In July 2026, as per a new study in the Journal Nature Food, recycling food waste may not always be the right and most eco-friendly practice for the environment. Recycling food waste in this era may pollute the soil with microplastics if the right changes are not made to the food packaging at the right time.
In the United States, about a third of food produced is never eaten, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The procedure of producing, packaging, and disposing of the wasted food in landfills is one of the major contributors to climate change. Also, the EPA has a goal to cut the country’s food waste in half by 2030.
A few states have already begun the work to keep a record of their food packaging procedures and the materials used for the packaging. Massachusetts requires any business producing more than a half-ton of food waste per week to keep it out of landfills or incinerators. Instead, businesses must "recycle" by diverting edible surplus food to charities or food recovery services, and sending food waste to compost facilities or anaerobic digesters that turn it into energy.
Massachusetts now diverts about 370,000 tons of food waste from landfills per year, and has a goal of 780,000 tons annually by 2030. Vermont goes even further, prohibiting all residents and businesses from throwing food scraps and yard waste into household trash or landfills.
The researchers at the University of Vermont wanted to study what would happen if similar food waste bans were adopted globally. They found that recycling food scraps instead of tossing them in a landfill could drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, cutting the total climate impacts by up to 99%. Nationwide food recycling would also reduce nutrient pollution from landfills that can feed toxic algal blooms. But, without changes to food packaging, a national food waste ban could end up dumping up to 20,000 tons of plastic into farmland each year via contaminated compost.
“There are huge climate benefits to diverting food waste away from landfills. And a lot of that benefit is coming from avoiding methane emissions when the food waste breaks down,” said Katherine Porterfield, the lead study author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont.
She also stated that a huge amount of plastic food packaging gets mixed in with food waste either through accident or through sloppy sorting. Even though people and machines are hired for the process of sorting or picking the plastic out of the waste stream, a small amount sneaks through. In case of a huge amount of food waste, a huge amount of mixing is also expected.
Porterfield said that food waste is the only reason that microplastics are entering the environment. She also said that plastics can be found anywhere, hence they can be found in soil, air, water, stormwater runoff, and through plastic mulching used on many farms. It’s unclear whether plastics in agricultural soil can end up in food in a significant way. "It's still something that researchers are trying to understand,” Porterfield said.
The new study highlights "a real problem," said Laura Orlando, senior scientist at the nonprofit Just Zero, who was not involved with the research. "Plastic doesn’t belong in compost, full stop." She also stated that compost made from food waste is not inherently contaminated with plastic. Many gardeners and farmers are able to use food scraps as a high-quality, plastic-free compost. "An upstream solution is to take plastic out of packaging," she said.
It is also observed that the concern about the contamination of compost with PFAS, microplastics, and other pollutants is increasing. In 2022, an organic compost facility was linked to contaminated drinking water in Westminster, Massachusetts. The researchers also mentioned that their findings should not discourage municipalities from enacting food waste bans.
“The study shows clear benefits to food waste recycling. This is something we need to be doing,” said study senior author Eric Roy, who directs the University of Vermont's Casella Center for Circular Economy and Sustainability.
Casella Waste Systems Inc., a major waste management company in the Northeastern U.S., is a financial supporter of the research. Roy said the company did not influence the study design or results. He said that better sorting of food waste, as well as better packaging, could cut down on a lot of plastic waste.
“ Packaging is designed to package food, not to be de-packaged,” he said. "Conventional plastics tend not to disappear, but to just break into tinier and tinier fragments over time. So there's work to be done.”
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