Environment
Why Cities Are Working With Businesses to Fight Food Waste
In Nashville and New York, officials are leveraging relationships with companies and nonprofits to get smarter about food usage and disposal.
American cities have a trash problem: there’s too much of it, and not enough places to put it. Even Nashville, which stores its waste in nearby Rutherford County, is going to have a reckoning when that landfill reaches capacity—which is expected to happen in the next few years.
In many cities, much of the discarded refuse is scrapped food. As CityLab reported last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently took stock of the landscape of food waste in Nashville, Denver, and New York. Spoiler alert: There was a lot of it.