“The following comes from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org), a national nonprofit organization working to strengthen local economies, and redirect waste into local recycling, composting, and reuse industries. It is reprinted here with permission.” 

The US Environmental Protection Agency has long been a strong advocate of food waste recovery. Its Food Waste Reduction Hierarchy has been widely disseminated and even written into local law.  Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law, for instance, has made it the policy of that state. More recently, in 2015, EPA joined with the US Department of Agriculture, in establishing the first ever domestic goal to reduce food loss and waste by half by the year 2030. The agency’s hierarchy remains an important guideline for how this goal is to be met: prevent food waste, feed hungry people, feed animals, and recover via industrial uses and anaerobic digestion. However, in the EPA’s hierarchy, composting is listed just before disposal via landfilling and incineration. We believe size matters.

ILSR supports the development of a diverse and distributed food waste reduction and recovery infrastructure. We hope local and state governments will consider using our hierarchy as a policy framework. We welcome comments and suggestions.

Hierarchy to Reduce Food Waste and Grow Community

Download the original PowerPoint presentation of the above slides here: ILSR Food Waste Hierarchy PowerPoint.

Download a pdf of the Hierarchy to Reduce Waste & Grow Community: ILSR Food Waste Hierarchy v2.

Check out other composting infographics here.

We want you to be able to share this graphic under creative commons license, free of cost. But please, make sure to let people know they should link to: https://ilsr.org/food-waste-hierarchy/ to see the original content.