This article is part of HuffPosts Reclaim campaign, an ongoing project spotlighting the worlds waste crisis and how we can begin to solve it.

Americas cows are getting serious sugar highs, and theres nothing sweet about it.

On Jan. 18, hundreds of thousands of red Skittles spilled out of a truck on a highway in rural Wisconsin, CNN affiliate WISN reported. It was revealed later that the candy had been on its way to a local farm to be turned into cattle feed, instead of getting destroyed. Though this practice of feeding excess candy to animals is fairly common, a prominent food waste advocate was outraged to learn about the Skittles incident.

Red skittles are an alarming selection for cattle feed, said Nicole Civita, a professor and director of the Food Recovery Project with the University of Arkansas School of Law and assistant director of the Rian Fried Center for Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems at Sterling College.

While feeding candy to livestock might reduce waste and increase economic efficiency in the food system, we have to look at what it does to the internal systems of the animals that are forced to feed on it, Civita added.

A Skittles plant in Yorkville, Illinois, chose to discard all those red candies because the signature S wasnt printed properly on the sugary pieces. But the plant wasnt authorized to send the candy to the Wisconsin farmer, according to Denise Young, vice president of corporate affairs for Wrigley Americas, which owns Skittles. However, other Skittles plants often do sell excess product to processors who use it to make animal feed.

I dont have specifics, we are in the middle of investigating, Young told The Huffington Post of the incident in Wisconsin. [The candy] was supposed to be destroyed.

Destroying excess product in incinerators, or selling it to processors are part of the companys efforts to send zero waste to landfills.

Breaking down excess baked goods and candy and feeding them to livestock actually has been common practice among farmers for a while. In 2012, corn prices surged, which drove up costs of grain-based feeds, Civita noted. Cows find the sugar in candy highly palatable, and farmers argue that its a natural substitute for the sugars in corn.