How cutting your food waste

can help the climate

By Kelly Oakes
26th February 2020

All food generates greenhouse gases to reach our plates, but when
nearly a third of it is thrown away or wasted, does that mean we
could be doing more to protect the climate?

How much did you leave on your plate last time you ate? A few scrapings? A couple
of rogue chips? Or perhaps even a few mouthfuls you were too stuffed to finish off?

It is worth considering, then, that every time you throw leftovers away, you’re not just
binning tomorrow’s lunch – each forkful of food was responsible for greenhouse gas
emissions before it even got to your plate. Growing, processing, packaging and
transporting the food we eat all contributes to climate change. And then when we
throw it away, as it rots it releases yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

It has been estimated that if food waste was a country, it would be the third highest
emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China, according to the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. One third of greenhouse
emissions globally come from agriculture, and 30% of the food we produce is wasted
– about 1.8 billion tonnes of it a year. If, as a planet, we stopped wasting food
altogether, we’d eliminate 8% of our total emissions.

Of course, individual households aren’t to blame for all of this waste. A 2018 study
found that about a third of our fruit and veg is rejected for being the wrong size or
shape before it even reaches the supermarket shelf, for example.

Where food is most wasted differs across the world. In low income countries, 40% of
food is wasted after it’s harvested but before it makes it to people’s homes, usually
because of a lack of adequate infrastructure. But in middle- and high-income
countries, consumers take a bigger slice of the blame: estimates suggest that
households are responsible for 53% of all food waste in Europe, and 47% of food
waste in Canada. The reasons for that waste can vary too – in some parts of the world
it is considered polite to leave a small amount of food on the plate to show that the
host hasn't scrimped on portions. Lack of refrigeration is another major cause of
waste. But in many developed countries, easy access to abundant supplies of cheap
produce has made consumers less thrifty about what they keep in their fridges and put
on their plates.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your-food-waste-can-help-the-climate
Quantifying exactly how much food we’re wasting at a household level isn’t easy,
though. Kate Parizeau, an associate professor at the University of Guelph, and
colleagues ran a study in Canada that involved digging through all the rubbish
generated by 94 families living in Guelph, Ontario. They categorised the food they
found based on how edible it was and how much of it there was. They discovered that
each family threw out around 3kg of avoidable food waste each week, equivalent to
23.3kg of carbon emissions. Figures for the UK are comparable, with 68kg of food
wasted at home each year per person, according to 2020 data from the British waste
and recycling charity Wrap.

But not many studies, or indeed individuals, choose to delve this deep into our bins.
And when people are asked to record what they waste in diaries, they tend to under
report what they are throwing in the bin.

“I don't think people are completely aware of [the climate impacts of food waste],”
says Mattias Eriksson, who researches food waste at the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. “But I think the problem is even bigger, because
most people, they don't actually waste food, according to themselves.”

But a lack of precise data shouldn’t stop us trying to tackle the problem, says
Parizeau. “We know just by the audits that we've done, it is excessive,” she says.
“There's so much edible food that ends up in the trash.”

By simply rethinking how you shop and cook, in most high income countries at least,
it should be possible to reduce the amount we waste and so lessen our contribution to
climate change.

“We know that there’s a whole bunch we can do at the household level,” says
Parizeau.

Anne-Marie Bonneau, a book editor based in California and author of the Zero Waste
Chef blog, started thinking seriously about food waste after learning that up to 40% of
the food produced in the US isn’t eaten. “My mouth fell open,” she says.

Now, Bonneau estimates that she’s cut her food waste to almost zero, composting
scraps like tea leaves, eggshells and citrus peels, and using up everything else. “I try to
keep our inventory small enough that I don't throw out food, and large enough that we
have enough food to eat,” she says. “If I can't get to something before it will go south,
I freeze it.”

Achieving that level of waste reduction isn’t easy, but Bonneau recommends starting
with a few simple steps. If you can’t already cook, she says, learn to make some
simple meals, like soups. Then, start checking what you have at home already before
going to buy ingredients. “Instead of surfing the internet and finding a recipe that
looks good or going through cookbooks, first look at the food you have on hand,” she
says.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your-food-waste-can-help-the-climate
This suggestion is also backed by research. “Checking inventory is a big one,” says
Parizeau. “Often people will have habitual shopping habits. You go to the store, you
buy a loaf of bread every week – but maybe you already have some in the freezer.”

Another effective way to reduce food waste is planning ahead, she adds. When people
make shopping lists and meal plans, and stick to those, “that does seem to have a
relationship to the amount of food waste” they produce.

Once using up what you already have becomes second nature, you could be saving not
just carbon emissions, but potentially time and money, too, by avoiding the need to
run to the shops each time you cook dinner. “It's so satisfying when I make a meal out
of almost nothing,” says Bonneau.

Of course, for some of us cooking from scratch and even keeping track of the food
already in our fridge is not that easy. “We know there are many reasons why people
aren't able to reduce their food waste,” says Parizeau. Some people want to provide
abundance for their families by having a well-stocked fridge, others might be overly-
cautious when it comes to food safety and discard food they deem too old, while many
people simply struggle to find the time to plan meals at all.

To tackle some of these barriers, Parizeau recently worked on a cookbook featuring

food waste-reducing recipes that use, for example, a whole head of cauliflower rather
than half of one, to avoid leaving people with leftover vegetables that will eventually
turn nasty and need to be thrown away. Other recipes can be adapted to whatever
vegetables you have on hand.

But not all food waste is equal when it comes to carbon emissions. Meat and dairy
products have much higher carbon emissions than fruit and vegetables, so reducing
the amount of meat you waste will have a bigger impact than cutting down on
throwing out carrots.

A 2018 study found that fresh vegetables and salad make up 25% of edible household
food waste in the UK, for example, but only account for 12% of the greenhouse gas
emissions from wasted food. On the other hand, meat and fish account for just 8% of
wasted food but 19% of emissions.

Similarly, a 2015 study on food waste in Swedish supermarkets found that, though the
fruit and vegetable department account for 85% of food wasted by mass over a three
year period, that food only made up 46% of the total carbon footprint from wasted
food. Meanwhile, meat made up 3.5% of the total mass of food that was discarded, but
29% of the carbon footprint.

“If you want to reduce carbon footprint then beef will be a real target product,” says
Eriksson. “There you have super concentrated emissions, so you have a lot of
emissions in a few kilos of food waste.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your-food-waste-can-help-the-climate
With this in mind, it’s worth remembering that consumption and waste go hand in
hand, says Eriksson. “If you consume a lot, you probably also waste more of that
product,” he says. “A vegetarian will not waste any beef, for example, for obvious
reasons.”

How you throw your food away also matters. Organic matter rotting in a landfill
releases methane, a greenhouse gas several times more potent than carbon dioxide.
But if you compost your leftovers in a well-maintained bin that lets in oxygen, you’ll
significantly reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere and the
carbon in the composting organic matter will be held in the resulting soil.

One study estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions from composting are just 14%
of the same food dumped into landfill, while Mattias’s own work found the emissions
vary depending on the food, but composing bread, for example, would release just
2.2% of the emissions from putting it in landfill. Project Drawdown, a research
organisation that identifies potential solutions to climate change, estimates that if
composting levels worldwide increased, we could reduce emissions by 2.1 billion
tonnes by 2050.

“The low hanging fruit in the food system is to move from landfill to anything else,”
says Eriksson. “Home composting, anaerobic digestion, incineration, whatever you
do, everything is better than landfill.” While there are environmental differences
between those other disposal methods, the magnitude is much smaller. So if your
leftovers currently go in the bin, it’s worth considering whether you can change that.

If you don’t have a garden at home, you could check whether you can get your food
waste collected from your home for industrial composting instead. The UK has set out
plans to offer weekly food waste collections by 2023, for example, and many local
authorities already do so to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfill. In some
countries, like Denmark, sending organic waste to landfill is already banned.

Still, the biggest change most people in high income countries could make is to stop
buying too much food in the first place, says Eriksson. Eventually, a reduction in
demand could lead us to a system where we no longer produce more food than we
need. “For most people, at least in the Western world, consuming less will be
something that they can actually contribute with,” says Eriksson. “It is our
consumption that drives the whole problem.”

If your own contribution to that problem seems like a drop in the ocean, don’t think of
your actions in isolation. “As people start to care more about food waste in their
household, they become more informed citizens,” says Parizeau. “They ask questions
about how the food system works, and they ask for regulation to reduce waste across
the entire system.”

It may take some effort, but cutting the amount of food you throw away can have a
real impact on the planet.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your-food-waste-can-help-the-climate