Food Waste

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than 30% of the food produced in the United States is never eaten. Why do Americans waste so much food? Key reasons include a culture of waste in our country (e.g., the EPA estimates that, on a per capita basis, each American generates 4.9 pounds of municipal solid waste every day), losses across supply chains, oversized servings, overstocked stores, confusing labels, a preference for “perfect produce,” and missing diversion and recycling infrastructure. A resource we have for estimating food waste in state-level municipal waste streams are “waste characterization” studies. Combining waste characterization studies for the New England states, we estimate that food waste is the largest single material in the regional waste stream by weight.

New England's Food Waste by State
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Note About Connecticut Maps: Although Connecticut has not had county governments since 1960, county boundaries have historically been used to depict data. For example, all USDA Census of Agriculture data for Connecticut is collected at a county-level. In 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau shifted to using Connecticut's nine planning regions as county equivalent geographic units for data collection. This has presented a challenge for depicting data for Connecticut's planning regions in Tableau. This mapping challenge has not been resolved yet, but when a solution is available, we will update Connecticut maps.