About 40 million tons of food waste end up in U.S. landfills every year. That’s roughly 60% of all the food wasted by homes, restaurants, grocery stores, and other food service businesses. Food is actually the single largest material taking up space in American landfills, outpacing plastic, paper, and every other type of trash.
The Numbers Behind Landfilled Food
The EPA estimates that in 2019, 66 million tons of food was wasted across the retail, food service, and residential sectors. Of that, 39.6 million tons went straight to landfills. The remaining 40% was split among composting, animal feed, donation, and other diversion pathways, but landfilling dominated by a wide margin.
Those 66 million tons don’t even capture the full picture. An additional 40 million tons of food waste came from food and beverage manufacturing and processing, a separate category the EPA tracks independently. When you combine both streams, the total volume of wasted food in the U.S. exceeds 100 million tons per year.
Food Is the Biggest Thing in Landfills
When researchers look at what’s actually sitting in a landfill, food takes the top spot. In 2018, about 146 million tons of municipal solid waste were landfilled nationwide. Food made up roughly 24% of that total, a larger share than plastics, paper, rubber, leather, or textiles. That year, about 35 million tons of food were buried in landfills.
This ranking surprises many people, who assume plastic or packaging dominates. While those materials are highly visible in litter and ocean pollution, food quietly accounts for nearly a quarter of everything landfilled by weight.
Where the Waste Comes From
The EPA groups food waste sources into a few broad categories: residential (your kitchen), food service (restaurants, cafeterias, hotels), and food retail (grocery stores, convenience stores, warehouses). All three contribute to the 66 million ton total, and all three send the majority of their waste to landfills.
At the household level, food waste adds up through spoiled produce, uneaten leftovers, and trimmings from meal prep. Restaurants and cafeterias generate large volumes from overproduction, plate waste, and expired inventory. Grocery stores discard items that pass sell-by dates or have cosmetic flaws. Each of these sources faces different barriers to reducing waste, which is part of why the landfill rate has stayed so high.
Why Landfilled Food Creates Outsized Emissions
Burying food in a landfill isn’t just a space problem. When food decomposes without oxygen, as it does under layers of compacted trash, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The EPA estimates that 58% of the methane escaping from municipal landfills into the atmosphere comes specifically from decomposing food waste.
That’s a striking figure given that food is 24% of landfill contents by weight but responsible for well over half the fugitive methane. Food breaks down faster and more completely than materials like wood or paper, which means it generates a disproportionate share of gas relative to its volume. Modern landfills capture some of this methane and convert it to energy, but a significant portion still escapes, contributing to climate change.
What Happens to the Other 40%
The food waste that doesn’t go to landfills follows several alternative pathways. Composting converts food scraps into nutrient-rich soil amendments. Some surplus food is donated to food banks and hunger relief organizations. A portion goes to animal feed operations. Anaerobic digestion facilities, which break down organic material in sealed tanks, capture methane intentionally and use it as fuel.
Despite the growth of curbside composting programs and food recovery networks, these alternatives still handle a minority of the total. The 60/40 split between landfill and everything else has been slow to shift, partly because composting infrastructure remains limited in many regions, and partly because food waste is heavy, wet, and expensive to transport compared to letting it go out with regular trash. Cities and states that have banned food from landfills, including Vermont and California, are beginning to change the math, but national progress has been incremental.
The Scale in Everyday Terms
Forty million tons is abstract, so here’s another way to think about it. The U.S. has roughly 130 million households. If you divide the residential and commercial food waste headed to landfills across those households, it works out to hundreds of pounds per household per year, even though much of the waste comes from businesses rather than home kitchens. The average American family of four throws away an estimated $1,500 worth of food annually, and most of that ends up buried underground producing methane for decades.