Name: Tossed Out: Food Waste in America
Uploaded: 2016-11-07T01:20:21.000Z
Duration: 28 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

GRANT GERLOCK: There's a problem with America's food system.

Pound for pound, more food goes into landfills

across the country than any other single source of waste.

GAIL TAVILL: When you put food in a landfill

it creates methane gas, which is massively more potent

all that food waste could be a valuable resource.

KARIN PAGE: I mean, every farmer I work with is so generous,

and they would rather have their food feed people

than even feed the chickens or compost it.

JACOB HICKEY: If we can just pull that stuff from

our industrial sites and our grocery stores

then we can pull that out of the landfill.

GERLOCK: They're writing a recipe for change,

so the food that's being thrown out doesn't all go to waste.

People are wanting to know where their food comes from.

At the same point they saying, okay, where does it go.

GRANT GERLOCK: There's more food available in the U.S.

has been on the rise for decades and that has serious

We begin our food waste story at the end of the line

It's taken away and you don't have to think about it,

But once you start digging into it, you find out -

There are those who do have your garbage on their minds.

States and cities hire Chappelle's consulting company

to look through their trash and tell them what it's made of.

JACK CHAPPELLE: You want to know how long the landfill can last,

what materials you can take out of the waste stream

that makes the landfill last even longer.

of what we throw away doesn't have to be.

Nationwide more than 8 million tons of glass

CHAPPELLE: You still find an awful lot of bank statements

CHAPPELLE: In the country you get more peelings,

GERLOCK: The Environmental Protection Agency

estimates that, Nationally, about 20 percent

of what goes into the landfill each year is food.

Add all the food together from L.A. to New York

and America throws away nearly 35 million tons each year.

That's almost 100 Empire State buildings, made of food.

Enough food goes uneaten in the United States in one day

to feed the Denver metro area for 10 weeks.

DAN NICKEY: We just have so much of an abundance of food

GERLOCK: Dan Nickey from the Iowa Waste Reduction Center

Nickey says waste happens at every level of the food chain.

NICKEY: You have food that is in warehouses that expires

and it doesn't have the flavoring they want.

They don't want to sell it, so they throw it away.

that compared to when our parents grew up.

GERLOCK: From farmers to consumers, fruits and vegetables