The purpose of the article. The development of a sustainable economic model for processing food waste in Ukraine, considering the principles of the circular economy and the proposals of Ukrainian researchers. Work methodology. The official statistics were aggregated, and the previous publications were analyzid to conduct comprehensive calculations and create a financial assumptiona about the total cost of food waste management in Ukraine. Work results. The stages of forming a total tariff for food waste processing in Ukraine are highlighted, namely: identification of waste; determination of the processing method; determining the full cost of handling them. The research revealed that household waste in Ukraine has a food waste content that varies between 25.1% and 67% of the total generated waste. The anaerobic digestion was selected as the method of choice to recycle the generated food waste in Ukraine as this is compliant with the common practice in the leading EU countries. To enhance the recycling process attractiveness, zero interest rate financing program was proposed, and government full ownership. As a result, it was found that building a financially sustainable food waste model requires its waste management tariff to be set at 353 grn/t and to implement additional ecological tariff of 601 grn/t as a reward for the CO2 emissions savings.