From Landfill to Innovation: Rethinking Food Waste

By Jacob Rueda

Behind a Mexican restaurant, an uneaten fajita plate sits inside a black plastic bag. It’s one of hundreds of meals served that day that were partially or completely uneaten. By dawn it will be on a truck, buried in a landfill by nightfall, and releasing methane by morning. Multiply that by every restaurant, in every city, every day, and you get one of the most invisible environmental problems in the country.

Food waste and loss affect different aspects of existence, including the environment, climate, and economies. The staggering figures surrounding food waste raise the question: why isn’t it addressed more?

NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE IT INTO THE NEWS

Despite its scale, food waste rarely makes the news. It’s not because journalists don’t care. It’s that the issue doesn’t fit the mold of what newsrooms consider a “story.”

There’s no clear villain, no scandal, and usually no broken law. It doesn’t align with an ideology or a political fight. It’s a slow, structural problem that doesn’t produce dramatic footage or easy narratives.

It also lacks what editors call news value. Food waste doesn’t explode, burn, collapse, or trend. It can’t be covered in a breaking-news format, and it doesn’t generate the clicks, outrage, or attention that news organizations today depend on for survival. When weighed against crime, politics, conflict, or a viral story, food waste drops to the bottom of the rundown every time.

Social media isn’t any more forgiving. Algorithms prioritize posts that trigger quick reactions like humor, anger, tribal loyalty, controversy. A post about food loss doesn’t spark those responses, so it sinks. Even when people agree the issue matters, it doesn’t “perform,” and platforms quietly suppress it.

In the end, food waste becomes a quiet problem. It is massive in scale, simple in concept, but invisible in practice because the systems that decide what the public sees aren’t built to amplify it.

However, even though food waste lacks the dramatic narratives typical of news stories, its impact on the environment and economy makes it necessary to address in news coverage.

SOLVABLE ON THE SURFACE

On the surface, food waste seems like one of the easiest problems to fix. At home, the solutions really are simple: eat what you buy, save what you can’t finish, and actually return to the leftovers you put in the fridge.

However, the picture changes the moment you move beyond the kitchen table.

Grocery stores can donate unsold but edible food to pantries, churches, and local charities. Restaurants can send safe, unused meals to food banks and compost much of their kitchen scraps. In theory, the tools and methods are already there.

In practice, using them costs money.

Sorting edible from inedible scraps takes labor. Composting requires contracts, bins, training, and space. Donating food comes with liability rules, health codes, inspections, and strict storage requirements. Even though the federal Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects donors, many businesses still fear being held responsible if someone gets sick.

In the end, most restaurants take the path that guarantees no fines, no extra staff hours, and no added paperwork: they throw food away. Despite this reality, addressing food waste involves not just individual actions but also looking at systemic factors like economic disparities and societal attitudes toward food consumption.

METHANE EMISSIONS

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), food is the single largest material in U.S. landfills - more than plastic, paper, or metal. It makes up over 24% of all municipal waste. Once food is buried, it doesn’t decompose the way it would in a backyard compost pile. It rots without oxygen, creating methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

Landfills have become one of the largest human-related methane sources in the United States, and because food waste is a major component, it plays a substantial role in those emissions. EPA researchers have previously warned that reducing food waste is one of the fastest ways to cut methane emissions, faster than switching cars, electrifying buildings, or any long-haul climate policy.

But none of this is visible to the average person. A tossed-out meal doesn’t burst into flames, or spill into rivers, or become a viral video. It just disappears into a trash bin, then a truck, then a landfill before quietly becoming a source for a powerful heat-trapping gas.

Food waste isn’t the only source of methane, but it’s one of the few that people and businesses can actually control.

ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FOOD WASTE/LOSS

The financial cost of food that never gets eaten is considerable. Globally, food loss and waste represent roughly $1 trillion in lost value every year. That figure isn’t abstract, but rather reflects the seeds, fertilizer, water, land, electricity, fuel, equipment, and labor used to grow and transport food that ends up in the trash.

Producers alone lose about $750 billion annually from food that spoils before it’s sold. That is not including waste from retailers, restaurants, and households.

What makes it more difficult to accept is that much of that wasted food could have been used to feed people who actually need it. In 2024, 47 million people in the United States lived in households that struggled to afford enough to eat.

Despite that reality, the ability to measure how many Americans are food insecure has now been weakened. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled its annual Household Food Insecurity Report, the nation’s primary tool for tracking hunger.

The agency dismissed the report as “redundant,” calling it “fear mongering,” and saying that it “failed” to show “anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”  This is despite the fact that lawmakers, researchers, and food assistance programs have relied on it in the past.

Without reliable data, it becomes harder to build policy, target resources, or acknowledge the true scale of hunger, all while billions of dollars’ worth of edible food is thrown away.

ALL IS NOT LOST

Despite setbacks, practical solutions are emerging to curb food waste and even address its climate impact. Some restaurants and retailers are facing the challenge by adopting innovative solutions like food donations, composting, and the incorporation of apps into their sustainability practices.

Apps like Too Good To Go and Flashfood help divert edible food from the trash by selling surplus items at steep discounts. Too Good To Go partners with restaurants and bakeries, while Flashfood works with grocery stores to move near-date or overstocked items. Both apps are available for Android and Apple devices.

Smart packaging is also gaining traction. By using components such as oxygen absorbers and intelligent indicators like 3M’s MonitorMark™ time–temperature labels, these packages provide real-time information about food quality, slow spoilage, and extend shelf life, saving consumers and retailers from premature losses.

Innovation is happening on the energy front as well. New technologies capture methane released from decomposing food and convert it into usable power. At the University of California San Diego, purified landfill methane fuels a 2.8-megawatt fuel cell within the campus’s advanced microgrid system.

Many cities are also expanding composting programs that turn food scraps into nutrient-rich compost for agriculture, reducing landfill volume and returning value to the soil.

Individually, these solutions may seem small. Collectively, they point to a future where far less food ends up in the trash. If anything, they prove that with enough commitment, meaningful progress is possible.