Rethink Food Waste Through Economics and Data (ReFED) spent more than a year in finding how Americans are wasting more that 62 million tons of food each year and looking for ways to fix the problem.
The group comprised of nonprofits, foundations, government leaders and businesses recommended a roadmap of 27 solutions to cut food waste by 20 percent within 10 years. Their suggestion is quite large but is believed to be a more modest goal compared to the one that the Obama Administration prepared last year to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030, according to Civil Eats.
The group's solution includes educating consumers, adjusting food packaging and standardizing food date labels, which is beneficial for the nation. ReFED believes that the solution could create 15,000 new jobs during those ten years.
It will provide 1.8 billion more meals annually to America's hungry and 2.6 million tons of foods each year will be kept away from landfills. It could also prevent 18 million tons of greenhouse gas emission and save 1.6 trillion gallons of water every year.
"At least 25 percent of the 1.6 trillion gallons of water will be saved in California," says Adam Rein, a managing director at MissionPoint Partners in Boston, who helped to coordinate the research project.
Meanwhile, among the 27 strategies the ReFED is suggesting, the top strategy to divert food waste is centralized composting. It is similar to backyard compost but it is a centralized version where all food scraps will end up as humus and not trash, as reported by NPR.
"Food waste recycling solutions like large-scale composting and anaerobic digestion have the potential to divert 9.5 million tons of food scraps from landfills every year," says Chris Hunt, who serves on ReFED's advisory council. He has written an analysis of the road map that explains how reducing food waste can also reduce the environmental impacts.
