Fig. 5: Contribution of individual policy categories towards likely food waste diversion potential.
Diversion potential values are based on the EPA’s original methodology (EPA-2016 scenario), which includes recycling. For each box plot, the centre line shows the median, the box limits show the 25th and 75th percentiles and the whiskers extend to the minimum and maximum, defined as the 25th and 75th percentiles ± 1.5× the interquartile range, respectively. Each data point corresponds to the state average based on four data points (that is, high and low conversion factors for both baseline and alternative scenarios), with n (per policy category) = 50. Only outliers (above and below the maximum and minimum, respectively) were labelled to avoid cluttering. The green line reflects the federal food diversion goal. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with post-hoc Tukey’s honest significance test: F(3, 196) = 85.71 (P < 0.001 (***)). Additional statistical analysis was also conducted separately for the baseline and alternative scenarios, yielding similar results (Extended Data Fig. 2).
