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The U.S. produces a lot of food waste. This place wants to address it, NPR, 11/26/25

. . ."We think of U.S. households wasting about a third of all their food that could be eaten," said Ted Jaenicke, a professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University who studies food waste and consumer purchasing behaviors.

"Visually, that's buying three bags of groceries at the supermarket and putting one in the trash on your way out the door."

. . . Much of that discarded food winds up in the country's landfills, where food waste represents nearly a quarter of the solid waste at those facilities.

"If [food] ends up in a landfill, instead of being eaten or composted, then it is a really big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions," Jaenicke said.

"Food waste in a landfill decomposes into methane. And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide." The EPA says that methane is some 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. "If food waste were its own country, then it would be the third largest greenhouse gas-emitter in the world," Jaenicke said.

In addition to the amount of food that consumers throw out, another significant contributor to the country's food waste problem happens at the production level.