Our report on food waste covers the huge cost of food waste, both only financially, but also environmentally and socially. To varying degrees, we are all part of this mind bogglingly inefficient global food system.
What are we wasting?
1. The world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters are as follows, China, the USA, food waste, India, and Russia. One of those isn’t like the others.
2. The food and agriculture industry is expected to double its food supply by 2050 to feed an increasing population while also decreasing its emissions. That’s an equation that doesn’t quite add up, read about what businesses can do to even up the scales here.
3. Seemingly new solutions to decreasing packaging waste, such as returnable or refillable packaging, aren’t quite so new at all. In fact up until the 1940s “things were actually quite circular”, as pointed out by Terracycle CEO Tom Szaky. Maybe it’s time to take a lesson from the 1940s and bring back the milkman!
4. In a study done in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1931 and 2000, it was found that half of all clothing industry job losses were attributed to clothing handouts. This is an eye-opening example of how kind-hearted donations can sometimes do more harm than good by damaging local economies.
5. On average Australians purchase 14.8kg of clothing every year, equating to 56 new items per person, per year. These are some of the alarming figures published in a report by Monash University on how to transition the Australian fashion industry towards a more sustainable future.
What can businesses do about it?
In our report on food waste we explore the history of food waste and its current social, economic and environmental impacts, and examine approaches businesses can take to help address the problem: redistribution, repurposing, and using technological innovations for more challenging examples of food waste.
Check out the full report here and our podcasts on Spotify or Apple.
Sustainable food systems and new technologies
A breakdown of our final final part of our series on the problem of food waste:
- Learn how businesses can tackle unavoidable and hard-to-process food waste using new technologies.
- Case study on Goterra, including an interview with sustainable foods systems expert and CEO of Zero Carbon Forum Bob Gordon, about how they use insects to process food waste and create animal feed.
- Case study on US startup Glanris, including an interview with the CEO and founder of Glanris Bryan Eagle, about how the company is converting previously wasteful rice hulls into sustainable water filtration media.
.avif)
.avif)
