24 ms·

Food waste responsible for 10% of global emissions?

123 points by cwwc 6y ago

leugim 6y ago
I have the feeling that you can criticize most of things from the point of emissions.
harperlee 6y ago
As Bloomberg was too lazy to provide a link to the actual report, here it is: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021 https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...
- cwwc 6y ago
  Thanks!
- the-dude 6y ago
  They are not lazy, they'll do anything to keep you on their premises.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Never attribute to sloth that which is adequately explained by the profit incentive.
- tpmx 6y ago
  "Estimates suggest that 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed." (page 20, note that it's just a reference to another paper) "This suggests that 17 per cent of total global food production may be wasted" (page 8) That would imply food is responsible for 47-59% of global greenhouse gas emissions which seems unrealistic. https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions "Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions." Working backwards from that number: Food waste (17%) would be responsible for 4.4% of global GHG emissions.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I'm not claiming this as fact, but it seems sensible enough that those products which have the shortest shelf life (meat, dairy etc) also have the highest greenhouse gas emissions.
  - harperlee 6y ago
    Take into account that they are measuring how much food emits when it rots, but not how much food captures when it grows. The net effect might be smaller. Another thing that might be happening is that they take into account the emissions of its transportation via intercontinental ships, trucks, etc.
nikanj 6y ago
Every other week I see a headline about $thing being responsible for $percentage of global emissions. The total global emissions, based on these headlines, must be well over 500%.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  I thought that too. But, thinking about it, a lot of things do overlap. For example, part of the CO2 associated with unused food would be transport (so fossil fuel for a lot of it), storage (refrigeration, so electricity) etc. so would show up in those stats too.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Definitely. Don't forget lights for human workers, concrete for buildings, and fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That's because you're adding and not unioning. There are many intersections.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  Agreed, if food is 10% of all emissions then what is the top 20% categories responsible for 80% of all emissions ?
ReptileMan 6y ago
A perk of rural life - you can throw every scrap of food to the pigs and they convert it to a tasty dish one year later.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Yeah, meat in moderation can actually reduce emissions because animals can use resources that would otherwise just go to waste. It's unfortunate that our meat consumption is so drastically above that threshold that we use giant agricultural areas just to provide feed for our animals.
  - shafyy 6y ago
    No, there no possible scenario where any animal livestock reduces GHG emissions. It's basic physics.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Of course there is. Keeping a couple of goats that live off a natural pasture provides calories for humans that otherwise would have to be provided by something else. Keeping a pig that mostly lives off food waste has a similar effect.
      - shafyy 6y ago
        Planting something that you can eat directly for the calories on that land area would be better (or don't touch it and let it sequester carbon, and plant somewhere else that's more suited). If you feed the goat 100 calories, there is no way you get back 100 calories.
        adrianN 6y ago
        Many areas can sustain goats but can't sustain agriculture. Goats can also eat stuff that is inedible to humans, for example the parts of wheat an corn that are not the grains. A lot of plant matter that has zero calories for humans has >0 calories for ruminants.
aero-glide2 6y ago
The fashion industry is responsible for 10 per cent of annual global carbon emissions. Which is 4 times that of all aviation.
- krageon 6y ago
  And it's entirely unimportant, which aviation definitely is not.
  - twic 6y ago
    Does "fashion industry" mean just Gucci handbags, or all clothes? Because i think the latter is not entirely unimportant.
    - eggsmediumrare 6y ago
      The fashion industry at this point is dominated by the fast fashion industry, which definitely doesn't need to exist.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        I don't need pants from H&M, but I need pants from somewhere. Maybe the emissions are higher than necessary, but people do need to buy clothes occasionally. I'm not so sure that fast-fashion is entirely bad, either. Lower clothing prices have also been very beneficial for clothing the poor. Fast fashion is more of a cultural side-effect of the fact that clothing is now affordable. Before that, people who could regularly afford new clothes were just called 'wealthy'.
    - krageon 6y ago
      While there is room for nuanced points to be made here, I was operating under the impression that we don't say someone in a basement fabbing a t-shirt is working in the "fashion industry". What's left is the parasites that design expensive handbags and dresses made of plastic, being sustained by FOMO and preying on institutionalised insecurity. That's leaving aside the fact that the way it treats it's models is plainly reprehensible, because the same case can be made for the sweatshop workers that end up crafting the clothes themselves.
kfk 6y ago
I got really deep into black soldier flies at some point and I can't understand why we are not turning organic waste into fly larvae. Larvae are 80%+ fat which means biodiesel + expensive chemical compounds like chitin. On the other end if you are processing industrial organic waste (supermarket waste included) according to EU laws since 2017 you can use those larvae as fish/chicke/pig/etc. feed. Using insects as feed would help reduce CO2 and other negative of fish and soy beans. I am sure I am missing something?
- twic 6y ago
  Black soldier flies are definitely cool. You put eggs or small larvae in a bin full of food waste, and when the larvae are fully grown, they crawl out of the bin and feed themselves to your chickens: https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-harvesting-chicken-feed/ https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...
- hinkley 6y ago
  Furthermore, why are we feeding tiny dinosaurs all-grain diets when they should be getting vegetables and bugs? I won't eat BSF, but I've no problem eating chicken or pork that's been eating them.
shafyy 6y ago
Food waste != food waste. Animal-based products have a significantly higher environmental footprint than plant-based ones. Therefore, the majority of this 10% is from animal-based products. Reducing livestock agriculture will automatically decimate this number, too. Edit: It's rather misleading that they put a carrot on the cover of their report, too.
- cute_boi 6y ago
  and the sad thing is government subsidize animal industry heavily :(
  - shafyy 6y ago
    Yes, meat and dairy are the new Big Oil. In fact, they spend a bigger relative portion of their income for lobyying than Big Oil: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby...
    - specialist 6y ago
      I just watched The Poison Squad. The tortured history of banning poisons from food, aka the progressive era Pure Food movement. Big Food pioneered lobbying, alongside all the other robber barons.
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    government subsidizes everything to one level or another. to say it is subsidized higher than other sectors within agriculture is more meme than fact. some segments may be depending on your country. in the US we subsidize everything to include corn for ethanol to cotton which we ship to China and receive back as finished clothing. the issue has always been subsidies are politicians means to show their constituents they are doing their job, bringing home the bacon. however the rules and regulations are stacked such that only very large farms and organizations see real benefit. US wise, most subsidies are towards guarantees of rates. Dairy and Meat get picked on a lot because they are very noticeable but much of the numbers assigned to them are because corn is a feed product and the biggest crop in the US by far. Throw in that many who don't care for animal farming will then associate any other subsidy they can find, to include WIC payments shows just how much a stretch it becomes Outside of pandemic years the estimates for all of agriculture in the US ranges from the low twenties in billions to highs in fifties. Again, depends on what you count. The real issue isn't what we are subsidizing in this case but that we don't insure that the small farms are compensated as well as large private and commercial farms are because the regulatory burden puts obtaining such funds into the category of not worth the time and money
cassepipe 6y ago
I think the problem of food waste is a structural one and that it has to do with how capitalism operates as a mode of production. A lot of people like to think that capitalism is the most rational mode of production and a lot of the criticism of that viewpoint tend to base itself on moral grounds as a mode of production that is unethical, as the "era where money is king" or on some sort of "paradise lost" like we lost touch with "nature" or something. I don't agree with that and my problem with capitalism is that, although it is a system that is able to produce a massive amount of goods, it totally fails to adequately distribute them for the greater good. It leaves that to market forces and the problem with market forces is that you only know you have produced too much shit after you have already produced it. The consequence is quite a lot of instability and a massive source of waste. I guess if Karl Marx was alive today, the first sentence of Capital would be : "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of WASTE"
- lucian1900 6y ago
  That is precisely the position we communists have today: production for profit mediated by markets is highly irrational and wasteful, even if you were to ignore the inevitable exploitation of the workers. Planned economies can instead more efficiently allocate resources, even when done within a capitalist economy and for profit. The book “People’s Republic of Walmart” goes into a lot of detail on this topic. A democratically planned economy with society’s overall welfare as a goal could be even more efficient.
  - mantas 6y ago
    Planned economies are so bad, people living in them couldn't afford anything go to waste. See: USSR.
    - lucian1900 6y ago
      And yet the USSR went from a semi-feudal war torn country to industrialised power that first reached space, all within a handful of five year plans. Even capitalist economies have benefited from significant central planning, most notably South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Today we also see it within the likes of Walmart and Amazon, unlike Sears’ internal markets. Even when profit is your motive planning beats markets.
supernova87a 6y ago
I'm sure it will be straightforward to get people to buy only exactly what they think they will consume. Or a little less. That's pretty easy. Oh, and also making sure that they eat absolutely everything they bring home or be charged penalties by the garbage man. Those with children know that the kids can help estimate and reduce waste with even higher accuracy. And given our experience with having to convince people to take a life-saving vaccine once, I anticipate no issues in regulating their activities having to do with the private hour by hour things they do multiple times per day.
vlfig 6y ago
Aside from the click-baity article, the actual report puts emphasis on the quality of the existing data about food waste. A bit of an "let's measure this first" attitude, which is a bit of a let down to me. "Food waste means all of the environmental impacts of food production without any of the benefits of people being fed." — it reads, and I think it misses an important point: leaving food waste to rot with the rest of the rubbish is in itself environmentally damaging while using it for composting, feeding larvae or both, is immensely beneficial. I'd like to see more practical recommendations for what we already know we can do about food waste. And not just about reducing it, which is more easily said than done, but also about giving it a proper goodbye.
DiabloD3 6y ago
Another garbage paper that thinks "food waste" exists on that scale, and everything isn't recycled into further productive stages. How many times does this have to be debunked until it goes away? The plural of "bad science" isn't "good science".
- eggsmediumrare 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? As far as I can tell, we're not really composting at any sort of scale. We're not feeding wasted produce to livestock. Not sure what you're talking about.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >We're not feeding wasted produce to livestock. They don't? A 5s google search reveals this document https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/Recycled-Organic-Waste-as-Animal-Feed-OP.pdf https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/Recycled-Org... >Recently, State Veterinarians and State Feed Program Managers have been approached by waste management firms that intend to use recycled organic waste from large wholesalers, distributors, and retailers as animal feed ...and this: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reduce-wasted-food-feeding-animals https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reduce-waste...
    - necrobrit 6y ago
      I'm not convinced you read your own links. 1. Is a report on the need to evaluate how prevalent the practice of recycling food scraps from manufacturing as feed actually is, as apparently the FDA (or the author of the report anyway) doesn't have access to good data on the topic. 2. Is advice that appears to be targeted at large institutions that want to _start_ recycling... doesn't really say much about the prevalence except that it isn't a novel idea. Plus, the original article says: > Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the food service industry.
      - gruez 6y ago
supermatt 6y ago
Why are there no integrated anaerobic digesters for home biogas production? I have a small home-made one and its truly surprising how much gas is generated that can be used for cooking and running a small generator
- boplicity 6y ago
  Maybe there needs to be a startup that provides such a product ;)
- eptcyka 6y ago
  Tell me more.
  - supermatt 6y ago
    Here’s a good video description of an open source solution: https://youtu.be/Cwm5Rm8uIsk https://youtu.be/Cwm5Rm8uIsk Mine is slightly different as I built with what I had on the farm, but it’s what inspired me.
- thatcat 6y ago
  how do you store the gas?
  - supermatt 6y ago
    I store it in an array of 200l drum liners (as that’s what I had on hand), but any low pressure bladder will work. I haven’t had cause to compress it.
stdbrouw 6y ago
It's important to note that (1) the report uses a very liberal definition of food waste, that is, it includes inedible portions of foods such as pits, rinds and bones and (2) it does not account for the destination, so if you compost the peels of an apple or feed them to your chickens, that too is food waste, as another commenter mentioned. FWIW, at a first glance, I think the report [1] looks well-executed and talks about a lot of quite subtle aspects of food waste, e.g. it breaks everything down by sector and by where in the supply chain waste occurs, and it acknowledges cultural aspects to food waste such as whether we consider bones or skins to be edible or inedible. It's just that its main goal is to provide indicators of how well different countries fare in reducing food waste and for that purpose the absolute numbers matter much less than how much the indicator changes over time. The absolute number could never be zero anyway, because you'd need a perfect just-in-time supply chain, refrigeration that never breaks down, predictable crop yields that don't vary too much from year to year, we'd have to eat at restaurants that have machines for zero-trim prep and high turnover so consumption is stable, and so on... all of which would be incredibly costly in other ways, so it doesn't make sense to focus on the raw stats, except as an intellectual exercise. It's similar to the numbers you sometimes see about the environmental impact of Portland cement production, which of course is huge, but that's simply because of the huge quantities that are produced given how important it is to modern construction. As a result, though, the report does not translate well to newspaper headlines that want to present just one (preferably shocking) number. Admittedly, the 8-10% comes straight from the executive summary itself, so there's that... [1] https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-202 https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Glavnokoman 6y ago
There is a root of the problem - too many people. The rest is just side effects.
- rocknor 6y ago
  That's a dangerous anti-science viewpoint. No, the problem is the exact opposite - we as a species are not scientifically advanced enough yet to satisfy our relentless hunger for energy with renewable resources.
  - Glavnokoman 6y ago
    Why exactly you believe it is "anti-science"? And how is being scientifically retarded is exact opposite?
- FredPret 6y ago
  With hydroponics, aquaponics, lab-grown meat (the real factory farming), and nuclear energy, we can fit a hell of a lot more people on this planet.
  - Glavnokoman 6y ago
    Maybe it is possible, yes, but in my view that's pretty stupid goal.
    - FredPret 6y ago
      It’s not a goal, it’s a way to deal with the billions more who are yet to arrive on the scene
    - rocknor 6y ago
      Actually, it's your viewpoint that's stupid. No one wants more humans on the planet. We only need to account for humans that are yet to be born, before we hit the peak around ~10B. And before you start blaming countries for high birth rates (which is the typical ignorant and possibly racist viewpoint), read some books to know that birth rates have dropped drastically since WW2 due to increase in education and healthcare ACROSS THE WORLD, and they are still dropping. We have already reached peak child [1]. We will reach peak human at around ~10B according to latest reports, which is much less than what we can actually support in the future with renewable tech. So everything's mostly good, get educated. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24835822 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24835822 [2] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/
New_California 6y ago
Ban food and Bitcoin.
eric4smith 6y ago
As a side note... Here in Bangkok, the street dogs are so fat from all the wasted food, that they have become incredibly picky and really, don't give two f*cks. They're so fat and lazy that you have to literally walk over some of them on the streets. On the other hand, the dogs further away from restaurants and off the beaten path depend on people coming to feed them. So they are a bit more svelte. And by golly, people have daily feedings of the "Soi" dogs. So thats the one benefit of excess food, at least here.
ineedasername 6y ago
This has to be one of the most misleading reports I've seen in a while and especially damaging because it's now been cited by many news outlets. It is misleading for 3 very big reasons: 1) It counts the non-edible portion of food as "waste". Consider this just in terms of bananas: About 50 billion tons of bananas are produced each year. The banana peel, not edible, is about 30% of the banana weight, which means you're already ready starting with 15 billion tons of supposed waste on bananas alone. 2) A significant amount of waste not accounted for in the underlying UN report is actually not wasted: If not suitable for human consumption it is often used in animal feed (often pig slop) or composted back into productive material for further use on the farm. 3) Even food that is well & truly wasted isn't really contributing all of its carbon or the emissions released to grow it back into the atmosphere because carbon is actually sequestered in the food itself, the same way and for the same reasons that planting new trees sequesters carbon. I am by no means an anthropomorphic climate change denier, but sloppy studies like this do significant damage to the cause by giving such people ample ammunition by which to paint the entire body of science with the same "fake news" brush.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Another key weakness here, imo, is there isn't really anything actionable about this? People have to eat. How do we cut down emissions from food waste?
  - bratcomplex 6y ago
    -take what you need. Need more? get more. -eat within growing seasons. bananas in Greenland have a much larger distance to travel, loss of stock increases. -aesthetics, a wonky looking apple is less likely to make it into the grocery store(even if taste and nutritional value is no different)
    - kritiko 6y ago
      I've heard that the "wonky looking" stuff typically gets processed into other products - apple sauce, e.g. and that some of those defects can actually increase the likelihood of a whole container developing mold. https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1086055093244432385?lang=en https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/108605509324443238...
adolph 6y ago
The below is a wonderful podcast talking about food waste in the larger context: Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/ https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/ See also "Its a Wonderful Loaf": https://wonderfulloaf.org/ https://wonderfulloaf.org/ “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” --F. A. Hayek https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6867865-the-curious-task-of-economics-is-to-demonstrate-to-men https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6867865-the-curious-task-of...
11235813213455 6y ago
All my food, except rice, are fruit-legumes leftovers/damaged, free or 50%, collected at several groceries and producers. I also forage fruits in the "wild" (residential areas, road sides)
- TollingSteady 6y ago
  This is fascinating to me. Are you worried about your foraged food being contaminated with car emissions / herbicides / etc? How do you find these produce discounts? You're definitely winning the sustainability award, if this is true.
  - 11235813213455 6y ago
    - "foraged food being contaminated with car emissions": Sometimes I think about it, when eating figs just next to roads, trees literally shaped by the traffic, or near gutters. But I try and see. I live in the French riviera, it used to be full of orchards, greenhouses. There less and less relics of this beautiful past, but I can still explore the area for those fig/clementine/mandarine/orange/loquats/persimmons trees (there are avocados, but I'm not fan) - "How do you find these produce discounts?" Same process - exploration, helping, sympathizing with fruit producers vendors, they are often happy to get rid of unsold fruits. I wish people will change their mind, damaged/ugly/super ripe produces should not be wasted, they are still mostly good, a fruit that fell on the floor isn't wasted, a fruit with a bug isn't wasted (all the opposite, it's a sign it's good), most people throw away way too much food, and parts of the food
thanatos519 6y ago
You can do something — where I live, this app is amazing: https://toogoodtogo.org/ https://toogoodtogo.org/ My family has been saving piles of money with this, and getting all sorts of interesting food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
Havoc 6y ago
I struggle to understand food waste numbers frankly. Not counting off-cuts & things that turn out to be bad on day of purchase mine is functionally zero. Buy it & eat it. Not that hard. The packaging situation on the other hand makes me hang my head in shame. So much plastic. Throw it in recycle sure but idk
- fastball 6y ago
  I think it's mostly coming from the restaurant industry, where there is a lot more waste at both ends.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Those are exactly the types of things that "food waste" refers to. Also, it includes anything that goes bad before you ever get it.
  - Havoc 6y ago
    >Also, it includes anything that goes bad before you ever get it. Depends on habits I guess but basically everything my side is <48hr turn around. Food that can't make 48 hrs refrigerated was in my mind not fit for sale in the first place. (Salad being the exception...I try to eat that same day)
Black101 6y ago
Food waste could be reduced a lot by fixing "best buy" dates and perhaps packaging that could signal bad food.
- Black101 6y ago
  "best by"
djohnston 6y ago
Over producing certainly adds waste, but once you have it whether you use it or not doesn't change the amount of carbon released right?

123 points by cwwc 6y ago

I have the feeling that you can criticize most of things from the point of emissions.

As Bloomberg was too lazy to provide a link to the actual report, here it is: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021 https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...

cwwc 6y ago
Thanks!
the-dude 6y ago
They are not lazy, they'll do anything to keep you on their premises.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Never attribute to sloth that which is adequately explained by the profit incentive.
tpmx 6y ago
"Estimates suggest that 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed." (page 20, note that it's just a reference to another paper) "This suggests that 17 per cent of total global food production may be wasted" (page 8) That would imply food is responsible for 47-59% of global greenhouse gas emissions which seems unrealistic. https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions "Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions." Working backwards from that number: Food waste (17%) would be responsible for 4.4% of global GHG emissions.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I'm not claiming this as fact, but it seems sensible enough that those products which have the shortest shelf life (meat, dairy etc) also have the highest greenhouse gas emissions.
- harperlee 6y ago
  Take into account that they are measuring how much food emits when it rots, but not how much food captures when it grows. The net effect might be smaller. Another thing that might be happening is that they take into account the emissions of its transportation via intercontinental ships, trucks, etc.

nikanj 6y ago

Every other week I see a headline about $thing being responsible for $percentage of global emissions. The total global emissions, based on these headlines, must be well over 500%.

stephen_g 6y ago
I thought that too. But, thinking about it, a lot of things do overlap. For example, part of the CO2 associated with unused food would be transport (so fossil fuel for a lot of it), storage (refrigeration, so electricity) etc. so would show up in those stats too.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Definitely. Don't forget lights for human workers, concrete for buildings, and fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.
guerrilla 6y ago
That's because you're adding and not unioning. There are many intersections.
reportgunner 6y ago
Agreed, if food is 10% of all emissions then what is the top 20% categories responsible for 80% of all emissions ?

ReptileMan 6y ago

A perk of rural life - you can throw every scrap of food to the pigs and they convert it to a tasty dish one year later.

adrianN 6y ago
Yeah, meat in moderation can actually reduce emissions because animals can use resources that would otherwise just go to waste. It's unfortunate that our meat consumption is so drastically above that threshold that we use giant agricultural areas just to provide feed for our animals.
- shafyy 6y ago
  No, there no possible scenario where any animal livestock reduces GHG emissions. It's basic physics.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Of course there is. Keeping a couple of goats that live off a natural pasture provides calories for humans that otherwise would have to be provided by something else. Keeping a pig that mostly lives off food waste has a similar effect.
    - shafyy 6y ago
      Planting something that you can eat directly for the calories on that land area would be better (or don't touch it and let it sequester carbon, and plant somewhere else that's more suited). If you feed the goat 100 calories, there is no way you get back 100 calories.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        Many areas can sustain goats but can't sustain agriculture. Goats can also eat stuff that is inedible to humans, for example the parts of wheat an corn that are not the grains. A lot of plant matter that has zero calories for humans has >0 calories for ruminants.

aero-glide2 6y ago

The fashion industry is responsible for 10 per cent of annual global carbon emissions. Which is 4 times that of all aviation.

krageon 6y ago
And it's entirely unimportant, which aviation definitely is not.
- twic 6y ago
  Does "fashion industry" mean just Gucci handbags, or all clothes? Because i think the latter is not entirely unimportant.
  - eggsmediumrare 6y ago
    The fashion industry at this point is dominated by the fast fashion industry, which definitely doesn't need to exist.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      I don't need pants from H&M, but I need pants from somewhere. Maybe the emissions are higher than necessary, but people do need to buy clothes occasionally. I'm not so sure that fast-fashion is entirely bad, either. Lower clothing prices have also been very beneficial for clothing the poor. Fast fashion is more of a cultural side-effect of the fact that clothing is now affordable. Before that, people who could regularly afford new clothes were just called 'wealthy'.
  - krageon 6y ago
    While there is room for nuanced points to be made here, I was operating under the impression that we don't say someone in a basement fabbing a t-shirt is working in the "fashion industry". What's left is the parasites that design expensive handbags and dresses made of plastic, being sustained by FOMO and preying on institutionalised insecurity. That's leaving aside the fact that the way it treats it's models is plainly reprehensible, because the same case can be made for the sweatshop workers that end up crafting the clothes themselves.

kfk 6y ago

I got really deep into black soldier flies at some point and I can't understand why we are not turning organic waste into fly larvae. Larvae are 80%+ fat which means biodiesel + expensive chemical compounds like chitin. On the other end if you are processing industrial organic waste (supermarket waste included) according to EU laws since 2017 you can use those larvae as fish/chicke/pig/etc. feed. Using insects as feed would help reduce CO2 and other negative of fish and soy beans. I am sure I am missing something?

twic 6y ago
Black soldier flies are definitely cool. You put eggs or small larvae in a bin full of food waste, and when the larvae are fully grown, they crawl out of the bin and feed themselves to your chickens: https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-harvesting-chicken-feed/ https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...
hinkley 6y ago
Furthermore, why are we feeding tiny dinosaurs all-grain diets when they should be getting vegetables and bugs? I won't eat BSF, but I've no problem eating chicken or pork that's been eating them.

shafyy 6y ago

Food waste != food waste. Animal-based products have a significantly higher environmental footprint than plant-based ones. Therefore, the majority of this 10% is from animal-based products. Reducing livestock agriculture will automatically decimate this number, too. Edit: It's rather misleading that they put a carrot on the cover of their report, too.

cute_boi 6y ago
and the sad thing is government subsidize animal industry heavily :(
- shafyy 6y ago
  Yes, meat and dairy are the new Big Oil. In fact, they spend a bigger relative portion of their income for lobyying than Big Oil: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby...
  - specialist 6y ago
    I just watched The Poison Squad. The tortured history of banning poisons from food, aka the progressive era Pure Food movement. Big Food pioneered lobbying, alongside all the other robber barons.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  government subsidizes everything to one level or another. to say it is subsidized higher than other sectors within agriculture is more meme than fact. some segments may be depending on your country. in the US we subsidize everything to include corn for ethanol to cotton which we ship to China and receive back as finished clothing. the issue has always been subsidies are politicians means to show their constituents they are doing their job, bringing home the bacon. however the rules and regulations are stacked such that only very large farms and organizations see real benefit. US wise, most subsidies are towards guarantees of rates. Dairy and Meat get picked on a lot because they are very noticeable but much of the numbers assigned to them are because corn is a feed product and the biggest crop in the US by far. Throw in that many who don't care for animal farming will then associate any other subsidy they can find, to include WIC payments shows just how much a stretch it becomes Outside of pandemic years the estimates for all of agriculture in the US ranges from the low twenties in billions to highs in fifties. Again, depends on what you count. The real issue isn't what we are subsidizing in this case but that we don't insure that the small farms are compensated as well as large private and commercial farms are because the regulatory burden puts obtaining such funds into the category of not worth the time and money

cassepipe 6y ago

I think the problem of food waste is a structural one and that it has to do with how capitalism operates as a mode of production. A lot of people like to think that capitalism is the most rational mode of production and a lot of the criticism of that viewpoint tend to base itself on moral grounds as a mode of production that is unethical, as the "era where money is king" or on some sort of "paradise lost" like we lost touch with "nature" or something. I don't agree with that and my problem with capitalism is that, although it is a system that is able to produce a massive amount of goods, it totally fails to adequately distribute them for the greater good. It leaves that to market forces and the problem with market forces is that you only know you have produced too much shit after you have already produced it. The consequence is quite a lot of instability and a massive source of waste. I guess if Karl Marx was alive today, the first sentence of Capital would be : "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of WASTE"

lucian1900 6y ago
That is precisely the position we communists have today: production for profit mediated by markets is highly irrational and wasteful, even if you were to ignore the inevitable exploitation of the workers. Planned economies can instead more efficiently allocate resources, even when done within a capitalist economy and for profit. The book “People’s Republic of Walmart” goes into a lot of detail on this topic. A democratically planned economy with society’s overall welfare as a goal could be even more efficient.
- mantas 6y ago
  Planned economies are so bad, people living in them couldn't afford anything go to waste. See: USSR.
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    And yet the USSR went from a semi-feudal war torn country to industrialised power that first reached space, all within a handful of five year plans. Even capitalist economies have benefited from significant central planning, most notably South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Today we also see it within the likes of Walmart and Amazon, unlike Sears’ internal markets. Even when profit is your motive planning beats markets.

supernova87a 6y ago

I'm sure it will be straightforward to get people to buy only exactly what they think they will consume. Or a little less. That's pretty easy. Oh, and also making sure that they eat absolutely everything they bring home or be charged penalties by the garbage man. Those with children know that the kids can help estimate and reduce waste with even higher accuracy. And given our experience with having to convince people to take a life-saving vaccine once, I anticipate no issues in regulating their activities having to do with the private hour by hour things they do multiple times per day.

vlfig 6y ago

Aside from the click-baity article, the actual report puts emphasis on the quality of the existing data about food waste. A bit of an "let's measure this first" attitude, which is a bit of a let down to me. "Food waste means all of the environmental impacts of food production without any of the benefits of people being fed." — it reads, and I think it misses an important point: leaving food waste to rot with the rest of the rubbish is in itself environmentally damaging while using it for composting, feeding larvae or both, is immensely beneficial. I'd like to see more practical recommendations for what we already know we can do about food waste. And not just about reducing it, which is more easily said than done, but also about giving it a proper goodbye.

DiabloD3 6y ago

Another garbage paper that thinks "food waste" exists on that scale, and everything isn't recycled into further productive stages. How many times does this have to be debunked until it goes away? The plural of "bad science" isn't "good science".

eggsmediumrare 6y ago
Can you elaborate? As far as I can tell, we're not really composting at any sort of scale. We're not feeding wasted produce to livestock. Not sure what you're talking about.
- gruez 6y ago
  >We're not feeding wasted produce to livestock. They don't? A 5s google search reveals this document https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/Recycled-Organic-Waste-as-Animal-Feed-OP.pdf https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/Recycled-Org... >Recently, State Veterinarians and State Feed Program Managers have been approached by waste management firms that intend to use recycled organic waste from large wholesalers, distributors, and retailers as animal feed ...and this: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reduce-wasted-food-feeding-animals https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reduce-waste...
  - necrobrit 6y ago
    I'm not convinced you read your own links. 1. Is a report on the need to evaluate how prevalent the practice of recycling food scraps from manufacturing as feed actually is, as apparently the FDA (or the author of the report anyway) doesn't have access to good data on the topic. 2. Is advice that appears to be targeted at large institutions that want to _start_ recycling... doesn't really say much about the prevalence except that it isn't a novel idea. Plus, the original article says: > Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the food service industry.
    - gruez 6y ago

supermatt 6y ago

Why are there no integrated anaerobic digesters for home biogas production? I have a small home-made one and its truly surprising how much gas is generated that can be used for cooking and running a small generator

boplicity 6y ago
Maybe there needs to be a startup that provides such a product ;)
eptcyka 6y ago
Tell me more.
- supermatt 6y ago
  Here’s a good video description of an open source solution: https://youtu.be/Cwm5Rm8uIsk https://youtu.be/Cwm5Rm8uIsk Mine is slightly different as I built with what I had on the farm, but it’s what inspired me.
thatcat 6y ago
how do you store the gas?
- supermatt 6y ago
  I store it in an array of 200l drum liners (as that’s what I had on hand), but any low pressure bladder will work. I haven’t had cause to compress it.

stdbrouw 6y ago

It's important to note that (1) the report uses a very liberal definition of food waste, that is, it includes inedible portions of foods such as pits, rinds and bones and (2) it does not account for the destination, so if you compost the peels of an apple or feed them to your chickens, that too is food waste, as another commenter mentioned. FWIW, at a first glance, I think the report [1] looks well-executed and talks about a lot of quite subtle aspects of food waste, e.g. it breaks everything down by sector and by where in the supply chain waste occurs, and it acknowledges cultural aspects to food waste such as whether we consider bones or skins to be edible or inedible. It's just that its main goal is to provide indicators of how well different countries fare in reducing food waste and for that purpose the absolute numbers matter much less than how much the indicator changes over time. The absolute number could never be zero anyway, because you'd need a perfect just-in-time supply chain, refrigeration that never breaks down, predictable crop yields that don't vary too much from year to year, we'd have to eat at restaurants that have machines for zero-trim prep and high turnover so consumption is stable, and so on... all of which would be incredibly costly in other ways, so it doesn't make sense to focus on the raw stats, except as an intellectual exercise. It's similar to the numbers you sometimes see about the environmental impact of Portland cement production, which of course is huge, but that's simply because of the huge quantities that are produced given how important it is to modern construction. As a result, though, the report does not translate well to newspaper headlines that want to present just one (preferably shocking) number. Admittedly, the 8-10% comes straight from the executive summary itself, so there's that... [1] https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-202 https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Glavnokoman 6y ago

There is a root of the problem - too many people. The rest is just side effects.

rocknor 6y ago
That's a dangerous anti-science viewpoint. No, the problem is the exact opposite - we as a species are not scientifically advanced enough yet to satisfy our relentless hunger for energy with renewable resources.
- Glavnokoman 6y ago
  Why exactly you believe it is "anti-science"? And how is being scientifically retarded is exact opposite?
FredPret 6y ago
With hydroponics, aquaponics, lab-grown meat (the real factory farming), and nuclear energy, we can fit a hell of a lot more people on this planet.
- Glavnokoman 6y ago
  Maybe it is possible, yes, but in my view that's pretty stupid goal.
  - FredPret 6y ago
    It’s not a goal, it’s a way to deal with the billions more who are yet to arrive on the scene
  - rocknor 6y ago
    Actually, it's your viewpoint that's stupid. No one wants more humans on the planet. We only need to account for humans that are yet to be born, before we hit the peak around ~10B. And before you start blaming countries for high birth rates (which is the typical ignorant and possibly racist viewpoint), read some books to know that birth rates have dropped drastically since WW2 due to increase in education and healthcare ACROSS THE WORLD, and they are still dropping. We have already reached peak child [1]. We will reach peak human at around ~10B according to latest reports, which is much less than what we can actually support in the future with renewable tech. So everything's mostly good, get educated. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24835822 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24835822 [2] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/

New_California 6y ago

Ban food and Bitcoin.

eric4smith 6y ago

As a side note... Here in Bangkok, the street dogs are so fat from all the wasted food, that they have become incredibly picky and really, don't give two f*cks. They're so fat and lazy that you have to literally walk over some of them on the streets. On the other hand, the dogs further away from restaurants and off the beaten path depend on people coming to feed them. So they are a bit more svelte. And by golly, people have daily feedings of the "Soi" dogs. So thats the one benefit of excess food, at least here.

ineedasername 6y ago

This has to be one of the most misleading reports I've seen in a while and especially damaging because it's now been cited by many news outlets. It is misleading for 3 very big reasons: 1) It counts the non-edible portion of food as "waste". Consider this just in terms of bananas: About 50 billion tons of bananas are produced each year. The banana peel, not edible, is about 30% of the banana weight, which means you're already ready starting with 15 billion tons of supposed waste on bananas alone. 2) A significant amount of waste not accounted for in the underlying UN report is actually not wasted: If not suitable for human consumption it is often used in animal feed (often pig slop) or composted back into productive material for further use on the farm. 3) Even food that is well & truly wasted isn't really contributing all of its carbon or the emissions released to grow it back into the atmosphere because carbon is actually sequestered in the food itself, the same way and for the same reasons that planting new trees sequesters carbon. I am by no means an anthropomorphic climate change denier, but sloppy studies like this do significant damage to the cause by giving such people ample ammunition by which to paint the entire body of science with the same "fake news" brush.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
Another key weakness here, imo, is there isn't really anything actionable about this? People have to eat. How do we cut down emissions from food waste?
- bratcomplex 6y ago
  -take what you need. Need more? get more. -eat within growing seasons. bananas in Greenland have a much larger distance to travel, loss of stock increases. -aesthetics, a wonky looking apple is less likely to make it into the grocery store(even if taste and nutritional value is no different)
  - kritiko 6y ago
    I've heard that the "wonky looking" stuff typically gets processed into other products - apple sauce, e.g. and that some of those defects can actually increase the likelihood of a whole container developing mold. https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1086055093244432385?lang=en https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/108605509324443238...

adolph 6y ago

The below is a wonderful podcast talking about food waste in the larger context: Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/ https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/ See also "Its a Wonderful Loaf": https://wonderfulloaf.org/ https://wonderfulloaf.org/ “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” --F. A. Hayek https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6867865-the-curious-task-of-economics-is-to-demonstrate-to-men https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6867865-the-curious-task-of...

11235813213455 6y ago

All my food, except rice, are fruit-legumes leftovers/damaged, free or 50%, collected at several groceries and producers. I also forage fruits in the "wild" (residential areas, road sides)

TollingSteady 6y ago
This is fascinating to me. Are you worried about your foraged food being contaminated with car emissions / herbicides / etc? How do you find these produce discounts? You're definitely winning the sustainability award, if this is true.
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  - "foraged food being contaminated with car emissions": Sometimes I think about it, when eating figs just next to roads, trees literally shaped by the traffic, or near gutters. But I try and see. I live in the French riviera, it used to be full of orchards, greenhouses. There less and less relics of this beautiful past, but I can still explore the area for those fig/clementine/mandarine/orange/loquats/persimmons trees (there are avocados, but I'm not fan) - "How do you find these produce discounts?" Same process - exploration, helping, sympathizing with fruit producers vendors, they are often happy to get rid of unsold fruits. I wish people will change their mind, damaged/ugly/super ripe produces should not be wasted, they are still mostly good, a fruit that fell on the floor isn't wasted, a fruit with a bug isn't wasted (all the opposite, it's a sign it's good), most people throw away way too much food, and parts of the food

thanatos519 6y ago

You can do something — where I live, this app is amazing: https://toogoodtogo.org/ https://toogoodtogo.org/ My family has been saving piles of money with this, and getting all sorts of interesting food that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Havoc 6y ago

I struggle to understand food waste numbers frankly. Not counting off-cuts & things that turn out to be bad on day of purchase mine is functionally zero. Buy it & eat it. Not that hard. The packaging situation on the other hand makes me hang my head in shame. So much plastic. Throw it in recycle sure but idk

fastball 6y ago
I think it's mostly coming from the restaurant industry, where there is a lot more waste at both ends.
kube-system 6y ago
Those are exactly the types of things that "food waste" refers to. Also, it includes anything that goes bad before you ever get it.
- Havoc 6y ago
  >Also, it includes anything that goes bad before you ever get it. Depends on habits I guess but basically everything my side is <48hr turn around. Food that can't make 48 hrs refrigerated was in my mind not fit for sale in the first place. (Salad being the exception...I try to eat that same day)

Black101 6y ago

Food waste could be reduced a lot by fixing "best buy" dates and perhaps packaging that could signal bad food.

Black101 6y ago
"best by"

djohnston 6y ago

Over producing certainly adds waste, but once you have it whether you use it or not doesn't change the amount of carbon released right?