Food Waste: The Impact on the Environment

Food waste has a huge impact on the environment; from global warming, wasting water and oil, to deforestation. Let’s take a look at how they’re all linked together and what we can do to help.

One quarter of man-made greenhouse gases are created by food waste. If food waste were a country it would rank third in the world in terms of greenhouse gas production. Why does this happen? Well, when we throw away food and it enters landfill, the rotting process produces lots of methane, which is 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in terms of trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Greenhouse gases such as methane absorb and trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up, which is often referred to as global warming.

If we were able to prevent the food waste that currently occurs, it would have the same benefit to the planet as removing 1 in 4 cars from our roads.

The agricultural industry accounts for around 70 percent of water used throughout the world, therefore food waste contributes to a huge amount of wasted freshwater and ground water resources.

50,000 litres of water is used in the production of just 1kg of beef, meaning that if you were to throw away just 500g of minced beef that you bought but never got around to using, you’re not just wasting the meat but 25,000 litres of water too! Along the same lines as this, if you were to throw away one glass of milk, you are wasting 1,000 litres of water that was used in its production.

Land is another of earth’s valuable and limited commodities that is greatly affected. There are approximately 4.2 billion hectares of land used for agricultural purposes worldwide but one third of this land is effectively used to produce food that will be wasted.

Food waste also has clear links to deforestation, as forests are cleared to produce crops for an ever-growing population. Because of the world’s growing population, the demand for land to produce our food will continue to grow, and deforestation will continue, destroying wildlife habitats and wiping out greenhouse-gas-absorbing trees and plants.

The United Nations predicts that by 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.8 billion. Food production will struggle to keep up with demand, but food waste will continue to increase. So what can we do about it?

We must continue to grow the great initiatives that already share surplus food around the world. Supermarkets should look to increase the amount of unsold goods they donate to community initiatives such as Hartlepool Food Network, so that so-called waste can be utilised by those that need it the most.

In the UK, we could also take a leaf out of our French counterpart's books and make it illegal to discard unused food and instigate a system of regular donations.

Markets such as SirPlus in Germany, where they only sell excess food donated by other markets, are a great way of making sure food doesn’t go to waste.

And innovative ideas just like WeFood in Denmark, who sell heavily-discounted produce that is past its sell-by date, must be pursued by more and more countries.

There are also lots of initiatives that are finding ways to turn waste into worth, such as turning coffee cherries into flour, making award-winning ales from leftover bread, recycling restaurant scraps into bioplastics, and home food waste into biogas.

Consumer behaviour must change, too. The simplest way we can all help is to buy locally, which shortens the supply chain, which in turn equates to fewer opportunities for loss of produce.

We can also improve our meal planning and buying only what we need - we’re all guilty of sometimes nipping into the supermarket unprepared and buying too much food!

Informing ourselves about date-labelling can make a huge difference too. This means understanding what the terms ‘sell-by’, ‘use-by’, and ‘best before’ actually mean, and helps us to only throw away food when it is truly inedible.

One last super easy thing many of us can do is to compost our scraps and waste. Composting diverts waste from landfill, therefore reducing methane emission. Home composting has the potential to divert up to 150kg of food waste per household annually!