Americans waste a lot of food. According to a new study from the American Chemistry Council, though more than half of all Americans repurpose meals to make leftovers, 76 percent end up trashing leftovers on a monthly basis. All that wasted food adds up to an average of $640 a year. Just to put that in perspective, that’s greater than the average monthly wage of many countries.
Though nearly 80 percent of respondents said they were bothered by wasting their money on food that went uneaten, just 15 percent said the environmental impact of such high quantities of waste bothered them. As USA Today notes, this is a big deal: The EPA has found that 20 percent of space in landfills is composed of discarded food. An executive at ACC told USA Today, “I just don’t think we’ve done a good enough job yet talking about the environmental impacts of food waste” …
