Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever Interagency National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics
This week, the Biden-Harris Administration released its National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics to accelerate the prevention of food loss and waste, which will help cut costs for families, address climate change, and advance environmental justice. This is the first interagency national strategy that lays out a path for the United States to meet its national goal to halve food loss and waste by 2030. To help advance progress toward this goal, the Biden-Harris Administration has invested more than $200 million to reduce food loss and waste from the President’s Investing in America agenda.
Preventing food loss and waste will save families money and lower food costs. In the United States, the average family of four spends $1,500 each year on food that ends up uneaten. The National Strategy is a deliverable in the Biden-Harris Administration’s National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Additionally, preventing food loss and waste and recycling food and other organic waste will reduce landfill methane emissions, a key driver of the climate crisis, and advance the U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan. Food is the single most common material found in landfills, and 61 percent of methane generated by landfilled food waste is not captured by landfill gas collection systems and is released to the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.
The Biden-Harris Administration is also advancing environmental justice through this Strategy. Many of the highlighted programs in the Strategy are covered under the President’s Justice40 Initiative, which set the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution. The Strategy also recognizes that identifying and addressing the challenges related to food loss, food waste, and organic waste to help meet the needs of Tribal communities as well as communities with environmental justice concerns is integral. These communities bear the brunt of the adverse environmental, social, and economic consequences of waste management, among other systems.
The National Strategy identifies four objectives: