When most of us — that includes me! — think about the causes of climate change, we tend to point at fossil fuels, because the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal, oil, and fossil gas really is the biggest driver of global warming. It’s the oil. We also sometimes remember that methane, which makes up over 90 percent of “natural” gas, is an extremely potent greenhouse gas when it escapes into the atmosphere from leaky pipelines and drilling equipment and the like. And those who are perpetually 11 years old can be counted on to point at “cow farts,” although if you want to get into it, it’s actually cow burps that release a more significant amount of methane.
Here’s the thing about methane: It’s way more potent, by mass, than carbon dioxide, about 84 to 86 times more harmful over 20 years, and 28 to 34 times worse over a century. But as those numbers suggest, methane also degrades over time in the atmosphere, while CO2 is up there for centuries. CO2 is still considered Warming Enemy Number One because we emit far more of it.
To really stop global warming, we need to transition to renewable, carbon free energy as quickly as possible. But because methane is so much more powerful, we’ll also get the greatest short-term reductions in warming by eliminating every source of methane emissions we can. We need that buffer to get the clean energy deployed.
Which brings us around to a source of methane we tend not to give a lot of thought to: food waste. We tend not to think of wasted food as a climate problem, though, because if you let the strawberries you bought on sale sit at the back of the fridge shelf, you can always just toss ‘em in the municipal composting bin (if your municipality has that) and bummer about the plastic, but it’s only a little bit.
But yeah, food waste is a climate matter too, for a number of reasons, as Carbon Brief details in this extensive Q&A article.
For starters, uneaten food mostly ends up in landfills, where it decays and produces methane. According to the EPA, food is the most common material going to landfills and incinerators. The Carbon Brief Q&A notes that food waste that makes it into composting has a significantly lower emissions impact, “resulting in 38-84% fewer emissions compared to landfill, a 2023 Nature study found.”
We were also a little surprised to learn that incinerating waste actually results in lower emissions compared to letting it rot in a landfill, although once we thought about it, it’s like how burning methane as fuel is less bad than letting straight methane into the atmosphere. But incinerating it still emits CO2.
All told, the UN estimates that about eight percent of annual greenhouse emissions result from food loss and waste, including food that’s produced but never goes to market. Carbon Brief notes that’s roughly the same as from all tourism; I’d add it’s more than double the amount of emissions from all aviation worldwide.
But long before we throw those strawberries in the compost bin, the most significant way to reduce greenhouse reductions from food would result from not wasting food in the first place, via steps for which the EPA even made a neato reverse food pyramid chart, starting with the most goodest to the least usefullest:
The EPA also has this more-detailed explanation of how to deal with food waste (with another neat illustration) and a thing that’s pretty obvious once you think of it, which I hadn’t: Better to send food waste to compost, incinerator, or landfill than to put it down the drain, because once in the sewer system, it decomposes more rapidly, releasing more methane. I don’t use the garbage disposal much anyway, but I’ll make a point of using it even less now.
At the top level, some 30 percent of food is actually wasted before it even goes to a distributor, either because it’s just plain unusable, like fruit that gets et up by pests or some parts of a crop that ripen too soon or late or get flooded; or because the crops aren’t ideal for mechanized processing, like potatoes too small for French fry factories, or weird shaped carrots that are twisty or dick-shaped. There aren’t even good cost incentives for packing up such “Grade B” food for soup kitchens, because it costs the producer to pay people to pack food that can’t be sold, as does transporting it. (That’s where government or nonprofit organization subsidies could help, hello!)
As Josh Domingues, founder and CEO of the Flashfood app, pointed out to PBS Newshour in a Thanksgiving-adjacent story in November 2022, even our stupid human brainworkings can incentivize waste at grocery stores.
If we buy a watermelon and there is one on the shelf, as consumers, we assume it’s the worst one so the grocer has to over stock the shelves so that we get selection.
Flashfood, which partners with a bunch of grocery stores in the Midwest, Northeast, and Western Canadaland, plus a few elsewhere, collects edible food that has minor flaws or that’s near its sell-by date, and then sells it on an app at a discount to nearby consumers. Since it got started in 2016, Flashfood says it has kept 90 million tons of food out of landfills, which would have been a lot of methane.
There are also all sorts of nonprofits that pick up food from retailers and restaurants to get it to unhoused people, keeping it out of the waste stream. Bet you a quarter you can find one local to you, unless you’re out in the boonies. (This is not an actual bet. Do not come demanding a quarter.)
Also, as Yr Editrix highlighted in Thursday’s tabs, Yr Wonkette has partnered with another company, Martie, so let me just blockquote her here. Martie, says the boss of me,
has great deals on overstock and salvage pantry items you like (in addition to great snacks for the girls’ lunches, a bunch of flavored vinegars because I am a fancy lady, upscale tuna — your new a capella jazz band name — and household items, I just bought Bonne Maman jams for several bucks off in each flavor) that also would end up in a landfill. […] While I was shopping, I googled prices on each item, and I absolutely saved eightyish bucks on each order so far. This is a sort of ad-like object, as we will get a commission if you order. But I really like it and I bet you will too.
There’s another online grocer the Editrix likes too, and that doesn’t offer us a partner commission but we suppose you might find useful anyway. That one, Misfits Market, offers dick-shaped carrots and other perishables as well as pantry items.
As with many aspects of the climate emergency, we should all do what we can to reduce food waste, because hey, right thing to do. In addition to that, as Dr. Christian Reynolds, a food policy boffin at the Centre for Food Policy in City, University of London (which really is punctuated that way!), told Carbon Brief, the really big reductions in the climate impacts of food waste must be driven by smarter public policy:
“For both dietary change and for food loss and waste, there is an individualisation of responsibility to some degree. But, also at the same point, there are some system drivers for this.
“An individual can decide what portion and pack size of something they purchase. However, they can’t decide what portion and pack sizes are on display in the supermarket.”
Also too, we should keep in mind that getting people to really reduce food waste should ideally be at least as easy as wasting food is, if not easier — that’s why community composting programs, with the big bins for your spoiled strawberries and coffee grounds and garden trimmings, are easier than doing your own garden compost pile (which is still nice if you wanna).
And guilt is seldom the answer. Some of us are of an age that when we hear “food waste,” the first thing that comes to mind is a parent or teacher or nun telling us to eat everything on our plate because we should “think of the starving children in [name impoverished continent or country here].” This is where I add that when the think-of-the-hungry-children guilt trip was tried on one of my ex’s sibling units, he deadpanned, “Name two.”
Smartasses. The whole damn family, Crom love ‘em.
[Carbon Brief / PBS Newshour / Foodtank / Flashfood / Martie (Wonkette commission link)]
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