Food Waste: A Fermi Analysis

The Impact of 10% Reduction in U.S. Food Waste

The Research

For most, the problem of food waste went unnoticed until the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shook the world with its claim that one-third of food is wasted. Their estimate for the weight of U.S. food waste, the main metric for food waste measurement — 103 million tons.

The FAO stood behind their data and their claim despite the disbelief of many and the difficulty of measuring food waste on a system-wide scale. The result — many respected reports have created their own estimates, ranging from 35 million tons (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2014) to 80 million tons (U.S. National Institutes of Health 2010).

One of the most widely-accepted data reports on food waste measurement is ReFed (released in 2016, downloadable here) supported by National Resource Defense Council. This data will be used for our Fermi analysis. Appendix A of Wasted — How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill provides a nice summary of these reports (NRDC 44).

Our Claim: A reduction of food waste in the U.S. by 10% would have huge benefits to society and stakeholders.

• A 10% reduction in U.S. food waste equates to a 12.5% reduction in downstream food waste, our group’s target.

The Costs of 10% of U.S. Food Waste Each Year

$21.8 billion

0.13% of U.S. GDP

$180 average household cost

Environmental Cost

0.26% of greenhouse gas emission = 18 million tons of CO2 equivalent

8 million acres of land = land area of Maryland

390 million pounds of fertilizer nutrients

1.4% of freshwater use =1.7 trillion gallons

Potential Benefit

$50 billion economic gain

125 calories per person per day

Bottom line: 10% of food waste = 5.24 million tons yearly

*Data compiled from ReFed and NDRC reports discussed above