Frequently Asked Questions

Divert collects store-specific data from the food bins it collects from its customers using its Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking platform. This information is then relayed back to the stores so that managers and employees can work together to make better inventory purchasing decisions and refine their food recovery programs to prevent waste.

Divert partners with grocers and other consumer-facing businesses in the following ways:

• Leveraging data to identify donation opportunities at the store level
• Deploying a Field Team to work hand-in-hand with stores to put donation systems and processes in place
• Coordinating with stores’ food donation partners to strengthen communication channels and share best practices

These interventions have increased donations by up to 20% for some of our customers.

Divert takes a responsible approach to infrastructure development, building in a thoughtful and pragmatic way that prioritizes sustainable business practices over speed to market.

Divert’s anaerobic digestion process rescues and reuses water from the unsold food material it processes. This approach minimizes fresh water intake compared to some traditional industrial operators, which typically draw in larger volumes of fresh water for their processes. While Divert still uses fresh water, our facilities are net exporters of water, sending more water to treatment plants than the fresh water they consume. This nuanced approach highlights the balance between resource recovery and local water management.

Divert‘s decisions are based on which energy solution is the most efficient in terms of energy loss (maximizing the nutrients from food material to their full energy potential without losing efficiency), and which has the lowest carbon intensity.

Currently, producing renewable natural gas from the biogas is more efficient than producing electricity at scale.

Divert has created a reverse logistics process to transport unsold food in Divert bins using existing transportation routes. This increases program efficiency while preventing additional vehicle emissions, which helps companies reduce their carbon footprint.

Globally, nearly 1.05 billion tons of food went to waste in 2022, according to the U.N. Food Waste Index Report 2024. This amounts to nearly a fifth of all food available each year, or roughly one billion meals wasted per day.

In the U.S., nearly 63 million tons of food goes to waste annually, or nearly 40% of all the food we produce, according to Barclays’ Food Waste: Ripe for Change report.

According to ReFED, 48% of all wasted food comes from consumer households, while the other 52% comes from several business sectors:

• Farming: 16.8% of wasted food is due to environmental and market conditions, such as imperfections, pricing, and labor shortages, which can impact what gets harvested and sold.
• Manufacturing: 14.7% of wasted food is often a result of human or technological error, allergen cross-contamination issues, manufacturing experimentation for quality and quantity of new products, and inefficient ordering systems and processes.
• Consumer-facing businesses (such as retail grocers and restaurants) contribute 20.2% of wasted food due to the inefficiencies within their operations.

Learn more about why so much food goes to waste.

Nearly half (48%) of all wasted food in the U.S. comes from individual households, typically due to:

• Buying more food than neede
• Confusion about expiration and sell-by dates
• Not storing food properly
• Lack of access to food waste prevention services like community composting or anaerobic digestion facilities

To reduce wasted food, households can:

• Buy only what they need
• Understand food date labels
  Store food properly
• Utilize food waste prevention services in their community

Here’s a more complete list of what individuals can do to reduce wasted food.

The key drivers of food loss and waste are both upstream and downstream in the supply chain. Examples include:

• Upstream: Farming accounts for 16.8% of wasted food, where environmental and market conditions, such as imperfections, pricing, and labor shortages can impact what gets harvested and sold.
• Downstream: Wasted food is often a result of human or technological error, allergen cross-contamination issues, manufacturing experimentation for quality and quantity of new products (e.g., testing production of a new cracker for color, flavor, texture, packaging, etc.), and inefficient ordering systems and processes.

Grocery stores and other consumer-facing businesses have several options for managing unsold or uneaten food:

• Discounting excess saleable food
• Certain types of foods can be donated to local pantries and donation centers for distribution to people who are food insecure.
• Food that is not saleable or donatable, such as food with damaged packaging, dairy products past their sell-by date, etc., can be diverted from landfills through programs that convert inedible food into renewable natural gas or beneficial digestate, an amendment for agricultural soil.

Learn more about how consumer-facing businesses can sustainably manage their unsold and uneaten food.

Yes, food industry businesses can keep their food out of landfills by sending it to be recycled into renewable energy through sustainable methods such as commercial-scale anaerobic digestion processes or composting.

Food waste negatively affects the environment upstream and downstream along the supply chain.

Upstream, it wastes the resources used to produce the food and strains the natural resources we have available to continue growing food into the future.

Downstream, the vast majority of wasted food goes to landfills where it emits harmful greenhouse gasses such as methane, which has about 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years. Wasted food makes up 8 – 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Wasted food is a global crisis. Divert advocates using this term in accordance with the Environmental Protection Agency to acknowledge the problem to be solved, and that there is some inherent value that has not been realized in food waste. Food waste is the commonly used phrase for food that reaches the point where it’s available to be consumed but is instead thrown away.

Anaerobic digestion is a process through which bacteria and microorganisms break down organic matter in the absence of oxygen. In this process, anaerobic digestion can produce an amendment to enrich soil, as well as biogas that can be converted into renewable natural gas to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Learn more about how anaerobic digestion recycles inedible food.

The organic material left over after the anaerobic digestion process is called “digestate.” Digestate is a wet mixture that is usually separated into a solid and a liquid. Solid digestate is rich in nutrients and can be used as an agricultural soil amendment such as fertilizer.

Biogas is a safe and sustainable fuel comprised primarily of methane and carbon dioxide, produced through the process of anaerobic digestion.

Divert facilitates the anaerobic digestion process to cleanly and efficiently convert unsold and uneaten food into biogas, which is then refined into renewable natural gas (RNG).

Biogas produced through the anaerobic digestion process can be converted into two main forms of energy:

1. Renewable Natural Gas (RNG): Biogas is upgraded to remove impurities and create a pipeline-quality product to replace petroleum-derived natural gas.
2. Electricity: Biogas is used to directly power electric generators.

Biogas is converted into renewable natural gas through a conditioning process that removes water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other impurities to increase the methane content.

Divert uses this approach to create a pipeline-quality renewable natural gas product that can replace natural gas derived from fossil fuels.

The key environmental benefits of diverting organics from the landfill via anaerobic digestion include:

• A net reduction in equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is achieved from the diversion effort alone, before any renewable energy is produced, because the food’s embedded energy is captured instead of being released into the environment as methane and CO2 during landfill decomposition.
• Converting the resulting biogas into energy has the added benefit of reducing GHG emissions further by eliminating the emissions that are generated by the production and usage of fossil fuels for energy.

While both composting and anaerobic digestion have environmental benefits, there are some key differences:

• Anaerobic digestion produces biogas that can be converted into renewable natural gas or electricity, while composting does not produce energy.
• Anaerobic digestion is more efficient for commercial-scale processing of non-donatable and inedible food, while composting is more suitable for household food scraps mixed with yard waste.
• Anaerobic digestion operates in the absence of oxygen, while composting requires oxygen.

Learn more about the differences between anaerobic digestion and composting.

Anaerobic digestion is a preferred method for processing non-donatable food on a commercial and industrial scale, due to its efficiency and ability to generate environmentally beneficial byproducts, such as biogas and digestate.

Composting poses challenges at a commercial scale, such as the need for depackaging infrastructure and the disruption caused by the high moisture content of organic material.

Food waste exacerbates food insecurity; when edible food is sent to the landfill, it prevents access to affordable, nutritious food. In the U.S. it has been estimated that nearly 63 million tons of food goes to waste annually, much of which is edible, while an estimated 44 million Americans are food insecure. According to an EPA report from 2021, the amount of wasted food “is sufficient to feed 154 million people per year, a far greater number than estimated by the USDA to be food insecure.”

By changing the way the food industry manages unsold and uneaten food, we can increase the volume and quality of food available for donation at local food banks. Learn more about how food waste impacts food insecurity.

Food waste drives up food prices (e.g., inflation) in two ways:

1. Wasted food strains natural resources needed to grow more food, which leads producers and manufacturers to increase prices.
2. Inefficiencies within the food system that lead to wasted food can cause producers and manufacturers to increase their prices to accommodate the lost revenue.

These factors ultimately increase the cost of food available to everyone, the impact of which is felt most acutely by those who are low income and food insecure.

Grocers and other consumer-facing businesses face several challenges when it comes to donating unsold, edible food, including:

• Liability concerns
• Staff turnover
• Lack of visibility into donation opportunities
• Disjointed program training
• Unclear donation guidelines
• Fragmented food recovery networks

Through our Optimization Program, Divert leverages data to identify donation opportunities at the store level, and partners directly with stores’ donation partners, such as with our collaboration with Feeding America, to address these challenges.