In the US, 40% of food waste goes to landfill, where it creates 30m metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year – more than Cuba’s total annual CO2 emissions in 2024, which amounted to 24.4m tonnes. A new study, published in Nature Food, used life-cycle analysis modelling to compare the impacts – in terms of climate, nutrient pollution and plastic contamination – of different food-waste management scenarios. The authors, based at the University of Vermont, compared the annual climate impacts of landfilled food waste with the climate impact of alternative recycling pathways and found that diverting food waste from landfill would reduce climate impacts by between 89% and 99%.