FareShare has carried out a study which claims that food waste would be the third largest emitter of carbon globally, were it a country. The charity states that the issue of food waste was ultimately neglected throughout discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) last week, in spite of food waste accounting for between 6 – 7 per cent of the UK’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Nationally, two million tonnes of food are wasted from farm to factory, FareShare estimates – to assuage this, the company is promoting the redistribution of surplus produce to charities and community groups across the country.
This solution is supported by the publication of the report, conceived in collaboration with the Carbon Trust. It demonstrates that for each tonne of food that is reallocated to others, rather than simply wasted, approximately 1.6 tonnes of embedded carbon dioxide can be saved. This ‘hidden’ carbon arises from ‘energy used in everything from cultivation and harvesting to packaging and transportation’, according to the report, which also quantifies the emissions set within the life cycle of the food that FareShare redistributes.
It was also revealed by the study that for each tonne of food that is redistributed, a loss of 1,525,000 litres of water – used throughout production – will be avoided. In terms of the amount of water saved by FareShare, the total footprint generated by redirected food waste was 10,216,904 m3 of embedded liquid. The largest category in this instance was uncategorised foodstuffs, as a result of 40 per cent of the stock being non-classified within this section – its proportion of the water footprint totalled 40 per cent.
Source: Resource
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