FOOD WASTE IN CITIES

Up to 40%

of all food produced is wasted, contributing to extensive environmental, economic, and societal impacts.

Solutions to the enormous challenge of food waste can create equally extensive benefits, particularly at the local level:

By reducing the amount of food that is thrown out, cities can stabilize their waste management costs and make progress toward climate and sustainability goals; by rescuing surplus edible food, municipalities can address food gaps in local communities through capture and donation; and by recycling food scraps into compost, cities can put a nutrient rich soil amendment back into the ground that fosters growth of healthier plants and helps to sequester carbon.

OUR STORY

In 2018, as one of the Resilient Cities, funded by a grant with the Rockefeller Foundation, the City of Atlanta welcomed the opportunity to join the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Food Matters project. The Food Matters project, at NRDC, partners with cities to achieve meaningful reductions in food waste through the creation of comprehensive policies and programs with the main, but not only, goal being to determine how much of the food going into landfills is actually edible so that more infrastructure might be created to rescue this food and share it with food insecure populations.

PEER-TO-PEER LEARNING

A key component of the Food Matters initiative is peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing—providing a network in which best practices can be shared and evolved.

REPLICABLE CITY-BASED SOLUTIONS

With NRDC’s deep technical expertise and lessons learned from model cities, Food Matters is catalyzing the creation of replicable city-based solutions, helping to standardize market-supported best practices, and spurring meaningful progress.