Hungry for Leftovers?

Many of us reheat our leftovers from last night’s dinner, but how can we find uses for the leftover, surplus, or unsaleable food from supermarkets, hospitals, universities, restaurants and food preparation companies. With Americans wasting nearly 100 billion pounds of food scraps each year, it’s time to find safe and productive uses for all of this food.

EPA’s newest publication Putting Surplus Food to Good Use: A How-To Guide for Food Service Providers is doing just that. From reducing the amount of food purchased to composting organics, the guide helps food service providers put their food scrapes to good use.

Reduce and recycle your surplus food today!

Surplus Food Recovery and Recycling Success Stories

These are some great ways of putting surplus food to good use! Please visit Surplus Food Recovery and Recycling Success Stories at EPA's Organic Materials Web site to learn from our newly posted success stories on sustainable efforts to reduce and recover surplus food.

Food to Fuel

Want fries with that fill up? With PacBio Biodiesel you can. Hawaii-based Pacific Biodiesel, Inc. converts recycled cooking oil into fuel that powers generators, commercial equipment, vehicles, and marine vessels. Biodiesel production diverts cooking oil from landfills, while its use reduces emissions of major greenhouse gases and substances such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, hazardous diesel particulates, and the acid-rain-causing sulfur
dioxide.

Rockin' to Fight Hunger

Rock and Wrap It Up! (RWU) is a nonprofit program that arranges the collection and local donation of leftover food from rock concerts, sporting events, political rallies, and college and school cafeterias. There’s a lot of food leftover from these venues—as a rule, caterers prepare 10 to 15 percent more than they need for an event—and RWU makes it simple and satisfying to donate the leftovers.

Shopping for Change

Recycling food scraps is good for the environment and business! Supermarkets in Massachusetts are reducing, recovering, and recycling their food waste and saving money by participating in the state’s voluntary supermarket recycling certification program.

Food Scraps Go to the Animals

Don't throw away your food waste! A Minnesota recycling company is providing an example of an innovative food scrap collection program.