Currently browsing posts about: Food-waste

I’ve been collecting items on food waste.  Here are four recent ones.

I.  EPA: From Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of Food Waste.   The Infographic Summary:

II.  WWF: Driven to Waste: The Global Impact of Food Loss and Waste on Farms.

Driven to Waste: Global Food Loss on Farms, a new report from WWF and Tesco, reveals an estimated 2.5 billion tonnes of food goes uneaten around the world each year. That is an increase of approximately 1.2 billion tonnes on the established estimates of 1.3 billion tonnes wasted each year. These new estimates indicate that of all the food grown, approximately 40 per cent goes uneaten, which is higher than the previously estimated figure of 33 per cent.

III.  Washington State Department of Ecology: Use Food Well Washington: A roadmap to a more resilient food system through food waste reduction].

Food waste is one of the greatest challenges of our time, with significant environmental, social, and economic impacts. Thankfully, our research shows the potential benefits to addressing food waste in Washington are just as enormous (Fig. 1).
Our calculations indicate Washington generates more than one million tons of food waste annually, with a large portion (about 35 percent) being edible food going into landfills.

IV.  How are food manufacturers tackling waste management?  As 2022 gets underway, waste management has moved from arguably to inarguably never more important…. Read more

I was fascinated to see this ad in the October 24 New York Times extolling Coke, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper’s commitment to improve recycling.

The ad says “We’re all in…But we need your help to change how America recycles.”

Sure.  Happy to.  But these companies are among the leading plastic polluters in the world, according to the latest audit.

So how about:

1.  Stop producing so much waste in the first place
2.  Stop fighting bottle recycling laws.

I just read the Intercept’s investigative report on Coca-Cola’s overt and covert opposition to recycling laws: “LEAKED AUDIO REVEALS HOW COCA-COLA UNDERMINES PLASTIC RECYCLING EFFORTS.”

As the article explains:

States with bottle bills recycle about 60 percent of their bottles and cans, as opposed to 24 percent in other states. And states that have bottle bills also have an average of 40 percent less beverage container litter on their coasts, according to a 2018 study of the U.S. and Australia published in the journal Marine Policy.

But bottle bills also put some of the responsibility — and cost — of recycling back on the companies that produce the waste, which may be why Coke and other soda companies have long fought against them.

Soda companies would much rather have us clean up the mess they make.

Mind you, I’m for cleaning up that mess and am happy to help.  But I also want bottle recycling laws that give us an incentive to take back all that waste.

The World Resources Institute has issued this report.

Here’s what it does:

1.  We encourage countries and companies to adopt the global SDG 12.3 target as their own, measure their  food loss and waste (since what gets measured gets managed), and take action on the hotspots identified. Although simple, this “Target-Measure-Act” approach is proving effective.
2.  We identify a short-list of “to do’s” for each type of actor in the food supply chain. If you don’t know which actions to take, start with this list and go from there.
3.  To scale up the impact and pace of these actor-specific interventions, we recommend 10 interventions that tackle food loss and waste across the entire supply chain, target a handful of food loss and waste hotspots, and help
   set the enabling policy and financial conditions that are necessary for success.

It has a great laundry list of recommendations, some of which we can all do right now.

Others will require systems change.

Food for thought.

I try not to waste food.  At worst, I compost leftovers.

Food waste is a huge issue these days, not least because it appears to be an obvious solution to world hunger.

A great many people are working on projects to reduce food waste.

Reducing food waste makes us feel like we are doing something to reduce hunger—in the same way that working for food banks makes us feel good about what we are doing.  Dealing with food waste is even easier.

It’s easy to understand why so many people have jumped on the food-waste bandwagon.  It’s as downstream—close to the individual and furthest away from policy—as you can get.  It’s easy.  It costs nothing.  It feels good.

Whereas: Trying to achieve upstream policies to alleviate poverty to reduce hunger is frustratingly difficult, expensive, and slow, and not nearly as much fun.

This is why I was so pleased to see the commentary from Nick Saul, author of The Stop, his book about his struggles to feed hungry people while directing a food bank in Canada.  I hope he won’t mind my quoting extensively from his piece:

• Food waste will never be able to address hunger because hunger isn’t about a lack of food. It’s about a lack of income. People are food insecure because they can’t afford to eat.
• Waste isn’t about not having enough mouths to feed. It’s about inefficiencies and bureaucracy in the food system that see crops tilled under and lost in the production process; other crops that are overproduced as a result of antiquated agricultural policy and incentive programs; a retail system that has overabundance built into its operation model; and individual consumers who buy food with the best intentions, only to have it spoil in the back of the fridge.
• The food that we throw out unnecessarily gobbles up resources, including energy, water, land and labour to the tune of $100 billion each year. And the food that ends up rotting in landfills fuels climate change by generating 20 per cent of Canada’s methane gas emissions.
• If we want to tackle this monumental problem, we need a whole-system approach — from taxing waste to public education on reducing waste in our own kitchens.
• Instead of incentivizing waste by dangling corporate tax credits, we ought to support employees fighting for fair, livable wages. And let’s put those same tax dollars into building the social infrastructure required to ensure no one will ever again need to rely on someone else’s leftovers for sustenance.
• It’s time to create real, long lasting solutions to poverty and hunger, policies that bring us together, rather than divide us as citizens.

If you are working on food waste initiatives, how about also trying to get some of them focused on upstream approaches such as the ones he suggests.

Joachim von Braun, the director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC, explained the reasons behind rising food prices to the State Department on May 6. His powerpoint presentation, (sent to me by a colleague) cites three reasons: high demand, high energy costs, and misguided policies, among them growing food for biofuels and–a new one–neglect of agricultural investment. Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin provide evidence for this last suggestion with an article about how the lack of investment in rice research is hurting the Philippines. Andrew Martin writes in the New York Times about the extraordinary amount of food Americans waste every day–roughly one pound of food per person per day. He cites an estimate from the USDA that recovery of just one-fourth of the waste could feed 20, million people a day. The proverbial food for thought?