Vermont banned food from the landfill. Its haulers can't believe how much of it people still throw away

What struck private trash haulers was the sheer volume of edible-looking food going into the garbage — four years into a ban that is supposed to keep it out.

A federal estimate says a family of four wastes nearly $3,000 of food a year. Vermont is one of the only states that can tell you what happens to it next — and the men hauling the cans see how much of it still ends up in the trash.

A family of four throws away nearly $3,000 worth of food a year, according to an April 2025 estimate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — about $728 per person, or some 11 percent of a household’s food budget. That’s nearly double the $1,500 figure long cited in food-waste campaigns, which was built on 2010 prices; food has gotten roughly 50 percent more expensive since, and so has the cost of letting it rot.

That number is national. Vermont keeps no comparable tally of what its own households spend on food they never eat — no state really does, because the EPA figure measures wallets, not waste bins. But Vermont can answer a question almost no other state can: once that food is wasted, where does it go?

Since July 1, 2020, it has been illegal to throw food in the trash in Vermont. And by the state’s most recent count, we divert just over half of it.

What Vermont measures

The number comes from the 2023 Vermont Waste Composition Study, released by the Department of Environmental Conservation in May 2024 and built on field crews physically sorting through samples of the state’s trash. For the first time, the study produced an estimate of Vermont’s food-scrap recovery rate: somewhere between 50.7% and 56.8% of food scraps kept out of the landfill. The study’s authors noted they weren’t aware of any other state that had even attempted to measure the figure.

The same study found food still makes up 18.8% of what Vermonters send to the landfill — about 71,112 tons. As a share of the trash, that’s barely moved since the last study in 2018. But the raw tonnage of food in the landfill fell 13% over those five years, from 81,627 tons, even as the state’s overall garbage shrank. The study’s authors read that drop as evidence the ban is working, if slowly.

That’s the view from a distance — sampled, weighed, averaged. The view from the truck is the same picture, closer up, and harder to shrug off.

The men who lift the cans

At a transfer station serving a private hauler that runs routes through some 20 Vermont towns, three drivers — who between them work six or seven of those towns apiece — described what they see at the bottom of the trash cans they empty by hand. None was authorized to speak for the company, and all spoke on their own.

Asked how much of the residential trash they handle is food scraps or other compostable material, the first driver said “half” without blinking — then caught himself and softened it to “or close to it.” Pressed on whether it was at least a third, all three answered “definitely.” Call it a third to a half, and by their own read, probably more than a third.

What struck them wasn’t the fraction so much as the sheer volume of edible-looking food going into the garbage — four years into a ban that is supposed to keep it out. It astounds them, they said, how much food people throw away.

This isn’t a formal measurement — it’s an eyeball read of volume in hand-loaded trash, and “compostable” covers more than food. But it isn’t one site’s worth of trash, either: between them the three cover six or seven towns apiece, so they’re describing what they see across a fair slice of the state, week after week. And it rhymes with the sorts.

The state’s study, weighing categories rather than guessing at volume, puts food alone at about a fifth of the trash; add the other compostable and recyclable material that didn’t have to be there, and the divertible share climbs past half. The methods don’t match and the categories don’t line up cleanly, so the drivers’ “third to a half” isn’t a confirmation of the study so much as a ground-level echo of it — and of DEC’s own drier line that if everyone recycled and composted, Vermont could cut its landfill waste by almost half.

Set the exact fraction aside, and the drivers and the sorts agree on what matters: plenty of food is still reaching the landfill, ban or no ban. What none of them can see is the bigger number behind it.

What the data can’t measure

That bigger number is the part of the problem the recovery rate was never built to catch. The EPA’s $3,000 is a prevention figure — money spent on food that’s bought, hauled home, and never eaten. Vermont’s recovery rate is a diversion figure — of the food that’s already been wasted, the share composted, donated, or fed to animals instead of landfilled. They answer different questions, and it’s easy to read the recovery rate as a verdict on the whole problem when it only settles the back half of it: a household that dutifully composts $3,000 of spoiled produce has kept it out of the landfill, but it’s still out the $3,000.

The hierarchy makes the gap sharper still. Vermont’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, written into Act 148 when the Legislature passed it unanimously in 2012, ranks the options in plain order: don’t generate the waste; feed people; feed animals; then, and only then, compost or digest. Prevention sits at the very top — and it’s the one rung no one measures. Everything the recovery rate counts happens lower down, after food has already become waste. So do the drivers: the food softening in their cans was already wasted, and the food quietly composted in a backyard, or never overbought to begin with, never reaches their truck. Everyone in this story is measuring what happens to food after it’s lost. How much is never lost at all goes uncounted.

How Vermonters get rid of it

In a UNH Survey Center poll done for the state, composting dominated the methods residents reported: about 43% compost in their own backyards, with smaller shares using a drop-off site (13%), curbside pickup (12%), livestock (12%), pets (9%), or the garbage disposal (12%).

A separate University of Vermont study tracked how behavior shifted after the ban took full effect. The share of residents separating food waste from their trash climbed from 48% to 71%. But the same researchers found the system still confuses people: more than a quarter of Vermonters said they were unclear on what the law actually requires, and one in five who compost called it hard or very hard. That gap — between the 71% who say they separate and the loaded cans the drivers still empty — is where the policy lives.

The summer problem

This is the season the gap shows up. Late June through September is peak produce — and peak waste. Farmers’ markets pile high with greens and the first tomatoes, CSA boxes arrive every week with more than most kitchens can cook through, and the stores price summer produce low enough to encourage the overbuy. The distance between the ambitious cooking we plan and the lighter, busier, eat-out summer meals we actually have widens right alongside the abundance. The zucchini softens in the crisper. The berries mold before anyone gets to them. The salad greens turn to slime in the back of the fridge — and, if the drivers are right, into the trash.

Vermont’s system catches a good share of that on the back end. The compost pile, the drop-off bin, the chickens, the hauler’s cart — all of it keeps the spoiled haul out of the Coventry landfill, the state’s only one. But none of it puts the money back in anyone’s pocket, and none of it is what the law actually wants most.

What the law wants most

Above composting, the law prizes two things more: feeding people, and — at the very top — not wasting the food in the first place.

Feeding people at least leaves a faint trail. The Vermont Foodbank reported moving 3,430 tons of rescued food last year — by the state’s own accounting, roughly 2.2% of estimated food waste, and an undercount, since it misses the community fridges and local food shelves that don’t report to the state. Prevention leaves no trail at all. There’s no Vermont number for the food bought, bagged, and thrown out before it’s ever cooked, because the state’s data only starts once food is already waste. The closest proxy is the EPA’s national $3,000 — and no one in Vermont, the drivers included, is measuring it.

The honest scorecard

So here’s where Vermont stands. It is one of a few states to ban food from its landfills, and, as far as its regulators are aware, the only one even trying to measure how much it keeps out — real, and rare. It is also a state that still landfills nearly half its food waste, leans hardest at the household level on composting, the option its own rules rank last, and can’t say whether residents are wasting less, only that more of what they waste is being kept out of the trash.

The $3,000 is the part you can fix at the grocery store. The just-over-half is the part Vermont built a law to handle. They’re not the same number, and the distance between them — all the food wasted before anyone decides whether to compost it — is the part of the story neither the state’s clipboard nor the men lifting the cans can see. What the drivers can tell you is narrower, and damning enough: the ban is real, the program works — and the cans are still full of food.

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Sources: U.S. EPA, “Estimating the Cost of Food Waste to American Consumers” (April 2025); Vermont DEC, “2023 Vermont Waste Composition Study” (May 2024); Belarmino et al., “Impact of Vermont’s Food Waste Ban on Residents and Food Businesses,” University of Vermont (January 2023); Vermont Universal Recycling Law / Act 148. Reporting at the transfer station by the author; the three drivers spoke on condition of anonymity and were not authorized to speak for their employer.

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