Research Reports

Local governments are involved with collecting and managing waste, permitting and regulating food service businesses, and addressing food insecurity among residents. Accordingly, food waste and surplus food generation data can help inform municipal food waste reduction efforts. The NRDC/ELI Model Ordinance on Mandatory Reporting for Large Food Waste Generators is intended to require large generators, including businesses, nonprofit organizations, and municipal governmental subunits, to measure and report on their food waste generation.

Evaluating the implementation of Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs), especially their ultimate effects on water quality, is challenging but important. It is needed to reveal whether a TMDL and implementation actions are working or should be revised. It also provides information about restoration and protection, ideally making future efforts more effective and efficient, and it helps to demonstrate to the public the impact of TMDL programs and other Clean Water Act programs.

ELI’s Food Waste Initiative is publishing a Research Brief Series to present takeaways from the Initiative’s research, spanning a range of topics important to food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling.

ELI’s Food Waste Initiative is publishing a Research Brief Series to present takeaways from the Initiative’s research, spanning a range of topics important to food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling.

In our 50th anniversary year, ELI partnered with the Environmental and Energy Law Program at George Washington University School of Law to review the state of environmental law and “reimagine” what law might need to look like in the years ahead if we are to achieve a more sustainable future.