In our previous blog, we established that food wastage is not merely a social or humanitarian one, but also a largely environmental one as we revealed the ecological footprint of the production of food. We discussed the implications of the pre-consumption of food, and now we will delve deeper into the post-consumption of food, this, in the form of food wastage.
What exactly happens to food that ends up in our landfills?
Again, as mentioned in our previous blog, the common misconception that biodegradable equates to no environmental damage is a naive perception that needs relooking. While yes, we acknowledge that food, unlike plastics, does not retain in the environment in that sense, in another sense, it’s not so different to plastics.
What do we mean by that?
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation quantified the food wastage footprint on natural resources, namely greenhouse gases. Their methodology took assessments of the volume of wastage and their emission factors taken from Life Cycle assessment studies to examine the amount of GTCO2 eq is created per year. In 2011, the Global GHG emissions was 4.4 GtCo2. Though not isolating the impacts of food wastage alone, it was found that food wastage and loss accounted for about 8% of global greenhouse emission and equivalent to almost 87% of global road transport emissions.
It is clear to see that both food loss, in terms of wasted energy and unnecessary pollution, and food wastage, in terms of actual emissions that result from the degradation of spoiled food, both pose significant environmental damage in terms of air pollution and climate change. Now evaluating then, the permanence of food wastage is not in the food itself, but rather its secondary pollutant, predominantly methane as well as other greenhouse gases, these of which, can linger in the atmosphere. In this sense, food waste is not so different to plastics in a sense that their effects are both permanent to the environment.
It is through this we see that food wastage, in itself, is not merely a waste of resources, but embeds a much larger implication of air pollution and climate change.
Reference:
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (n.d) Food wastage footprint and climate change. Accessed 10 July 2020. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-bb144e.pdf
World Wild Life (n.d) Fight climate change by preventing food waste. Accessed 10 July 2020. Available at: https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/fight-climate-change-by-preventing-food-waste
