Food & Climate
An organization in San Francisco succeed to collects groceries from supermarkets that would head to the landfill and delivered them to a nonprofit that helps people living with HIV and other disabilities.
The Executive Director of an organization called Extra Food, Dittmar delivered produce, meats and baked goods to the Derek Silva Community, according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
The food was a godsend to resident Vicente Macias, who’s been HIV+ positive since 1989. One of the few survivors of his group of 30 friends, his only income is $1,300 a month from social security.
“In the Supermarket those kinds of things they are very, very expensive. So, for me this is glory,” he said.
At the end of the day Dittmar was able to rescue more than 300 pounds of food, filling bellies instead of landfills, according to “CBS”.
“We have the food we need to feed more people we just have to waste less,” he said.
About a third of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten. When it rots in landfills, it produces methane gas.
California now requires all supermarkets to give away food that is still fit to eat, rather than throw it away.
Food insecurity
Now organizations like Dittmar’s are getting a boost from the state agency CalRecycle, which recently granted more than $2 million to the city’s Environment Department.
The goal is to rescue food that’s still fit to eat but has passed its sell by date. But Dittmar said many companies are dragging their feet.
“There has to be effective enforcement on the back end to make sure that there’s the carrot and the stick,” he said.
Alexa Kielty, the Zero Waste Coordinator at San Francisco’s Environment Department, said the city is giving businesses until the end of the year to comply with the law.
“You don’t want to rush it because what you’re going to end up with is organizations receiving food that may not be as fresh as we’d like it to be,” she explained.
The latest Food Waste Index Report from the U.N. Environment Programme reportedly found that an estimated 19% of food produced globally was wasted in 2022.
UN report showed that households worldwide discarded more than 1 billion meals every single day in 2022 – at a time when over 783 million people, grappled with food insecurity
Overall, 1.05 billion tons of food went to waste that year, and the majority of 631 million tons – or up to 60% – came from households, according to the UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024.
In the U.S., food is the largest category of material found in municipal landfills, according to federal officials. More than one-third of municipal waste – or about 100 million tons – is organic waste, with food making up 66 million tons of that waste.
Methane emissions
Once in a landfill, food is often trapped under other debris. Rotting in this oxygen-starved setting, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, food loss and waste are responsible for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities, according to “usnews”.
Many countries realized this problem. For example, South Korea implemented policies over the past three decades have helped raise its food recycling rate to over 95%, Seoul-based policy researcher Doun Moon told “Anadolu”.
In 2019, there was an average of 14,314 tons of food waste in South Korea per day, of which 13,773 tons, or 96.2%, were recycled. This followed a recycling rate of 97% in 2018 and 97.1% in 2017, according to data from the South Korean Environment Ministry.
The transformation began in the 1990s when South Korea enforced a raft of policies to tackle a burgeoning waste crisis, Doun Moon, a policy researcher at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) based in Seoul, told Anadolu.