Vermont already requires residents to keep food waste out of landfills, diverting it instead to composting or other recovery methods. As more states consider similar rules, researchers at the University of Vermont modeled what happens if the entire country followed suit — and found a sizable payoff shadowed by an unresolved problem.

Using life-cycle assessment models that track food waste from the transfer station through composting, anaerobic digestion, or landfilling, the team compared two main alternatives to landfill disposal: composting the waste for agricultural use, or processing it through anaerobic digestion to generate renewable biogas. Nationwide diversion, they found, could cut the climate impact currently tied to food waste by 89% to 99%. It could also sharply reduce the nutrient pollution that food waste contributes to waterways — pollution that fuels summer blue-green algae blooms in lakes — cutting nitrogen-related impacts by 49% to 54% and phosphorus-related impacts by 78% to 98%.

The catch is plastic. Spreading compost and digestate on farm fields nationwide could add roughly 20,000 tons of microplastics to agricultural soil every year, the researchers estimate — a tradeoff set against a comparatively modest nutrient benefit, since the recovered nutrients would offset only about 2% of the country’s annual synthetic fertilizer demand. Up to 40% of food produced in the U.S. goes to waste, and food currently takes up roughly a quarter of all landfill space, underscoring the scale of what’s at stake either way.

Lead author Kate Porterfield, a postdoctoral researcher at UVM’s Gund Institute, said that without deliberate planning, plastic will likely end up in the soil amendments recovered from food waste, calling plastic “literally everywhere” in the waste stream and arguing that planning needs to start with how packaging itself is designed. Coauthor Eric Roy, a professor at UVM’s Rubenstein School who directs the university’s Casella Center for Circular Economy and Sustainability, said the findings call for planning around microplastic management alongside any diversion effort, and noted he isn’t aware of any national food waste diversion plan currently in the works. Roy said Vermont’s early experience is already surfacing both the benefits and the challenges of the approach, and posed the open question of what happens if more states follow Vermont’s lead.

Journal: Nature Food
Article Title: Food waste recycling in the USA can reduce climate and nutrient pollution impacts yet risks plastic accumulation in soils
DOI: 10.1038/s43016-026-01396-z
Publication Date: July 23, 2026

Source: EurekAlert