 Hello and welcome back to part three of our briefing series, reduce and reuse how to cut greenhouse gas emissions of building materials, plastics, and food. After tackling building materials and plastics over the past two days, today we will consider policies for reducing emissions by reducing food waste. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. ESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. The best way to stay informed about our latest educational resources is to subscribe to our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. I have a certain bias, and I acknowledge that, but these briefings this week have been really fascinating. On Wednesday, we were joined by two experts who helped us understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with building materials, and they outlined some steps we can take to make the most use of materials we already have. And yesterday, we reviewed the climate consequences, single-use plastics, and the findings in two recent reports, the new coal by Beyond Plastics from October, and reckoning with the U.S. role in global ocean plastic waste, which was just released by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on December 1st. And one of the reasons I've enjoyed the briefing so much is the connections we're making. There are complex relationships between the materials we use that have both climate benefits and impacts. For example, blower agents used to spray insulation, hydrofluorocarbons, and various types of plastics all have climate benefits, even though they provide energy efficiency benefits. And we left off yesterday talking about plastics and plastic alternatives to single-use food packaging. Of course, wasting less food would lead to reduced waste from packaging. These briefings have encouraged me to think more holistically about these topics. They're really more interrelated than they seem. We say it a lot, but it's true. Climate policy is everything policy. You can access all the resources for the entire briefing series online, www.desi.org, and I really encourage you to check them out. They've been really good. We're joined by a special guest today to help us think about policies for reducing emissions by reducing food waste. Representative Julia Brownlee represents the 26th District of California. She was first elected to Congress in 2012, and today serves on the committees on natural resources, transportation, and infrastructure, and veterans affairs, as well as on the select committee on the climate crisis. Of special note, given the topic of today's briefing, Representative Brownlee is the sponsor of two important pieces of legislation, HR4443, the Cultivating Organic Matter through the Promotion of Sustainable Techniques Act, or Compost Act, and HR4444, the Zero Food Waste Act. Thank you so much, Representative Brownlee, for your leadership on these and other climate change issues. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to join you virtually for today's environmental and energy study institute's briefing on reducing emissions by reducing food waste. I wanna thank Dan and today's panelists, Dana and Emily, for this important discussion on the climate impacts and the solutions to reducing emissions from food waste. As you know, nearly half of all food produced in the United States is lost or wasted, which means an estimated $400 billion is spent on growing, processing, transporting, storing and disposing of food that is never consumed. To make matters worse, food waste is a major contributor to climate change. Landfills are the third largest source of methane in the United States and food is the single largest product sitting in our landfills. As a member of the select committee on the climate crisis, I've introduced two bills to address these issues. First, my bill, the Zero Food Waste Act would create a new EPA grant program to help communities across the country identify food waste mitigation projects or develop the strategies that will reduce the amount of food waste that their localities generate. The cultivating organic matter through the promotion of Sustainable Techniques Act or better known as the Compost Act would add composting as a conservation practice under the USDA's conservation programs and making such practices eligible for conservation program funding. Under this bill, both the act of producing compost from organic waste and using compost on a farm would qualify as a conservation practice. The bill would also create a new USDA grant and loan program for composting infrastructure projects for large-scale composting facilities and farm, home, or community-based projects. In addition to these two bills, I've also been working to advance these food waste and composting policy goals in other legislative vehicles. I'm very pleased to report that the House Pass Build Back Better Act includes provisions to help address food waste issues. The Build Back Better Act provides $190 million for investments in waste reduction infrastructure, incentives, and related activities located in or directly serving low-income and underserved communities. Composting is also an eligible activity for the use of these funds. The bill also includes $30 million for schools to purchase equipment to offer healthier meals, improve food safety, and increase scratch cooking. This will help schools to reduce food waste while helping to ensure that children have access to more nutritious meals that include more fresh food and vegetables. While the Build Back Better Act is now in the hands of the Senate, I am hopeful these critical provisions will make it into the final legislation that President Biden will sign. I'm also pleased to report that the House Pass Fiscal Year 2022 Appropriations includes language directing USDA's natural resources, conservation service to direct more funding toward community compost and food waste reduction projects. Because food waste is the single largest contributor to landfills, making up 22% of municipal solid waste, the bill also directs USDA to work with EPA to incorporate best practices to use composting to avoid food waste and to share education and other resources with those entities involved in food production and use. As Congress continues to negotiate the final appropriation bills, be assured that I am fighting to keep these provisions intact in the final legislation. If we are to achieve our U.S. climate goals, the federal government needs to step up its efforts to eliminate food waste and promote composting practices. These are the bold climate smart actions we need to protect our resources and our environment for future generations, develop a more sustainable food system and address the challenges of the climate crisis with the urgency it demands. Again, I wanna thank EESI and all of you here today for your efforts to prioritize food waste reduction and recovery solutions like composting. Our country's food waste problem and its impact on our communities and our environment has become too big to ignore. We must take action and develop a green and sustainable food economy. A federal investment in the reduction of food waste will not only be an investment in our planet, but it will be an investment in our future. I look forward to hearing about the outcomes of what is sure to be a productive dialogue as we continue to explore solutions for reducing food waste in the United States and around the world. Thank you so much to Representative Brownlee and her wonderful staff for making that possible today. We really appreciated hearing your remarks. I also like to just say thanks for your leadership on policies to reduce food waste. And I am also looking forward to the upcoming discussion because I know it's gonna be really good. Before I introduce our panelists, let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions after our experts make their remarks and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at AskASK, ask at EESI.org or even better, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send it to us that way. And now I'm gonna introduce the first of our two panelists today. Dana Gunders is Executive Director of Refed, a nonprofit focused on advancing solutions to U.S. food waste. Deemed the woman who helped start the waste-free movement by Consumer Reports, Dana is a national expert in one of the first to bring light to just how much food is wasted across the country through her 2012 report, Wasted, how America is losing up to 40% of its food from farm to fork to landfill. For almost a decade, she was a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She launched her own business next course to strategically advise on the topic. Some of her career highlights include authoring the Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, launching the Save the Food campaign, appearing on John Oliver's program, testifying in Congress. And when not worrying about food professionally, she spends far too much time convincing her two young kids to eat broccoli stalks and not throw food on the floor. Jock the Pen always says the broccoli stalk is the best part, you just have to peel it a little bit. He's exactly right. Dana, welcome to our briefing today. I will turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Dana. I'm gonna attempt to share my screen here, so let's see how this goes. Hopefully you're seeing some beautiful-looking peaches there. Well, thank you so much for being here, everyone, for having me today. Dan's remarks at the beginning of how integrated waste issues are reminded me of when I got into this, which was actually before I got into this. When I, 20 years ago, was in school, I actually focused on energy efficiency. And that was my concentration and everything. And then 10 years later, working in the food sector, started to realize that, wow, there's a ton of food going waste. And here we are so focused on how it's produced, but not really paying attention to what happens later. And so I see some real parallels, and that's always what's been driving my interest in this issue is how much of a parallel it does have to energy efficiency and the idea that we need to think about how we're using our resources in addition to how we are producing things with them. So thank you so much for having me. And I'm hoping to give you a little bit of, kind of a lay of the land on this issue before we dive into specifics around policy. And so I'm the executive director of an organization called REFED. We are a national nonprofit that is entirely dedicated to reducing food loss and waste here within the US. We do that through three main pillars of work. The first is providing data and insights on the topic, which sometimes can be pretty hard to actually get. The second is by bringing more capital into the space, private, philanthropic, and public, and really trying to help attract that, inform it, and then once there's interest, help figure out where that capital can go and really be aware and fostering the innovation that it can match with. Third, we act as kind of a hub and connector in the space. We host the big annual summit on the topic every year, which we actually used to do in partnership with our other panelists here with the Harvard-Huland Policy Clinic. We host the big summit. We host a network where we do a lot of programming on the issue from all sorts of angles. So if you're interested, please come check us out and join that network. But just to give you a sense of the issue here within the US, believe it or not, about 35% of all the food in this country went unsold or uneaten. These are 2019 numbers, but it doesn't change that much, about 35%. The vast majority of that is going directly to landfills or other waste destinations. When you consider the value of that product, it's about $408 billion worth of food that is not being eaten in this country. That's nearly 2% of the US GDP. And then when you start to think about what it takes to produce that food, right? Everything that it takes to grow, harvest, cool, transport, store, transport again, store again, cook, and get it to your table. It's a huge amount of resources that we are throwing out when we're not actually eating that food. We estimate the footprint to be about 4% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. And in addition, 14% of all the freshwater use, 18% of cropland. And then to add insult to injury, food is actually the number one product entering our landfills today. Now, just last week, the EPA released a new report with their estimates of what the impacts of this are. And they actually estimated the greenhouse gas emissions to be equal to that of 42 coal powered, coal powered fire, coal fired power plants. And the energy and water enough to supply 50 million homes. And the land use is really the one that blows me away. An area of agricultural land equal to that of California and New York combined. Just imagine a farm that size producing food all year. That is how much food we are not using today. And of course, much of that food is good food that could be eaten. Today, as I'm sure many of you well know, one in eight Americans are considered food insecure. When you take a look at the quantity of food that is not eaten, it is vastly more than we would need to feed all food and secure Americans their full diet. That is the quantity that we're talking about here. Now, where is this happening? It is happening all along the supply chain. And part of the challenge is that because it happens in little bits and pieces everywhere, it can be hard to really see and get a handle on how much is happening. Just some key notes to point out, households are in fact the largest contributor of food going to waste. Right behind that are consumer facing businesses, but this includes everything from retail to your local diner to a hospital cafeteria. And when you look at those food service, the restaurants and food service, one surprising thing is that the most, like the highest volume in that setting is actually food that's been served and on people's plates. You know, those huge good old American Christians that don't always get eaten. And then another source is on farms. There is actually an enormous amount, even in non-pandemic times, an enormous amount of produce that is never harvested and it's left on the farm. It's perfectly edible. Some of it is even marketable quality, perfectly marketable. Some of it is kind of off spec, ugly, produce as they like to call it these days, maybe too big, too small, too square, whatever it is. But there is a lot of good nutritious fresh produce being left on farms. Now, what's been happening over time? Our analysis, and we conducted a large analysis on this topic, began going back casting to 2010. And our estimate is that it actually, surplus food started to increase all the way up until 2016 when it actually has started to level off. And that timing really matches in my experience with when businesses and others started to pay somewhat attention to this issue. If you look at it, this is absolute, if you look at it per capita, it's actually gone down about 2%. So I think that's slightly good news. It means I like to think of it as past peak waste. However, we have a national goal that matches with an international goal to reduce food loss and waste by 50% by 2030, just about eight short years away. And that 2% gets us nowhere near achieving that goal. And so we really need a massive acceleration in efforts around this issue if we're going to reach that. This here is something that the EPA put out quite some time ago that they call their food recovery hierarchy. And it's almost akin to the, if you've ever heard, the reduced reuse recycle mantra in plastics. It's kind of that, but for food. And what it says is, hey, the best thing is to not have surplus in the first place. Let's use food as we intend to and let's actually eat it. But if that's not possible, well then let's capture it and feed it to people. If that's not possible, let's get it to animals. And then and only then let's look at uses like industrial uses, rendering, turning into plastics, things like that. And then composting and last resort being landfill. The EPA just a few weeks back did something called reinterpreting the goal. So now the whole national government, well, at least the agencies of EPA, USDA and FDA have joined forces to adopt this 50% goal. The only things that count towards that goal of avoiding are these top four. Composting does not actually count towards that 50% reduction goal. In fact, the way they are telling it now, the number they are trying to cut in half includes what's going to landfill, but also food scraps going to composting. And they did that mainly to align with the international definition as that's what's been kind of raised and agreed upon internationally. All right, so how in the heck do we do this? So at ReFed, we conducted analysis. We took over 50 data sets. We spoke to many 10s and 10s of different solution providers who are creating solutions in this space. And we analyzed 42 different solutions to the problem. And what we came up with is that it is indeed possible to reach that 50% number, but it will take an investment of about $14 billion annually. Now the good news is that a lot of times when you save food from going to waste, you actually save money. And the return on that investment, we estimate it to be about $73 billion in net financial benefit. A lot of that actually is saving to consumers as well as depending on the solution, savings to the businesses that are implementing them. In addition, of course, you get a number of benefits in terms of water saved, greenhouse gases, 75 million tons of greenhouse gases is equivalent to about 16 million cars being taken off the road, as well as four billion meals for people in need and creation of 50,000 jobs. Now I should say this analysis differs a little bit from the EPA's new interpretation because we were going off their old interpretation. So it does include solutions like composting, which are now considered food waste management. And just to reemphasize, this is a five to one return on investment in terms of what's needed. Now, where should that money come from and where does the government fit in? So for all of our 42 solutions, we actually analyzed who should be investing in this, who's paying, right? And we found that actually about 50% of the cost needs to be covered by businesses themselves, right? It's them buying new software, it's them changing their waste management processes, whatever it be. So that's about half, but there was an important role for government. Yeah, sorry about that. Which is project finance, I'm sorry this box is sort of misplaced for this conversation, but both project finance, tax incentives, and then grants. And those dollars can be very catalytic, right? So not every dollar is the same. There are a lot of new innovations, there are bottlenecks, there are pilots that need to take place, there's infrastructure that needs to be built to enable other things. And so that government money is really critical for unlocking some of those bottlenecks. And that's why we like to call it catalytic capital. So what do we need to do? So as I mentioned, we analyzed 42 solutions, we actually had another 40 that we couldn't analyze, we just could not get the information and data to really model them. But that left us with a list of 80 solutions. And when we took a close look at it, we realized you knew it, these really boiled down to about seven categories. For the most part, when you step back and think, well, what needs to happen to really solve this issue? It kind of boils down to these seven things on the screen. So we call them our action areas. And the first is to optimize the harvest. So not only do we need to harvest what we can up the field, but even before that, we need to right size our production. In fact, both in the US and across the world today, we actually produce more food than we consume. So how do we right size that production? And then once we do that, make sure to actually harvest everything off the field. Secondly, we need to have airtight product distribution so that we're not losing product as it's traveling around the country and around the world and being stored. There's a lot of great technology coming out in terms of sensors and other intelligence to really help with that. Third, we're finding product management, really matching supply and demand. There's a lot of guessing game that happens if you're a restaurant, if you're a grocery store, but there's also new tools coming out to really help be more precise in that. So how do we match that supply and demand equation and use new capabilities and data to do that? And then there will always be surplus. So how do we make sure there are alternative marketplaces as well? Fourth, whichever product you have in hand, let's use it all, whether you are a manufacturer or somebody in your home. Let's use that broccoli stock that we were just talking about and not just the top of the broccoli. Fifth, reshaping and consumer environments. I think this is really critical, especially in the policy-making realm, because as you saw, households are a huge part of this issue. When you add sort of the consumer out of home, consumers and restaurants and the influence they have on food businesses, they really are driving a huge part of this problem. And so how do we shift our culture around that? How do we change the environment that we are all operating within to really encourage less waste, as well as speaking and asking consumers directly? Six, strengthening food rescue. As you saw, only 3% of all that surplus food is being donated right now. There are so many things that can happen to improve that. And lastly, there will always be banana peels. There will also always be rotten bananas. And so can we have the infrastructure in place to recycle all of that, whether it be some of the exciting things happening to create animal feed out of food scraps? There's some exciting innovation there, composting or other recycling destinations. So I won't go through this all, but just to give you a sense, under each of those I just went through, there is a whole list of solutions that you can explore. And there's also a whole lot of innovation in all of those categories. So just tons of startups that we're seeing. We just had our first unicorn in the space, appeal, reach a billion dollar valuation, and there's a couple others not far behind. So really exciting times in the innovation space here. A huge amount of investment pouring in, just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on that, but we're just, it can't go a week or two without seeing several million dollars go to one startup or another. So if you'd like to learn more, please visit our Insights Engine. It's a really fun tool. You can play around on there and see things like the top solutions. I won't go into the details here, but the best solution really depends on what you care about, right? Is it economics? Is it greenhouse gases? Is it meals served? On our site, you can actually play around with all of those different impact areas and tell us what is most important to you and we'll show you. But as you can see from an economic standpoint, things like portion sizes, meal kits, consumer education campaigns, very consumer focused solutions. Similarly from a greenhouse gas perspective, because consumer food, it has so much more of a footprint embedded in it. But then when you get to just straight up tons, you do start seeing more of these solutions like composting and rubic digestion, where those recycling solutions come into play. So on policy, there is a range of things that can happen all along this hierarchy. I know Emily is gonna spend her whole time talking about these, so I won't, but I'm really excited to be part of this conversation. I hope that you can all take some ideas away from it. And with that, I will pass it to Emily. I'm gonna intercept your pass so that I can introduce Emily, but that's totally fine. Dana, you shared with us some amazing slides. I just would like to remind everyone that if you'd like to go back and take a look at your slides and we're gonna revisit some of the things you talked about in our Q&A, I have a feeling. But if you'd like to go back and revisit Dana's slides, you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org. Dana also was nice enough to provide lots of additional resources, reports, and policymaker resources, and all of those are posted on our briefing page as well. Thank you so much for your presentation. And our second panelist, like Dana was just saying, is going to help us get through some of the policy issues. Emily Broadleib is a clinical professor of law and the faculty director at the Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic, the nation's first law school clinic, devoted to providing legal and policy guidance on food law and policy issues. She is a recognized leader in the field. She focuses her scholarship on teaching, practice, on the big scholarship, teaching, and practice, sorry, missing a comma there, on the biggest health, economic, and environmental issues facing our food systems to promote sustainability and equity and to reduce the waste of healthy, wholesome food. Emily, welcome to the briefing today. I'm gonna throw it over to you. Okay, can you, everyone can see my slides. I presume. You look great. Great, thank you. So thank you so much to EESI for organizing this and I want to give a big shout out to Dana. We've been working on this topic together for about 10 years. So it's always fun to get the tag team on these kinds of presentations. And I'm just really glad to be here today to talk about this. So as you heard a bit, I direct the Food on Policy Clinic where we work directly with clients and communities to champion community-led food system change, production and food waste, healthy food access, and equity and sustainability in food production. So in that work, we often play a role in helping others understand the law and the systemic barriers that can be addressed through policy change. So we do this by working with non-profit organizations, startups, social enterprise, government agencies at all levels. And through that, we learn a lot about some of the systems-wide barriers. So I'm gonna raise a few points today that are policy areas that I think are most exciting or good opportunities at the federal level based on experience working on food waste policy with all of these different stakeholders. So to just say a little more about what we do, the work that we do at the Food Law and Policy Clinic in food waste and food recovery is by far our largest area of work. So why is law and policy so important? Kind of picking up where Dana left off. Law impacts food waste in a lot of different ways. One way that it impacts food waste is that food is heavily regulated at all stages of the supply chain. And this means that sometimes food is wasted because there's either confusion over those laws or there's just a lot of cost involved in getting food pass along and diverted and it might be cheaper to actually throw it away. So this means law can sometimes act as a disincentive or confusion can be the barrier. And then also law and policy are important because policies can provide incentives or drive changes in habits. So here's some of the work that we do at different levels of government at the state and local food waste policy level. We provide technical assistance to states. Right now we're writing back sheets for partners in New Jersey on the laws in New Jersey and at the federal level that impact food donation. So we've done that in now about 15 different states. We're also working on recommendations for gleaning and making it more clear that gleaning is protected in New Mexico. And then we also do state bill tracking and maintain a database of state policies on the refund site actually. At the federal level, we've offered numerous recommendations to minimize food waste and I'm gonna talk in much more detail about that. So I'll kind of gloss over that right now. And then at the global level, we are running a big project that I'll tell you about where we're comparing laws on food donation across different countries. So on that front, this is the Global Food Donation Policy Atlas which is a partnership between the Food Law and Policy Clinic and a group called the Global Food Banking Network. The key missions really to analyze and compare the legal landscapes in different countries as they relate to food donation and to food waste reduction. So in each of the countries, we work hands on with food banks and other partners like government, businesses and other NGOs. And we've created an online map. You just have a static view of it here that compares and contrasts the laws in different countries. And one of the things that's been really interesting is actually building on our knowledge of the laws and policies around the US and really the comparisons across states, we've been able to look at the global level and see places where the US has the best practice or places where we can import models from other countries. We prepare legal guides and recommendations and executive summaries with detailed analyses for each partner country. And at this point, we've published those materials for 14 countries and we have six countries in production right now. And then we lastly offer opportunities for our country partners to engage. So we've hosted a series of webinars that are targeting government officials across countries. Our last one was actually last week and it was on tax policies to support food donation. And we had about a hundred participants from, they're all government officials from around the globe. And we also prepare issue briefs on really particular topics. And you can see one here on bait labeling. So the most interesting finding from this work has actually been that there are kind of six major areas of law that impact whether states or plus food is donated or rescued or whether it goes to waste. And we, in the first year of the project, we compared, we really looked at five very different countries, the US, Mexico, Canada, India and Argentina. We had an open mind going in and just asked all the different stakeholders what we've met with about what were the barriers, what were the questions they had, what were the policy goals, and the same issues came up in every country. So these are really the standard issues that we're now tracking from country to country on our website and in our reporting. And some of these were really issues we know very well from the US and that I'm gonna talk about right in a few minutes. But some of them were new like tax barriers, which is something that comes up in some countries that have a value added tax, but not something that we've really seen in the US. Closer to home, earlier this year, we partnered with Refed, so Dana knows this intimately and also with NRDC and the World Wildlife Fund to put out a US food loss and waste policy action plan that really called on both Congress and the administration for kind of the most important things that can be done right now to address food waste and increased food recovery and diversion in the US. I should say in addition to our four organizations working on this together, we now have over 60 different signatories, including other NGOs, state and local government, and a number of private companies, hotel chains, grocers, et cetera, some really big companies. So the link is there and you can check it out and you can see the list of all those signatories. But I just raise that to say there's a lot of coalescing of opinion around some of these key policies. So in first, in terms of investing in prevention and keeping waste out of the landfill, I'll talk a little bit in a minute about funding really for states and localities to support policies that reduce waste and landfills. That was one of several recommendations within part one. In part two, enabling surplus food donation, and as you can see this tracks as well with the hierarchy that Dana showed is if we're gonna prevent first and then next is really enabling donation. There's a lot of questions outstanding on things like the liability protection for food donations, on things like the food safety rules that apply to food that's donated and on-date labeling and not only the consumer level questions, but also questions around donation. So we talk about that in that section. In terms of showing leadership at home and abroad, again, there's a number of different recommendations within the action plan. But one of the things in there was really an opportunity for Congress to provide support for the Interagency Food Loss and Waste Collaboration, which is something that was created as a cross-agency collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. They've done amazing work, but they haven't actually had a formal mandate or funding or any need for reporting. So that was something that could be really useful. The next section is really on educating and activating consumers. As you saw from Dana's slides, waste at the household level is one of the biggest areas that we see waste. And there's opportunities to really provide awareness to consumers, both adults and also children and really think about schools. And then lastly, it's standardizing national date labeling, and I'm gonna move to that next. So I wanted to talk through a few different particular policies that I think are most exciting and timely and could have a lot of impact now, and then we can have more discussion. First, in terms of date labels, so this is actually where Dana and I got started working together about a decade ago, but here in the US at the federal level, there's no definition or requirements for date labels with the exception of infant formula. In the absence of any federal law, more than 40 states regulate date labels and 20 states restrict sale or donation of food after the date. The challenge comes up because more than 90% of consumers believe that these dates are safety indicators. So the majority of consumers throw food away after that date. But when you actually look into it, what you'll find is that companies report most of these labels are suggestions of peak quality. And in fact, it's not even really possible to put a date that's based on safety for most foods because for most foods, there's not a date at which they become unsafe. They'll start to spoil, but people will notice that they're spoiling. I won't consume them. There's not any kind of hidden foodborne illness in most foods that's gonna become worse over time. And then the other thing is that standardizing date labels is one of the most cost effective opportunities for reducing food waste. And this is partly because there's already labels on so many foods. So just changing them to be standard and educating people about that could divert lots of food that's currently wasted, bring a lot of savings to households, but wouldn't cost that much to implement. So in terms of opportunities, a couple of years ago, the Consumer Brands Association and Food Marketing Institute partnered to develop a voluntary product code dating initiative that now a lot of particular big companies in the US are in compliance with that. And what it says is that foods should be labeled either with a vested use by date if they are labeled to show that that's a freshness indicator or probably indicator. And then foods where there's really an increased risk, like a foods that may have been contaminated or could be unsafe after the date would have the date label used by plus the date. And it's great to see this leadership from industry. The problem is that since there are so many state laws we found that actually more than half of states have a state law that conflicts with that voluntary initiative for at least one or more categories of food products. So that's really stymied the ability from this voluntary perspective of having kind of comprehensive standard labels. So we've really looked also globally the Codex Alimentarius which has a voluntary kind of recommendation for countries. And it matches a lot with what we've called for in the US which would be similar to the, again the voluntary dating initiative. One standard label for safety used by one standard label for foods, a label for quality which is best used by allowing donation of food past the date that is freshness or quality based because often that date is set very conservatively and then most importantly really educating businesses and consumers about this. And I just want to fly that we have a webpage where we are including a lot of information and resources and data on opportunities in the food ways, sorry, in date labeling as a leader for food ways and in terms of policy opportunities. Next policy I want to briefly talk about is liability protection for food donations. There's lots of opportunities to increase food donation and I think as Dana mentioned now that EPA has really realigned some of its goals to really focus more on prevention and donation. I think it's a place where we can dig in. We in the US I could confidently say we have the strongest liability protection for food donations from around the globe which is in the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act which protects food donors and nonprofits that distribute food when they distribute it to people in need for free. The problem is that more than 50% of companies say that they still don't donate because of fears of liability. So in digging into this one challenge is a lack of awareness and the other is that after Congress passed this act there was never any regulation or clear guidance that interpreted the terms. The good news is it's never been used in court which should bring some comfort to companies but because there's not been any interpretation lots of questions remain and I can't tell you how much of my time I spend trying to help companies answer these questions about what would be protected. And then the other issue is that there's comprehensive protection but it's limited. For example, if a company donates directly to those in need they won't be protected under this. They also won't be protected if they give to a nonprofit that doesn't give it away for free. So there's opportunities here to make it more clear and more protected. One last area I wanna mention quickly is around donation requirements or waste penalties. So this has been an area really heating up in state law the past few years. At this point there are eight states around the US and about 10 major cities that have some restriction on food going to the landfill. For example, in Massachusetts we prohibit companies sending more than a half a ton of food to landfill per week. That was recently reduced from one ton per week. And then in California there was already a requirement of diverting food to landfill or digester and they now implemented on top of that a requirement for some food, 20% of edible food to be donated. State and local governments know what's gonna work best for them. These are all crafted really differently. A lot of them have taken a lot of input on writing the regulations. The problem is that they cost a lot. It costs a lot to plan them, to implement them, to raise awareness and enforce them. And also to really think about supporting businesses and making these transitions. So this is a place where I think there's a real opportunity to support from the federal level. And I think we just heard from Reverend Adam Brownlee the Zero Food Waste Act which is just one amazing opportunity to really support states and localities in finding the policies that work best for them. So just lastly, this is outdated because it's from last year but we do track a lot of state bills in this space. Last year the biggest areas were tax incentives and liability this year. And I will have it hopefully by January. The number one area we're seeing are actually weight organic waste bans and waste penalties as an area of interest in state legislation. Oh, sorry, I wanna mention one other thing which is that we also have put out some reports that really think about different policy vehicles and how food waste can be incorporated in them. We did one earlier this year on the child nutrition reorganization and a few years ago one on the farm bill that was really successful in some of the ideas got picked up in the 2018 farm bill and we'll have an update of that coming out next year. So I think we heard already a lot of opportunities. I love working on reducing food waste because there's not only planet opportunities for the planet and environment for people if we can make sure that safe surplus edible food gets to people, but also there's a lot of opportunities when we really treat food as a resource to create more jobs, more wealth. Massachusetts has seen an increase in revenue and in job creation just by requiring food not to go to the landfill. So it's a great area to work on. I think there's a lot more opportunity. And thank you so much. Thank you, Emily. And we'll have to have you back next year with your updated charts and we can walk through and talk a little bit about more what's happening in state legislatures. We are gonna now have about 15 minutes for Q&A. There's still an opportunity for people to ask questions. You can send this an email, ask ASK, ask at ESI.org. You can follow us on Twitter at ESI online. I am going to pick up, Emily, where you were just talking about and I'm gonna let Dana go first since you were just talking about it, but it's the idea that policies regarding food waste vary across states. A lot of times we talk about briefings about states being laboratories for great ideas and new policies. It sounds like from your presentation, Emily, in fact the lack of consistency from one state to the other might actually may not be a great thing. We may need to clarify that. So we'll definitely give you an opportunity to weigh in but I'll start with Dana. How could the federal government be supportive to standardize or fill gaps between what states are trying to do for all the right reasons when it comes to reducing food waste? Yeah, great question. I think the straightforward answer and the realistic one is funding. Really trying to provide funding to states and local governments that are doing innovative things. And of course they're all watching each other. So a handful of those really successful programs can really travel across the country relatively quickly. The less realistic, but I can't help myself answer. And after, as Emily said, working together for 10 years, she spent 10 years telling me this is not actually possible, but I have to say it anyway, which is my dream would be to see a national ban on food and landfills. It's something that's been done across Europe. It's probably when you speak with businesses in Europe, the fundamental thing they bring up. And in the states that we're seeing do that, you see not only does it get the food out of landfills, recycle it, et cetera, but also, but it also actually increases food donation and it helps to drive businesses to prevent waste as well. So a lot of benefits. And if we can't do that as a national law, I think supporting the states and local governments that are doing it through funding is best. Emily, what are some other things that we could do to help sort of level what states are trying to do? Sure, thank you. And let me just respond to that point because it's our fun debate that we've had. So my sense is as a lawyer, I think it is legal. It would actually be legal for the federal government to do it. I think it would just be really tricky because states and localities are the ones that take the lead on waste and landfilling. And so I think that's why, while I actually do agree with Dana that that would be an incredibly effective way to address this, I think where we are now, it's more, it's easier to give money to states and localities and say, you can only have this money if you implement one of these best practice lists of policies, whether it's a waste ban, a diversion requirement, et cetera. But I also like Dana, dream of one day where we just say food can't go to landfill. I think what you're alluding to, Dan, which I wanna kind of pull out is that sometimes it's good that states can go above the federal level. So actually on some of the liability protection things, we've seen innovation in states. For example, lots of states have now offered protection where food is donated for free to a nonprofit and the nonprofit can either give it away for free or sell it at a very low cost, which helps provide like innovative models. It's helped during COVID to offset the price of just, transporting that food to people's homes and keeping vulnerable individuals out of like big crowds. On the flip side, there's some like date labeling where the state variability makes no sense. If there is a scientific reason to date label, then all of the policies should follow the science. And the fact that no two states have the same policy doesn't make sense. So this has been a challenge for us on the refed site where we track policies. We try to really show the places where having a state policy as a negative versus ones where having a state policy can build on top of a federal floor. And I would say like date labeling and I think restrictions on feeding food scraps to animals are two areas where the state policies actually make things more restrictive and lead to more food being wasted. Thank you very much. And now I'm gonna refer to Dana's slides, that give Emily the first chance to go. So Dana, you had those great slides. I think you called it your insight engine. If I remember correctly, if I took my notes properly, I love those charts, those slides where you sort of ranked different solutions. You also talked extensively about the idea of things being delivering a bang for your buck return on investment. I'm curious from either a climate perspective or from an economics perspective, some additional things that you might wanna pull out from this part of the conversation about what could we do differently that would provide us the greatest bang for our buck in terms of reducing food waste. And Emily, I'll let you go first there and then we'll turn to Dana. I'm happy to go first, but I do think this is Dana's sweet spot because we've done such a great job of really showing the cost effectiveness, what is the cost of different things. I do think it is really, really important. One of the biggest challenges in both enacting policies in like measuring their success, et cetera, is that it's hard to measure prevention of food waste. And so I think that's, if we think that that's a challenge, that that's also a great place to invest. And I know EPA is actually starting to develop a food waste production strategy. So even kind of placing that squarely as a challenge around how do we better measure and support innovation and prevention, I think is a worthwhile endeavor. Best bang for buck, huh? You know, I think from a policy perspective, the, there's probably the best bang for buck is what we just talked about is supporting the state and local governments. But I would also point out, our analysis really shows that, the bang for buck comes in these big consumer efforts. So trying to reduce portion sizes, trying to educate consumers on this issue and help give them tools and tricks and things like that. At a low cost, if you can really get to all those households, even, they reduce their waste 1% that actually adds up to be really significant. I think the caveat with that is that it needs to be a long-term play. You can't just do that in a year, right? It's just like a, it's like a not littering effort. And you know, it's a long-term kind of large scale campaign style thing accompanied with a lot of other smart interventions that you need to get there. Thank you so much. I'd like to turn to some of the questions around environmental justice and climate equity and your presentations covered the idea of food going to waste when it could be diverted in part to people who need it, who are either food insecure or, you know, or schools maybe that are having a hard time providing lunches to students. I'd like to hear from you about some of the environmental justice concerns involved in food waste that we should be sort of especially aware of. And if you have any thoughts about sort of which of the policies we've covered today might help us make progress. And Dana, you have your mute off, so maybe we'll start with you and then go to Emily with what your thoughts are about this issue. Sounds good. Yeah, you know, I think that providing more food into the emergency, you know, food system is an important, like it addresses a surface cause of injustice, right? It doesn't really get to the root cause of food insecurity, but it does help kind of address that surface issue. It allows lower income people to spend money on other things and not spend it on food. So I think, you know, there is an important role that food donation plays in making that all happen today. You know, beyond that, I think there's some things to just be aware of, like a lot of landfill and then proposed composting sites are in lower income neighborhoods, right? And so I think there's just some watchouts for things like that as well. I totally agree. I'll build on that a little. I think, you know, in the food system in general, the benefits and the burdens of the food system aren't shared equally. And a lot of that is economic, but even more so, you know, racial and ethnic grounds. So, you know, those who are next to, as Anna said, landfills, the sites of even like parts of food production that are, you know, kind of noxious are burdened. And then the benefits are kind of re-filed larger companies that are dream really well. So I think any ways that we're being more efficient for our food system, if that means that we're, you know, we're producing less food because we're more efficient with it, then we also reduce some of the burdens on communities that are nearby runoff from farms and those kinds of things too. And I think in an even bigger climate justice picture, the fact that food waste is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. And we know that, you know, there's a huge injustice in terms of who's going to be burdened by climate change. So, you know, in that big picture, one thing I love the Zero Food Waste Act that we heard about from Representative Brownlee does have in it, the way it was constructed that there's a provision for increased funding for marginalized communities. So really trying to make sure that as we invest in new infrastructure, new composting, new digesters, even new food recovery infrastructure and donation infrastructure, that it is equally available to those same communities that are burdened right now and making sure that we're making those opportunities for, you know, available across those communities too. Thanks. And now I'm going to refer back to Dana's slides. You had the great, it was very busy slide, but it was a great slide and you talked about your first unicorn. I think you said it was called Appeal, which is a great name. And there was a lot of public sector, excuse me, private sector innovation. I'm curious, and I think this is going to have, probably have to be our last one, but innovation I think probably plays a large role in our potential to reduce upstream food waste. What are some of the innovations that you see on the horizon or that are entering the marketplace that make you especially optimistic about our ability to handle food waste and are there things that policy makers should think about as they're putting things together that might encourage innovation, whether it's technological innovation or programmatic innovation or any other innovation that might help us attract, get to the bottom of this. And Emily, I think maybe we'll, actually I'll start with you, Dana, you're unmuted and then we'll go to Emily, she'll have the last word today. Okay, sounds good. I think there's a ton that can be done and, you know, I would love to see more incentives for innovation. And I think that there are, what I'm excited about, I'm excited about machine learning applied to data in a new way that's really allowing the whole system to get more precise about how food moves around, when it's used, where it goes, how much to order, things like that, as well as being able to kind of alert the food donation world when there is a donation possible, right? A lot of this stuff is last minute and it's unexpected. And so if you, you know, with our new ability to kind of broadcast information and share it in different ways, I think there's a lot of opportunity. So there's a, we have a ton of solutions, you know, within our playbook that are showing really great results. So I'm excited about that. I do think the policy play there is, you know, a combination of potentially some kind of mechanism to unlock like an energy start type of certification that can then unlock money that could flow to that, right? Incentives. So if you can get that, you know, businesses get an incentive to adopt anything with this certification, that sort of thing. And I think that would not only unlock federal, you know, potential federal incentives, but also state, government philanthropic and just signal to the private sector as well. I think Dana covered that really well. I would agree with everything she said. You know, I think it's sort of to me, and you know, I think I'm kind of saying again, but there's two sides in terms of innovation. One is supporting more innovation, more funding. And we recommend, I mentioned before, we've done recommendations for the farm bill, for example, like certain areas where investment could kind of bring those innovations forward. But then once we know what things work, I think it's really figuring out the incentives for companies to use those technologies or mechanisms. You know, I mentioned briefly there's, we have a great tax incentive for food donation. It works really well for big companies. It doesn't work at all for farmers. It doesn't really work for small businesses that don't make enough for a deduction to benefit them. So I think there's areas too where we could create alternatives. In particular, I think about with farms that that's also some of the freshest, healthiest food. So when we think back to the equity question, you know, any food on firm that's getting tilled under that could have gone instead to people who need it is a real waste of that. So this was really fun. Thank you so much for organizing and for the opportunity. It was absolutely our pleasure. This was such a great panel today. Dana and Emily, thank you so much for your excellent presentations and such an interesting and engaging discussion. Thank you so much for entertaining our questions and helping our audience think about all of this. Also like to say special thanks to Representative Brownlee for her video intro, to say thanks to her staff for being such great folks to work with and helping her available for today. And I'd like to thank everyone in the audience. I know we have a big crowd out there today and I really appreciate you sticking with us through part three of our series this week. If you missed our briefings earlier this week on Wednesday we talked about building materials. Yesterday we talked about plastics today, food waste. Of course, you can check everything out online. You can visit us at www.esi.org. I'd also like to take a moment to thank all of the folks behind the scenes at EESI who makes these briefings possible. Special thanks to Dan O'Brien. Special shout out to Savannah Bertrand for pulling this all together today. Thanks also to Omri, Allison, Emma, Anna and Amber and Isabella for all their efforts as well. The next slide will be a link to a survey. If you have a moment, we would really appreciate if you would share any feedback that you have. We read every response. If you had any issues with the live cast, the webcast, the audio, the video, any issues at all any ideas for how we might be able to do better when it comes to providing educational resources for policymakers. We are really all ears and we'd really appreciate those extra two minutes or so you might take to share with that feedback. We're a couple of minutes over. Sorry about that. I think it was definitely worthwhile, such an awesome engaging discussion today. But we will end there. I wish everyone a very happy weekend and we will see you at our next briefing which will be in early January. It's a really interesting topic. A briefing notice will be in your inboxes before too long. I think you're really gonna like it. We've got some great stuff lined up for 2022. But in the meantime, enjoy hopefully a restful and relaxing holiday break and we will see you next year. Thanks so much.