What Are the Levels of the Waste Hierarchy — and Did the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy Change?

The classic waste management hierarchy has five levels: prevention, reuse, recycling, other recovery (such as energy recovery), and disposal — ranked from most to least preferred. For food specifically, the U.S. EPA long used a six-tier version called the Food Recovery Hierarchy, and in 2023 it replaced that pyramid with the Wasted Food Scale. All three tell the same basic story — keep material from being wasted first, and treat landfill as the last resort — but they slice the middle differently.

The five-level waste hierarchy

When people ask about "the five levels," they usually mean the general waste hierarchy used across solid waste management, not just food:

• Prevention — don't generate the waste in the first place
• Reuse — use the item again for its original purpose
• Recycling — reprocess the material into something new
• Recovery — extract remaining value, typically as energy
• Disposal — landfill or incineration without energy recovery

This framework applies to everything from packaging to construction debris. Food gets its own version because food has options other materials don't: it can feed people and animals.

The six tiers of the old Food Recovery Hierarchy

EPA's Food Recovery Hierarchy adapted the general hierarchy into six tiers for food, drawn as an inverted pyramid:

• Source reduction — produce and buy less surplus in the first place
• Feed hungry people — donate wholesome surplus to hunger relief
• Feed animals — divert scraps to animal feed
• Industrial uses — render fats and oils, or send food to anaerobic digestion
• Composting — return nutrients to soil
• Landfill or incineration — the last resort

You'll still see this pyramid in older sustainability plans, grant applications, and classroom materials, which is why searches for "food recovery hierarchy" and "food waste pyramid" persist.

What the Wasted Food Scale changed

EPA's Wasted Food Scale is the current version, and it isn't just a redesign. It reflects updated EPA analysis of the environmental impacts of each pathway. The most visible changes:

• It's drawn as a curved gradient rather than a strict pyramid, and some pathways are grouped as similarly preferable rather than force-ranked against each other.
• Upcycling — turning surplus into new food products — appears explicitly alongside donation.
• Anaerobic digestion is treated with more nuance: digestion where the leftover digestate is beneficially used ranks better than digestion where it isn't.
• Sending food down the drain to the sewer is called out among the least preferred endings, alongside landfill and incineration.

We walk through each tier of the new scale in detail in our explainer on the EPA Wasted Food Scale.

Which one should you reference?

For anything current — reports, signage, school projects, sustainability plans — use the Wasted Food Scale, since it's what EPA now publishes under its sustainable management of food program. If you're reading an older document that cites the six-tier hierarchy, the translation is straightforward: source reduction maps to prevention, feeding people expands to donation plus upcycling, and the bottom tiers get finer-grained rankings.

Whatever version you use, the practical order of operations for a kitchen is the same: measure what you're wasting with a food waste audit, prevent what you can, and donate what you can't prevent.