There are many contributors to the challenge of climate change. So many that at times it can feel paralyzing for organizations to even know where to get started. While there tend to be few quick fixes, there are many areas that offer potential for meaningful progress, and one such area is wasted food. Typically, you hear about “food waste” in everyday speech, but that frames the issue as inherently out of our control. There has been a big movement to switch the verbiage to “wasted food”, because it signals that food has a purpose (to be eaten or used in a process), but instead, is wasted.
Food systems in general require a lot of inputs. From seeds to fertilization and proper irrigation, to farm equipment, manual labor, automated technology, and animals, it is no wonder food is one of the largest contributors to climate change. Project Drawdown has done a lot of great food modeling over the years, and its analysis shows that reducing wasted food would drastically reduce carbon emissions from going into the atmosphere. Particularly, when food is wasted, it needs a disposal pathway, which historically has been landfills. When decomposing food sits in landfills, it generates methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is at least 25x more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere. That means a warmer planet for all.
Wasted food can occur in many areas of the economy. It can be generated in the commercial sector (wholesale and retail), industrial sector (manufacturing and processing), and residential sector. The most recent year that EPA has estimates for is 2019, and that year, approximately 66.2 million tons of wasted food went to one of nine management pathways, including landfills. That is an incredible volume of waste by any measure. Highlighting another tool, the EPA also released the Excess Food Opportunities Map (EFOM), which includes many industry and commercial sector codes, and excludes farms. EFOM estimates how much waste is being generated at various organizations across the country.
With entire supply chains being important in a warming world, it is essential to look back at the initial state of growing food (farms) and understanding where sourcing is taking place. A new tool that is still in beta, the Global Farm Loss Tool, has been developed by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in concert with the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), World Resources Institute (WRI), and others. The Forum has a global commitment community dedicated to reducing wasted food across supply chains. These efforts expand on the WRI’s 10x20x30 initiative, which is funded by the Walmart Foundation. The 10x20x30 initiative explores having 10+ of the world’s largest food retailers engage at least 20 suppliers each to reduce and half food loss and waste by 2030. This program inherently has a cascading effect, and many large corporations and suppliers are starting to engage in the movement.
Large corporations have been making zero-waste commitments and trying to divert large percentages of their waste streams away from landfills or incinerators. An example is Target, which has set up recycling or composting programs in more than 1,500 of its locations nationwide. Programs include better food forecasting, composting organics, establishing a food footprint, and donating food from stores. In 2022, the corporation donated the equivalent of 87.7 million meals. Often, commitments are made to reduce wasted food, but the actual metric that should be discussed is waste diversion, meaning moving waste away from landfills or incinerators.
True wasted food reduction means not having excess in the first place, which is where forecasting comes into play. An example is the partnership recently established between Dollar General and Shelf Engine (wasted food reduction technology), which relies on artificial intelligence to look at individual stock keeping units (SKUs) that are highly perishable, and reduce inventory losses or out-of-stock issues for products. Grocery stores are a primary target for this type of technology.
The first step to dealing with waste is to not generate it in the first place (source reduction). But there are many other ways to manage waste, including donation, animal feed, upcycling, anaerobic digestion, compost, and valorization technologies. I will dive deeper into these for my next blog post (Wasted Food Scale), but for now, the key takeaway is that food matters in every way – how it is grown, harvested, transported, and how it is managed if it is wasted.
