Food Lifeline Endorses Campaign to Maintain Washington’s Climate Commitment Act
With legislation in 2024, Washington established programs with Climate Commitment Act funding to support Washington food growers and producers who donate unsold food, fund wasted food reduction grants, and convene a statewide workgroup to recommend best practices in food donation.
To continue this progress, Food Lifeline is endorsing No on 2117 (no2117.com), the campaign to protect the Climate Commitment Act by defeating the I-2117 referendum on this November’s ballot.
Each year Washington wastes millions of pounds of perfectly good food while nearly 2 million Washingtonians face hunger. At the same time, wasted food is responsible for 58% of landfill methane emissions released to the atmosphere – a pollutant 80 times more powerful at warming the globe than carbon dioxide.
Prioritizing wasted food reduction means more food for donation and less potential for food loss or food that ends up in landfills, where it creates dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. This matters because climate change disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and vulnerable populations.
Food Lifeline has long championed public policy with the aim of increasing food donations. Starting with legislation in 2019 and 2022, Washington state established food and climate goals to reduce wasted edible food and encourage food donations to food banks and food pantries.
Washington is only at the beginning stages of investing Climate Commitment Act funding to foster more sustainable, climate-resilient, and equitable food systems in Washington state. To be sure, more is needed for agriculture resilience and to increase access to available food for food banks and food pantries working to meet their communities’ needs, especially vulnerable communities. It is important to recognize that the policies in place also help food growers, producers, grocers, and retailers in the state with improved systems, partnerships, and support for their part.
Of the important agricultural and environmental programs currently funded by the Climate Commitment Act, the following will source tens of millions of pounds of unsold Washington grown food and grocery products for hunger relief:
- The Washington State Department of Agriculture’s new Washington Commodity Donation Program will use Climate Commitment Act funding to scale up support for farm commodity food bank donation to increase access to unsold produce, protein, and grains that would otherwise remain unharvested. If fully funded, as many as 60 million additional pounds – double the amount donated now – would be sourced. Funding helps growers and producers with harvesting and transportation costs when donating.
- The Washington State Department of Ecology’s Washington Center for Sustainable Food Management will use Climate Commitment Act funding for newly created Wasted Food Capacity Grants and a Food Donation Workgroup – to ensure that community-led problem solving will help everyone reduce food loss and achieve systems that encourage using food well. These programs can quickly add efficiency and scale to many successful partnerships between grocers and local food banks that already yield tens of millions of pounds of grocery store donations.
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Food Lifeline is on a mission to end hunger in Western Washington. We firmly believe that access to food is a human right and that no one should go hungry. We know poverty, racial inequity, and social injustice have long fostered and perpetuated systems that reward some while leaving whole communities behind. Food Lifeline resolves to dismantle these systems while promoting policies and practices designed to lift people out of poverty and enabling all members of our society to thrive.
Through grassroots advocacy, we work to shape local, state, and federal policy; we partner with organizations that are addressing poverty; and we’re building a movement to end hunger through community engagement and mobilization.
To solve hunger today, Food Lifeline provides fresh, nutritious food and pantry staples to hundreds of thousands of people facing hunger every year by sourcing donations from food industry partners, contracts with government food assistance programs, working with farms, and purchasing traditional, and culturally relevant foods. We distribute this food through a partnership with 300 food banks, shelters, and meal programs, enabling us to provide the equivalent of 164,480 meals every day to foster healthy communities.