The letter came on the heels of two recent reports from the EPA on the scope of America's food waste problem and the damage that results from it. The local officials pressed the agency to expand grant funding and technical help for landfill alternatives.
So for the first time since the 1990s, the EPA updated its ranking of preferred strategies for waste reduction, ranging from preventing wasted food altogether to composting or anaerobic digestion, a process by which food waste can be turned into biogas inside a reactor. Prevention remains the top strategy, but the new ranking includes more nuances comparing the options so communities can decide how to prioritize their investments.
“I think it is possible to get zero organic waste into landfills,” Ashton said. “But it means that we need an infrastructure to enable that in different locations within cities and more rural regions. It means we need incentives both for households as well as for commercial institutions.”