Most Americans feel bad about throwing away food but fewer understand the negative environmental impacts, according to a new study aimed at informing strategies to curb the trend.

The good news, according to the authors, is that families would likely have an appetite for changing their behavior if they better understood the harms of waste and misleading sell-by labels that often cause people to dispose of edible food.

About a third of the world’s edible food is squandered, and in the United States about nearly all ends up decomposing in garbage dumps where it releases about 35 million tons of greenhouse gasses every year, according to the report published Thursday in PLOS ONE.

About 77 percent of those polled said they feel guilty when throwing away food, according to the 500-person study. At the same time, 42 percent of people said didn’t think the practice of tossing edible food was harmful to the environment.


“We’re ripe for continued information campaigns,” said Brian Roe, study co-author and agricultural economist at The Ohio State University. “There’s a gnawing that something should be done that suggests that awareness campaigns would have an opportunity to move the needle.

“I think a lot of people think when you throw away food it’s natural; it decomposes. What’s so bad about that?” he added. “But they haven’t thought about once you put it all together in a landfill it creates methane, a pretty potent greenhouse gas.”

The report builds on recent research and campaigns focused on addressing the roughly 133 billion pounds of food that the country throws out annually — about 1,249 calories per person a day.

While only 53 percent of those polled said they came across the issue of food waste over the last year, that number’s up about 10 percentage points from a study last year funded by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.


Also suggesting room for improved education, nearly 70 percent of those polled overstated the health benefits of tossing food after a “sell-by” date — often a poor metric for assessing whether food is safe to consume.

“We found that people generally agreed that throwing away food once the label date had passed would reduce the chances of food-borne illness,” Roe said.

“There are some food where you do have to pay close attention to that date like packaged meats where particularly listeria and certain pathogens are a problem,” he added. “But most the time it’s about food freshness and quality.”

People are also likely underestimating how much food they throw away compared to their neighbors, with 86.5 percent of respondents believing they were less wasteful than other similar-sized households.


About half of those polled said it would be tough to reduce their personal food waste, with 59 percent thinking some waste is necessary to ensure meals taste fresh.

Awareness of food waste does seem to be on the rise.

Last fall, the Obama administration called on the country to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030, and the Ad Council has pursued a similar campaign.

× As California moves to reduce trash delivered to landfills, food scraps are the next items to move from the trash can to the recycling bin.


Now, congress is considering a bill to reform the unregulated practice of food labeling by manufactures through a uniform system that delineates when a product expires as opposed to simply lacking freshness.