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Maybe food production in America is subsidized and therefore artificially cheap but there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the

by pzone 4y ago

Maybe food production in America is subsidized and therefore artificially cheap but there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter)

modo_mario 4y ago
>there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter) If in the process you used practically finite fertilisers in the form of phosphorus from Morocco and nitrogen from fossil fuels, etc then you may wish to rethink that.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Ultimately phosphate is going to have to be recycled or extracted from much less concentrated sources. The average abundance in the Earth's crust is 0.1%, so supplying current world phosphorus demand (about 22 million tonnes/year; equivalent to 50 million tonnes/year of P2O5) would require mining about 9 cubic kilometers of rock per year. Difficult but not impossible.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  aren't fertilizers mainly produced using the haber-bosch process which takes nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, directly from air and combines it with hydrogen which is split from water, producing oxygen as a waste product which can itself be sold for oxygen cutting, scuba, and more? of all the things that are limited in this world, this seems like it ranks among the least concerning. Sure, it takes electricity, but that itself can be much more efficiently collected going into the future
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    That's nitrogen fertilizer. Phosphate and potassium (the other two major plant nutrients) are currently obtained by mining. Potassium will ultimately be available from seawater (although the estimated land resource would supply current global demand for thousands of years), so is not as much a problem as phosphate. But you are right that making nitrogen fertilizer doesn't require fossil fuels. It would be a major market for "green hydrogen", which would be a great dispatchable demand to help smooth variability in renewable power output and in other demand.
arcticbull 4y ago
Ok let's at least not under-sell the problem. It's not "a few squishy potatoes" it's almost half of all food. Like you go to Subway, order a foot-long. The person behind the counter makes two, hands you one, and throws another into the garbage. Every single time you eat. I'm not so sure that's a good allocation of resources. 20% of farmland in the entire United States is doused in fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. Enough water for 3 states (which are running out, btw). Fossil fuels to for tractors, for fertilizers, for transportation, and logistics. All so you can throw it out. So of course there are externalities: labor, land, water, environment, fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, run-off, topsoil depletion and plenty more. All of which is not nearly as big a deal if it's done to achieve a goal rather than to appease the voters in Iowa. These are classic externalities that aren't priced in when you subsidize corn to below the cost of production.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  I have to question the figure. There is food, and there is food. Wasting a pound of grain is much less of an issue than wasting a pound of beef. I suspect most of the wastage is in the lower value materials (obviously, there is less penalty to wasting them). And I suspect it doesn't include the stuff going to feed animals, which I suspect is used more efficiently (because it is simpler and those eating it cannot complain.)
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    The figure is echoed by the USDA. [1] The report I linked in the original post includes a breakdown of exactly where food is wasted on pages 14 to 30. [2] There's a pie chart on page 10 which includes a breakdown by kind of food too, as a percentage of waste by weight. - Dairy: 19.1% - Vegetables: 19% - Fruit: 13.9% - Grain: 13.9% - Added sugars and sweeteners: 12.6% - Meat, fish and poultry: 11.5% - Fats and oils: 7.5% - Eggs: 2.1% - Tree nuts and peanuts: 0.4% [1] https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/flw https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/f... [2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report....

by pzone 4y ago

modo_mario 4y ago

>there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter) If in the process you used practically finite fertilisers in the form of phosphorus from Morocco and nitrogen from fossil fuels, etc then you may wish to rethink that.

pfdietz 4y ago
Ultimately phosphate is going to have to be recycled or extracted from much less concentrated sources. The average abundance in the Earth's crust is 0.1%, so supplying current world phosphorus demand (about 22 million tonnes/year; equivalent to 50 million tonnes/year of P2O5) would require mining about 9 cubic kilometers of rock per year. Difficult but not impossible.
RugnirViking 4y ago
aren't fertilizers mainly produced using the haber-bosch process which takes nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, directly from air and combines it with hydrogen which is split from water, producing oxygen as a waste product which can itself be sold for oxygen cutting, scuba, and more? of all the things that are limited in this world, this seems like it ranks among the least concerning. Sure, it takes electricity, but that itself can be much more efficiently collected going into the future
- pfdietz 4y ago
  That's nitrogen fertilizer. Phosphate and potassium (the other two major plant nutrients) are currently obtained by mining. Potassium will ultimately be available from seawater (although the estimated land resource would supply current global demand for thousands of years), so is not as much a problem as phosphate. But you are right that making nitrogen fertilizer doesn't require fossil fuels. It would be a major market for "green hydrogen", which would be a great dispatchable demand to help smooth variability in renewable power output and in other demand.

arcticbull 4y ago

Ok let's at least not under-sell the problem. It's not "a few squishy potatoes" it's almost half of all food. Like you go to Subway, order a foot-long. The person behind the counter makes two, hands you one, and throws another into the garbage. Every single time you eat. I'm not so sure that's a good allocation of resources. 20% of farmland in the entire United States is doused in fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. Enough water for 3 states (which are running out, btw). Fossil fuels to for tractors, for fertilizers, for transportation, and logistics. All so you can throw it out. So of course there are externalities: labor, land, water, environment, fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, run-off, topsoil depletion and plenty more. All of which is not nearly as big a deal if it's done to achieve a goal rather than to appease the voters in Iowa. These are classic externalities that aren't priced in when you subsidize corn to below the cost of production.

pfdietz 4y ago
I have to question the figure. There is food, and there is food. Wasting a pound of grain is much less of an issue than wasting a pound of beef. I suspect most of the wastage is in the lower value materials (obviously, there is less penalty to wasting them). And I suspect it doesn't include the stuff going to feed animals, which I suspect is used more efficiently (because it is simpler and those eating it cannot complain.)
- arcticbull 4y ago
  The figure is echoed by the USDA. [1] The report I linked in the original post includes a breakdown of exactly where food is wasted on pages 14 to 30. [2] There's a pie chart on page 10 which includes a breakdown by kind of food too, as a percentage of waste by weight. - Dairy: 19.1% - Vegetables: 19% - Fruit: 13.9% - Grain: 13.9% - Added sugars and sweeteners: 12.6% - Meat, fish and poultry: 11.5% - Fats and oils: 7.5% - Eggs: 2.1% - Tree nuts and peanuts: 0.4% [1] https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/flw https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/f... [2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report....