Top: Image courtesy U.S. EPA

Approximately 38% of food in the U.S. goes unsold or uneaten, and most ends up as waste in landfills or incinerators. While there are many waste reduction solutions that span the food supply chain, making many of these changes takes investment. The federal government has long funded food loss and waste solutions, according to a blog by NRDC, and over the past year it has made “unprecedented investments” in the space. To help potential applicants find and understand these federal grant opportunities, ReFED and NRDC partnered to create a database of grants that could be used to fund food waste reduction work. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) all cover different parts of the food supply chain, and each can be a source of funding or provide other resources to states, tribes, and local governments,” notes Nina Sevilla at NRDC, author of the blog. For example, USDA’s Compost and Food Waste Reduction Cooperative Agreements has funded over 75 projects over the past three years. Two EPA grant programs, the Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grants and the Recycling Education and Outreach Grants, provided $44 million to support 33 projects to prevent and recycle wasted food in 2023. “It can be hard to track and find grants and funding from different federal agencies, so our new federal grants database offers a centralized list of all grants from across the federal government that could potentially fund food waste reduction projects,” says Sevilla. “The database has a row for each relevant grant that includes a description, eligibility, and link to the grant on the federal government’s website.”