ACTION PLAYBOOK:

Reduce Food Waste

  • Urge states to offer incentives to donate or compost excess food in order to help divert food waste from landfills.

    1. Customize and send an email to your state legislators

    2. Multiply your impact by asking a friend to do this too

    3. Report back


    How long does it take?     In 15 minutes, you can customize emails to all of your state legislators urging them to act.

  • Improper food waste disposal is a major source of methane emissions. Food waste reduction policies would divert organic waste from landfills and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Examples of these policies include incentives for composting and donating excess food.

1. Send personalized emails to your state legislators

It might be tempting to sign your name to the bottom of a completely prewritten email, but personalized emails are much more attention-grabbing. They also get processed individually, whereas mass-produced letters are batched. Our Slack #wins-shoutouts channel is packed with celebratory posts from changemakers who sent personalized emails to elected officials and received awesome personal responses. It’s always worth it!

Use the tool below to personalize and send an email to your state legislators about food waste reduction. In the template, make sure to customize the sections in brackets.

This letter is customized to your state legislators depending on their political ideology and the status of the featured policy in your state. If you see two or more legislators' names below, they will all receive the same letter. If you only see one legislator's name, it means your legislators are divided by political party, and you will be prompted to email the other(s) on the next screen.

2. Instantly double, 5x, 10x your impact

Network effects are powerful. We're not the only ones asking, “What more can I do?” So many folks in your immediate network likely wonder what more they can do as an individual to make a difference. Answering that question for others is an important climate action. Connecting others with opportunities to take productive climate action is a crucial step toward changing cultural norms, normalizing civic engagement on climate, and making real progress.

Spread the word about this issue and Action Playbook! That could be…

  • a post on Reddit or the social media network of your choice

  • sharing links in a Slack community

  • a group text

  • an email listserv

  • get creative!

You can frame it however you think might be the most effective, but here's a start:

Did you know food waste in landfills is an urgent climate problem? I just took action on reducing food waste using this Climate Changemakers Action Playbook, and it was pretty satisfying to channel my climate frustration into meaningful action directed straight at the key decision-makers. Let me know what you think! And if you get something out of the playbook, definitely pass it on to someone else who’d be interested. I’m starting to realize just how many people in our network want to do more about climate change but don’t know where to start!

3. Get a response? Share back.

If you receive a response from your state legislator, please share it with advocacy@climatechangemakers.org. You can simply forward emails or send a screenshot. This enables the Climate Changemakers team to take note of the collective impact of the Climate Changemakers community.

👎 Did your legislator give a reason it can’t happen in your state? Anything you learn from their response is valuable—including their real or perceived barriers to action—so please report back. We’re trying to grease the wheels for deploying climate solutions, so the more we know, the more effective we can become as connectors and advocates.

👍 Did you get an enthusiastic response? Awesome! In addition to forwarding it along, consider sharing it publicly in the Climate Changemakers Slack #wins-shoutouts channel—others in our community may find it motivating and inspiring. We’re normalizing civic action on climate, and it starts with talking about it.

And that’s it, playbook complete! Feel accomplished.
Thank you for taking action.

Want more action?
Go to the current Action Plan

Congrats, you just took productive climate action.

…or maybe you haven’t yet, and you just skipped down to this section. In any case, here’s some additional info to learn more about the problem we’ve got on our hands.

Improper food waste disposal is a major source of methane emissions.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, plays a significant role in accelerating climate change. Its presence in the atmosphere is short-lived, but it traps heat at 80x the potency of CO2. Methane’s potency makes it an urgent problem; quickly reducing methane emissions would help slow the pace of global warming in the short term and buy us time to solve particularly vexing decarbonization challenges.

In the U.S., methane accounts for around 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and while a lot of methane is produced by the energy sector, landfills account for 17% of U.S. methane pollution. When organic material decomposes without oxygen in a landfill, it emits methane. Shockingly, this happens to about 30-40% of food produced in the U.S. every year.

Organic landfill emissions present such a significant climate problem that the nonprofit Project Drawdown, which evaluates a comprehensive list of climate solutions in terms of decarbonization potential, ranks reducing food waste as the #1 most effective climate solution in a 2ºC warming scenario.

How to keep organic waste out of landfills

There are multiple ways to achieve the goal of reducing food waste, from the production stage of food all the way through its user stages, and many are remarkably cost-effective and low-tech. The nonprofit ReFED categorizes policy levers for reducing food waste into 3 buckets:

  1. Prevention (e.g. more precise date labeling),

  2. Rescuing (e.g. donating food instead of throwing it out), and

  3. Recycling (e.g. composting and using compost as fertilizer).

It’s common for farmers and other producers to dispose of excess food products, but there are nonprofits across the country that have the capacity to take in and distribute surplus food. Getting producers to donate those goods so they don’t end up in landfills is a critical step in reducing food waste. This is an example of a policy lever focused on rescuing.

Sometimes food disposal cannot be avoided, and that’s where recycling waste comes in. When food must be thrown away, composting is the best recycling method. Composting is a sped-up version of organic matter’s natural decomposition, which is achieved by providing an ideal environment for food waste to turn back into fertilizer.

It’s a straightforward solution, but widespread composting hasn’t yet materialized in the United States. Only 12% of American households have access to public composting programs. In a recent survey, 72% of Americans reported that they don’t compost their waste.

The good news is that there’s clear willingness to start: of those who do not compost, 69% indicated they would compost if it were easier to do so. That’s where the government can step in.

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