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Wasted: how America is losing up to 40 percent of its food from farm to fork to landfill

The second edition of its groundbreaking 2012 report, the NRDC’s Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill provides updated statistics on the environmental, economic and social impacts, analyzes areas of progress at the government, business and consumer levels in the last five years and offers policy solutions for addressing the issue. The report reveals that Americans throw away more than 400 pounds of food per person per year. If just one-third of this amount was redirected to people in need, it could feed 50 million people — more than the existing unmet food needs in the US. Wasted food also squanders 21 percent of the annual water usage of the agricultural industry, generates the emissions equivalent of 37 million cars per year and accounts for 21 percent of the material that goes into landfills.