Do you Know Producing the food we Throw Away generates more greenhouse
gases (GHGs) than most entire countries do ?
More than a third of all of the food that's produced on our
planet never reaches a table. It's either spoiled in
transit or thrown out by consumers in wealthier countries, who
typically buy too much and toss the excess. This works out to roughly 1.3
billion tons of food, worth nearly $1 trillion at retail prices.
Aside from the social, economic, and moral
implications of that waste—in a world where an estimated 805 million
people go to bed hungry each night—the environmental cost of
producing all that food, for nothing, is staggering.
The water wastage alone would
be the equivalent of the entire annual flow of the Volga—Europe's largest
river—according to a UN report. The energy that
goes into the production, harvesting, transporting, and packaging of that
wasted food, meanwhile, generates more than 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide. If food waste were a country, it would be the world's third
largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the U.S. and China.
What are the
solutions?
ohn Mandyck, the chief sustainability officer of
United Technologies, a U.S.-based engineering and refrigerated transport firm,
says that food waste can be mitigated by improving the "cold
chain," which comprises refrigerated transport and
storage facilities.
However, we can't take today's sophisticated
refrigerated truck-trailer systems available in the U.S. and Europe and expect
they can be immediately adopted in emerging countries. In many cases, the roads
in these countries can't accommodate large truck systems, the technical skill
is not yet present to support the systems, and the economy can't yet afford the
systems. So we have to scale the technology to the local needs—smaller systems,
fewer features, more affordable...
