Chris Milton : Independent Journalist & Writer

Earth Island Journal – Clean your plate

A startling new report from the UK has demonstrated the impact food waste can have upon a country’s carbon emissions and water footprint.

The report, published by WWF-UK and the UK government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), says that potentially avoidable food waste represents up to 64 gallons of water per person per day and 727.5 pounds of CO₂ per person per year.

This means that around 6 percent of the UK’s water footprint and 3 percent of its carbon emissions come from food waste. That’s roughly equal to adding 25 percent more cars on the road!

The amount of food we waste is shameful. It’s among the most unsustainable aspects of our high-consumption lifestyle. Curbing it will have a significant impact in improving our overall environmental impact.

How do these figures stack up against the rest of the world?  To answer that question I’ve looked at the US and China.

There are no directly comparable figures, mainly because the UK study is the first of its kind in the world.  However we can extrapolate some figures using published food and waste figures and water footprint and carbon emissions datasets.

United States

A commonly quoted figure is that 40 percent of US food is wasted.  That, by anyone’s measure, is a staggering amount.

The EPA has published a comprehensive set of figures for 2009 showing the CO₂ emissions of each sector, including embedded energy use. These show that 206 million tons of CO₂ come directly from agriculture, plus an additional 53 million tons from food waste in landfill (which is 20 percent of the total). Food waste in the US therefore produces a total of 260 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions ‑ 4.4 percent of the country’s overall carbon footprint.  This is equivalent 2,044 pounds of CO₂ per person per year, or a 41 percent increase in the number of cars on the road.

Only 58 percent of the US’ 696 billion cubic meters/year water footprint comes from agriculture, a relatively low proportion compared to other countries.  However because the rate of food waste is so high, 163 billion cubic meters of water, or 23 percent of the country’s total usage, is consumed unnecessarily every year. In terms of per person use, that amounts to a whopping 420 gallons per person per day.

China

According to figures published by the Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry (PDF), in 2009 around 62 million tons of food waste went to landfill in China.  Further figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (PDF) indicate total food consumption in 2004 was 905 million tons. Which means China wastes about 7 percent of the total food it produces.

A report prepared for the US Congress (PDF) in 2008 estimates that 14 percent of China’s overall carbon emissions come from agriculture. Combining these figures means that only 66 million tonnes CO₂, or 1 percent of its overall emissions is generated each year from China’s food waste.  However, this does not include energy emissions from agriculture or from food waste in landfill, which is a comparatively lower 115 pounds of CO₂ emissions per person per year. Agriculture accounts for over 85 percent of China’s 883 billion cubic meters/year water use, but because the rate of food waste is much lower than the US the amount of water wasted is also low: only 54 billion cubic meters of water, or 6 percent of the total. In human usage terms, that’s about 30 gallons per person per day.

I must emphasise these calculations are my own and don’t have any of the subtleties a proper scientific study will contain. In addition, the UK report differentiates between avoidable and unavoidable food waste but only total food waste figures are available for the US and China.

That said, it’s obvious that food waste has a significant impact upon a country’s carbon emissions and water footprint.  By taking greater care with the food we produce and consume, our environmental impact would be lessened much more than many of the industrial and energy solutions currently being proposed.

Earth Island Journal – England puts off selling public woodlands

A huge argument over the future of forestry in the UK came to a dramatic end last week when the Prime Minister, David Cameron, publically backed down and admitted he was unhappy with his government’s policy.

But what was the fuss about in the first place and why was a government with a clear parliamentary majority forced into such a humiliating retreat?

The UK has embarked upon a round of severe public service cuts to try and reduce the country’s debts as quickly as possible. The government did its sums and discovered it could make up to $8 billion from selling publically owned forests.

These represent 44 percent of the forests to which the public has free access in England (Scotland and Wales are not involved).

In addition, and unlike many privately owned monoculture forests, they are managed in a sustainable manner where timber production sits alongside long term biodiversity planning and the preservation of ancient woodlands.

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Earth Island Journal – Crude World Book Review

Plain text version:

Oil permeates our world. From the gas in our cars to the plastic on our keyboards it dominates our behavior, whether we embrace it or not The concern about oil was once greenhouse gas emissions, but the BP disaster has highlighted how the simple act of extraction is fraught with danger. Crude World, by Peter Maas, looks at all that surrounds extraction, in chapters named after the basest of human instincts, such as Fear, Greed, Plunder, and Desire.

Take Equatorial Guinea, for example. Ruled by a man described as “the worst dictator in Africa,” the country receives hundreds of millions of dollars each year in oil revenues. Maas describes in vivid detail how those funds are spent, from a Boeing 737 with gold-plated bath taps to the suitcases stuffed with American dollars which were regularly transferred from the embassy in DC to the dictator’s bank.

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