Report: Food waste reduction, reuse
The report—“Food Waste Erased”—gives an overview of various public- and private-sector initiatives for reducing food waste at various levels, from individual best practices to international policy.
A lot of attention has targeted the need to reduce food waste, but a report released by the NGO Energy Vision broadens that focus to include a less discussed but no less important dimension of the food waste problem: what to do with food wastes that can’t be eliminated. The report—“Food Waste Erased”—gives an overview of various public- and private-sector initiatives for reducing food waste at various levels, from individual best practices to international policy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and, most recently, the global retailer IKEA have all adopted goals of cutting food waste in half.
That’s a critically important ambition, but Joanna Underwood, Energy Vision chair, argues that even if it were achieved, it would still leave the other half of food waste to manage. “No matter how much food waste we avoid, we need to recognize that some element of waste will always be endemic, especially the large stream of inedible food,” said Underwood. “The question is, since we may not be able to avoid those wastes, what do we do with them?”
The report describes various productive uses for food waste, ranging from making it into compost to capturing the biogases it emits as it decomposes and refining them into renewable natural gas (RNG) for power generation and transportation. As a vehicle fuel, RNG produces the greatest greenhouse gas reduction benefits. This fuel can even be net carbon-negative, meaning it can prevent more GHGs from getting into the atmosphere than burning it in vehicles. Compared to diesel and gasoline, RNG produced by anaerobic digestion of food waste can reduce GHG emissions up to 120%.
RNG operations are springing up across the United States. For example, construction recently started on the first anaerobic digester facility in Utah, which will process food waste into enough RNG to power a city of 40,000 people. Thanks in part to federal incentives like the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard, RNG has grown rapidly in the United States, from the equivalent of 20 million gallons of petroleum fuel in 2013 to almost 150 million gallons in 2016, and is on pace to displace 250 million gallons in 2018.
Report (pdf)