Apparently, a third of the food we buy just gets thrown away.
My initial reaction when I heard that news on the radio was, Yeah And So What?
I was somewhat astonished to read that the report is “focused on global warming”.
Most of the waste food goes into landfill sites, where it breaks down and causes greenhouse gases.
But think about it for a microsecond. Didn’t it the carbon in food come from the air in the first place, when it was grown, or if it was an animal, when it ate plants that were grown? Even if we ate it instead of throwing it in a landfill, wouldn’t the carbon just come out in our breath when we metabolise it?
And as for “running out of landfill sites”, just look out the window next time you fly. There’s plenty of space. According to an article about recycling by John Tierney, “if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side”.
I did think of one reason that throwing away food might be a bad thing: paying people to grow food only to throw it away is economically equivalent to paying people to dig a hole and fill it in again. It’s a waste of human labour and wealth creation potential, so it effectively destroys wealth. To what extent depends on how much human labour goes into growing that extra third of food.
But I don’t think even that bears up. People behave rationally. If they’re buying too much food and throwing it away, there’s probably a good reason: doing so costs them less than not doing so. There are clues in the BBC article, under the heading, “things people could do to prevent wasting food”.
These include, “simple things like looking in the fridge, looking in the cupboard, before you go shopping”. And then there’s food that, “we may not feel like eating it after buying it”.
The amount of food wasted just represents the extent to which people find it cheaper and more convenient to buy extra to make sure there is enough food and enough choice of food in store, as compared to the time and effort to make sure there is the exact amount of food needed.
In other words, that labour spent growing extra food is less than the labour it would take to make sure no food gets wasted.
Update: More on this at Picking Losers. It seems that the people behind this useless report are a Quango who leech £80m in taxes every year. Your taxes at work…
Update 2: Don’t miss Bruno Prior’s comments. It seems that, w.r.t. landfill, methane from rotting stuff is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but it doesn’t matter because most of it is not released into the atmosphere: it is burned into CO2 for renewable energy.
Right as usual, Rob. Let me put one counter-argument, and then explain why it doesn’t alter your conclusion. Methane has a global warming factor (GWF) of 23, meaning that the effect on global warming of a given mass of methane over a 100-year period will be 23 times greater than the same mass of carbon dioxide. So if we convert our hydrocarbons into methane (CH4), we are theoretically doing 23 times more damage than if we convert it into carbon dioxide (CO2), which is what our metabolism is mostly doing (though you will have noticed that methane is a part of that process, and in the case of cows, a very big part of that process).
However, the great lie of many of those opposed to landfilling is that this methane is released into the atmosphere. It is actually captured and, in most cases in the UK, used to produce renewable energy (renewable because, as you say, the carbon released was simply part of the natural carbon cycle and therefore does not add more carbon to the atmosphere). The methane is converted into energy (which displaces fossil fuels), and carbon dioxide and water, which do no more harm than if (as you say) we had ingested the food and emitted the CO2 and H2O ourselves.
There are nuances about how much of the methane is captured, but the irony is that current waste management policy, by making landfilling more expensive, and by changing the volume of putrescible waste going into the fill, reduces the proportion that is captured, partly because the operators manage the site to minimise costs, which means waiting as long as possible before “capping” the site (putting a lid on it to keep in the gas), and partly because lower volumes and proportions of methane are harder to capture and utilise. The government’s incentives are actually driving down this most important renewable resource, which is not only our most reliable source (load factors similar to conventional power generation, compared to wind’s 27%), but has always provided the biggest proportion (around 30%) of our renewable energy – far more than wind power, which most people assume is the main renewable. It will take 3 MW of wind to replace 1 MW of landfill gas, in terms of output, and even then they will not match in terms of reliability.
This is a specialist area of mine. I was, until last month, MD of one of the leading landfill gas generation companies. We have just sold the business, partly because the market is very hot, but partly because of fear and frustration at the consequences of wrong-headed government intervention in every aspect of our activities.
Typical result of a meddling government that doesn’t understand the detail of the things on which it pontificates, regulates and legislates.
By the way, I forgot to mention that, if you want to see the future for converting food waste into energy, have a look at the website of our subsidiary, Andigestion Ltd, and particularly our Holsworthy site, the largest centralised anaerobic digestion (AD) facility in the country (and one of the largest in Europe). This process provides (near enough) 100% capture of any methane produced. We will be reinvesting some of the money from our landfill gas business into developing out the AD business, provided that the government don’t make it too difficult.
Thanks for the insightful comments, Bruno. There is more to this landfill issue than I thought.