Reducing food’s resource and climate footprints via food waste upcycling

Abstract

The global food system is a major driver of most-pressing sustainability challenges such as climate change, unsustainable resource extraction, and altered biogeochemical cycles of N and P1-5. Food loss and waste is at the heart of the problem6,7. With 1/3 of food uneaten but lost/wasted, not only do resources consumed in producing the food ‘go down the drain’ but also the wasted food continues to brew health and pollution problems8,9. Here we show that food waste recovery and upcycling can effectively mitigate food’s unintended consequences. Using global primary data, we estimated that recovering and treating food waste via composting, anaerobic digestion, or feed-making technologies could reduce carbon footprints by 614–1041 Mt CO2-eq, compared to landfill baseline, potentially offsetting global food system’s climate burden by 4.5–7.6%. Up to 6.6 Mt nutrients could be re-captured for soil-crop-based upcycling. The feed-making option could generate up to 155.6 Mt novel feeds for animal-based upcycling, potentially replacing 41% and 9% of maize and soy in global livestock feeding. Feed grain replacement can bring an array of cascading benefits such as land and fertilizer spared and pollutions avoided, which are evaluated for the U.S. and China as case-study countries.

Quantifying Food Waste in the Hospitality Sector and Exploring Its Underlying Reasons—A Case Study of Lahore, Pakistan

“…Applying this criterion is important in calculating this indicator, as a large proportion of kitchens did not disclose or quantify the number of food items procured. This indicator was calculated using Equation (5), where i represents the daily amount, and n is the total number of sample units in the case of surveys and the total number of quantification days in the case of live tracking.…”

“…A new report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has revealed that 2.5 billion tonnes or 40% of all food grown globally are lost or wasted [1]-approximately 1.2 billion tonnes more than previously estimated by FAO in 2011 [2][3][4]. This not only wastes huge amounts of natural and man-made resources employed in producing this food but also represents a lost opportunity for food security and the economy [5][6][7]. It is morally and ethically wrong to waste food fit for human consumption when 850 million people were still hungry and one out of three were malnourished in 2018 [3,[8][9][10].…”