Writing

First book – How do we get to carbon zero

 Tackling waste (Page number - 103)

It is tempting to think that all humanity’s carbon issues can be solved with new, better, more efficient
technology, and indeed, much of this book so far has focused on technological innovations. But that is
only one part of the solution. The other part is wasting less of what we already produce.

Humans generate around 2 billion tonnes of waste each year. By 2050, if we continue on the
trajectory of waste growth, that figure will be around 3.4 billion tonnes per annum. Leaving aside the
raw materials that are being thrown out – which then require huge amounts of resources and energy to
harvest more raw materials to replace them – the treatment and disposal of waste alone generates
around 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that humans -particularly those in
high-income nations – are inefficient consumers especially when it comes to food.

TACKLING FOOD WASTE

In 2016, around one I ten people were chronically undernourished, mostly in low- and middle-income
countries, and this rate is increasing. Yet around one-third of all food produced is wasted somewhere
between the field and the table. At the farm, poor climatic conditions or harvesting practices or
inadequate harvesting times contribute to food wastage, while some farmers experience difficulties
getting their produce to market and so it is thrown out. Food is wasted all the way along the supply
chain: during transportation because of inefficient infrastructure and trade networks; in the shop
because of short shelf-life or preferences around the size, shape and color of produce; and finally in the
home because people buy too much; do not store it properly, don’t plan meals well and don’t read
labels. Food that is wasted towards the end of the supply chain – at the shop or in the home – has the
biggest greenhouse gas emissions footprint because of everything that’s needed to get the food to that
point.

Tackling food waste could go a long way towards reducing the greenhouse gas emissions
associated with food. One study found that halving food loss and waste could reduce environmental
pressures – greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use etc. – by 6-16 per cent by 2050, while
reducing them by 75 per cent would reduce those environmental pressures by up to 24 per cent.

Many of the solutions to food waste already exist, such as improving refrigeration and cold-chain
management in lower-income countries. A 2009 study estimated that if lower-income nations had
access to the same refrigeration resources as high-income countries, more than 200 million tonnes of
food would be saved each year: around 14 per cent of total consumption in these areas.

This technology can be sustainable – for example, biogas or solar-powered coolers – and economical.

Another option is to improve the packaging to help preserve and protect foods better. But this
has to be weighted against the fact that packaging itself is a major contributor to greenhouse gas
emissions and waste because of the materials used and the weight it adds to a product. It comes down
to the ‘food-to-packaging ratio’: a ratio of the greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food saved by
that packaging to the emissions associated with packaging 1 kilogram of that food. The higher that ratio,
the greater the potential emissions cost associated with that food product, and therefore the more
important it is to invest in sustainable packaging. Packaging has overall environmental benefits for foods
with larger environmental footprints, such as meat and dairy products, but less so for foods with smaller
environmental footprints, such as vegetables and cereals. But even for high-emissions foods, there are
plenty of innovations that could reduce the emissions associated with packaging without jeopardizing
the food products they protect – for example using recycled materials and recycling packaging materials
to reduce waster and the need for the extraction of virgin materials, substituting bioplastics for oil-based
plastics, and choosing more lightweight materials to reduce the overall weight of the product.

Some food waste is unavoidable, but we can at least do more with it than throw it into landfill
where it generates methane. Erasmus Zu Ermgassen argues that employing food waste as animal feed is
far more efficient. One of the aberrations of the modern livestock farming is that we forgot what
animals are for,’ he says. ‘Pigs are incredible recyclers of things that we don’t eat into things that we do’.

Unfortunately, the idea of feeding food waste to livestock was dealt a knockout blow some
years ago by the devastation of foot-and-mouth disease for pigs, and mad cow disease for cattle. But
another food waste recycling solution – one that is already well under way in several countries – is
readily available to take its place: processing that waste organic matter in a low-oxygen environment
such as a digester to generate biomethane, which can substitute for natural gas. This not only prevents
the methane from food waster being released into the atmosphere, but replaces a fossil fuel as an
energy source. In countries such as Germany, food waste from households and commercial operations is
now finding its way into biogas digesters, and there is growing interest world wide in the potential of
biogas as a productive way to handle food waste.