Originally published by The Washington Post on March 28, 2016
Discussions about how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions frequently center on clean energy, more efficient transportation and sustainable agriculture. But research suggests that if we really want to pay attention
Originally published by The Washington Post on March 28, 2016
Discussions about how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions frequently center on clean energy, more efficient transportation and sustainable agriculture. But research suggests that if we really want to pay attention to our carbon footprints, we should also be focusing on another, less-talked-about issue: the amount of food we waste each day.
Food waste is already a hot topic in its own right. But with mounting concerns about our ability to feed the world’s growing population (expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050), cutting down on food waste is a big concern for experts in global food security. Wasted food is a major problem worldwide: In a 2011 report, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that, in 2007, about 1.6 billion tons of food were wasted. For comparison, about 6 billion tons of food were produced globally that year.
But an aspect of the food-waste issue that has perhaps received less attention is its contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions. In the same report, the FAO estimated that in 2007, the global carbon footprint of all of this wasted food was about 3.3 billion tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents — that’s 7 percent of all global emissions. To put that into perspective, this is more carbon than most countries emit in a year. In fact, only China and the United States exceeded this amount in nationwide carbon emissions that year.
This estimate includes the carbon footprints of all the work that goes into producing this uneaten food — all of the energy that goes into maintaining a farm and producing the food, as well as the emissions that come from soil and livestock. The estimate doesn’t include the carbon emissions that result from converting land for agricultural use or the greenhouse gases that would be emitted by wasted food in landfills. Accounting for those would drive the numbers even higher.
A massive amount of needlessly emitted carbon is poured into the atmosphere to produce unused food. These wasted carbon emissions could be prevented if we made sure that no more food was produced than was going to actually be used.
“The first step is really figuring out what is the right amount that we need to produce,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and an assistant clinical professor of law. Much of the food that goes to waste could be used by people who aren’t getting enough to eat. But it’s also likely that we could stand to reduce our overall production as well, cutting some of those emissions entirely.
“I do think there’s a sweet spot, and we’re not hitting it right now,” Broad Leib said.
Fortunately, cutting down on food waste i