Fighting Food Waste Needs both Policy and People’s Awareness
Nina Sevilla, a program advocate for food waste and food systems at NRDC, shares her views on the food waste issue
When she was working at a local community garden to engage with the community better, Nina Sevilla was fascinated to see how beautiful foods are. Sevilla loved baby carrots since she was a kid, but she had no idea that they have natural hair and how such foods grow. Realizing how distant people including herself are from the food system, Sevilla desired to improve this distance as well as problems with the food system that is exploitative of the land and the people.
Sevilla worked at a community food bank, providing emergency food for the community after college, but she wanted something bigger: She wanted to change the structure in a more systemic way through policy. Pursuing that path, Sevilla joined Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, a nonprofit organization that works across environmental issues from land and ocean conservation to food systems. She is a program advocate for food waste and food systems at NRDC.
This January, New York State enacted Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law, requiring large institutions to donate edible food and recycle food scraps if they are within 25 miles of a composting facility. Such changes in policies are attributed to the efforts of environmental advocacy groups as well as legislators.
Both New York State and California now require businesses and institutions to donate and/or recycle food scraps. How do you think such changes in policy will impact the businesses and other states?
Some other cities and states have implemented organic waste bans. Vermont, for example, has a Universal Recycling Law that requires food scraps to be recycled. They saw the number of business food scrap haulers that collect food scraps increases triple from 2012 when it started.
The policies in New York and California, they just started, so it takes time for businesses to figure out how to comply with the new law and after that, we will start seeing more impacts.
I know other cities that don’t already have those programs are starting to ramp them up, so I think people in other places are getting more information about new programs popping up.
So, I think we can anticipate seeing similar changes in the business landscape and in the composting landscape with these new states too.
NRDC has been working on a project called Food Matters for a long period of time, partnering with cities to reduce food waste through policies and programs. Please tell me one of NRDC’s work that you find satisfying.
A little under a year ago, we formed a small coalition with Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, World Wildlife Fund and ReFed. We came together to outline a food loss and waste policy action plan for the federal government. In this plan, there are suggestions of how the federal government can reduce food waste.
Coming together with this coalition of groups in the first place, I think was huge for coordinating action on policy regarding food waste. Then out of this action plan came the Zero Food Waste Act and the Compost Act which were introduced into Congress in 2021.
They haven’t been voted into law yet, but I think just the fact that they were introduced is huge because it is one of the First Federal pieces of legislation that is specifically about food waste and getting people more familiar with the issues as an important first step.
Do you find any difficulties when you work on passing such policies?
I think one of the struggles that aren’t as good is that policy takes such a long time. It takes a long time to figure out how to pass the policy and then measure it and see the impact. Oftentimes you don’t see the impacts for many more years, so it’s hard to know sometimes what the right thing to do is and what could possibly and feasibly get passed by a legislator. You need to compromise on some things and so whatever policy you’re going to pass isn’t going to be your perfect ideal thing.
When it comes to policymaking, there are policies for corporations and big businesses, but it seems there isn’t a lot or at all for residential buildings. For example, there are food grinders in some apartments so that people can throw out food waste in the sink, which can also lead to sewage pollution. Has NRDC been planning on addressing such issues?
When you grind the food scraps and put them down the sewer, it’s harder to compost that material. It is often either separated or anaerobically digested. There aren’t a lot of policies for zoning codes and building codes around food waste that exist. This is an area that we are actually looking into. We suggest some model policies that states could adopt further building codes to encourage food waste diversion. Another option could be to have mandate residential composting, making sure that there’s a place for compost and a place for it to get picked up like an easy way to bring all those bins out and for a truck to come and pick it up.
Along with the efforts of policymaking, it seems that people’s awareness is also important. A Study of NRDC shows that 75% of New Yorkers feel less guilty if they save leftovers, even if they think they will not be eaten. What do you think deters people from fighting food waste?
Behavior change overall is a hard but important piece of environmental sustainability work. I think a lot of people are really accustomed to their routines and disrupting their routine is really difficult. If people have access to a compost service, they don’t feel as bad throwing out a lot of food. But really what we need is to reduce the amount of food that people buy in the first place so that they just buy what they need.
We as a society in America, have a very overabundant mindset around food and the relationship with it is very personal, so telling people what to do around food and getting people to change their behaviors around food are very difficult.
Considering these changes in policy as well as difficulties fighting food waste, do you find hope in fighting food waste?
One area that is growing and gives me hope is that people are connecting food waste’s impacts to climate change more. And people are seeing how it can be a climate solution by diverting food scraps from landfill, composting it, adding compost to the soil, creating more of a closed-loop system and keeping nutrients in the soil. And so, this area I think gives me a lot of hope.
