Every day, nearly 1 million pounds of food ends up where no one can eat it: the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill.

Food, in fact, is the biggest single item to end up in the landfill, accounting for about 15% of all the landfill's refuse.

But while the amount of wasted food in central Ohio is high, it's coming down, thanks in part to a campaign from the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio.

About half of Franklin County's waste is recycled, and kept out of the landfill, well above the national rate.

Much of that is food.

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In 2019, SWACO pledged to cut in half the amount of food headed to the landfill by 2030. The organization stepped up efforts to educate central Ohioans about reducing food waste and partnered with community leaders on food-waste collection.

"Our food-waste initiative had partners from essentially every sector of the community — school leaders, restaurant owners, local grocers and local governments," SWACO communications manager Hanna Greer-Brown said.

Those efforts include sending uneaten food to compost piles instead of the landfill.  Ten Columbus-area municipalities have drop-off food collection sites made possible by SWACO and U.S. EPA grants, Greer-Brown said. The waste authority is assessing the progress of these efforts.

Upper Arlington diverted 21% of its food waste from the landfill through its composting program, and SWACO is working with other communities to implement similar programs, Greer-Brown said.

"Recently we launched a series of campaign resources with the City of Gahanna and the City of Whitehall. Our goal is to institute the campaign into each community in the central Ohio region," she said.

"In tandem with the campaign, Whitehall also launched a new food waste drop-off site that offers residents free access to composting their food waste. ... Whitehall is the tenth community to launch a residential food waste drop-off site in central Ohio since 2019."

SWACO's efforts illustrate the growing awareness of U.S. food waste. Nationwide, more than a third of food is wasted, and about 20% to 25% heads to the landfill, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

Figures specific to Ohio are more difficult to find, but “we estimate that it's similar,” said Diana Castellanos, an associate professor of dietetics at the University of Dayton who has studied food waste.

Uneaten food costs Ohioans money, contributes to food insecurity and worsens global warming, according to many economists and supply-chain experts.

Ohioans can take a number of steps, however, to lower the amount of edible refuse that ends up in trash bins.

Why is food wasted?

Wasted food goes far beyond the scraps left on plates. Food is lost at nearly every link in the supply chain that moves commodities from fields and livestock barns to restaurants and grocery stores.

A certain amount of waste is unavoidable, experts say, such as those last few drops of ketchup that can't be squeezed out of the bottle.

Some waste is the fault of the consumer. A restaurant patron might take a doggie bag home and leave it in the refrigerator until it spoils. Eating the head of the broccoli but not the stem also produces waste.

Confusion over labeling plays another role in the vast ecosystem of wasted food, experts say. Items approaching the sell-by or expiration date are still edible, they say, but often are discarded anyway.

“A lot of the waste comes from inefficiencies in the system,” said Darcy Freedman, director of the Mary Ann Swetland Center for Environmental Health at Case Western Reserve University.

Fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy products will spoil if uneaten or if a trip to a restaurant or grocery store takes too long. Foods most likely to go bad before reaching the dinner plate “are foods that tend to be the healthiest,” Freedman said.

The consequences of wasted food

Ohio has numerous food deserts, especially in low-income neighborhoods in big cities and in isolated rural communities. About one in nine Ohioans and one in six Ohio children are food insecure, according to USDA estimates. Nationwide, the figure is about one in 10.

If food could be diverted from the landfill, it could alleviate some of that insecurity, experts say.

“When we talk about a problem of hunger, we are really talking about a distribution problem,” Freedman said. “We have enough food; it's just not distributed in a way that reaches everybody fairly.”

Food left in the landfill also releases methane, contributing to climate change, according to the USDA. As much as 10% of all carbon emissions come from food production.

“That’s four times more than the global airline industry,” Freedman said.

Less waste means less food must be grown and fewer animals slaughtered.

What to do about it

Businesses try to avoid waste in a number of ways.

Restaurateurs, for example, know when they will be busiest and try to cook only enough food to meet each customer rush so nothing sits out for too long.

“Restaurants have gotten much better at being efficient with the food they're using, and how they are using it,” Ohio Restaurant Association President and CEO John Barker said.

Barker also noted that restaurant buffets, which let customers pay a flat fee for unlimited food, are largely a thing of the past. Food that sat uneaten on buffet tables went to the dumpster.

Some college food services also ask students not to take more than they’re going to eat.

“It's about education a lot of times,” said James Akers, executive chef for Otterbein University. “If they come up into the line and they say, ‘Can I have more chicken breast?’ we ask them to come back.”

Other schools are composting.

The compost program at Bowling Green State University “started off as a student proposed pilot project,” said Nick Hennessy, the university’s sustainability manager.

It now catches “pretty close to 100%” of the food students don’t eat, he said.

Consumers can help in a number of ways such as eating their leftovers and those broccoli stems and other items.

“Some of this is going to be culture change,” Castellanos said.

A small number of grocery stores also are doing away with expiration and sell-by dates.

“They're really not the true expiration date,” Freedman said. Grocery store employees and shoppers often dispose of still-edible foods that pass the dates, she said.

Not all options are easy or inexpensive.

The logistics of composing are complex, said Akers, with Otterbein. The university needs a farmer to accept its compostables, and the farmer might be able to go to campus only one or two days a week, leaving the school with the responsibility to store uneaten food, which can attract pests.

“Usually, it's a lot harder to organize than people think,” he said.

pcooley@dispatch.com

@PatrickACooley

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: How Columbus is reducing the 1 million pounds a day of food waste