When the biogas is filtered to remove the hydrogen sulfide, the resulting mixture can be burned as an energy source for cooking, lighting, or heating water or space. Food waste has a direct link to climate change. Waste food: The hungry, the planet and the atmosphere all lose Image: Taz via Wikimedia Commons. Where do the non-methane emissions from cattle and lamb come from? Food waste that ends up in landfills produces a large amount of methane – a more powerful greenhouse gas than even CO2. Keywords Biogas, kitchen waste, Anaerobic digestion, Methane. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 76, 69-78. The fast and highly decomposable nature of this waste demands efficient management for it to become a sustainable operation. License: All the material produced by Our World in Data, including interactive visualizations and code, are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. This is not the case for plant-based foods, with the exception of rice. Or do we focus instead on the persistent CO2 emissions which will be the primary driver of long-term temperature impacts? To put that in perspective, in the USA food waste represents 1.3% of the total GDP. However, it doesn’t change the general conclusion: meat and dairy products still top the list, and the differences between foods remain large. If we removed methane their emissions would fall by around half. This is not the case for plant-based foods, with the exception of rice. Geophysical Research Letters, 43(24), 12-614.Myhre, G., D. Shindell, F.-M. Bréon, W. Collins, J. Fuglestvedt, J. Huang, D. Koch, J.-F. Lamarque, D. Lee, B. Mendoza, T. Nakajima, A. Robock, G. Stephens, T. Takemura and H. Zhang, 2013: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing. Few would argue that we should eliminate methane completely, but, as explained, there is an ongoing debate as to how to weigh the methane emissions – whether the grey bar should shrink or grow in these comparisons. Food and vegetable waste come under putrescible waste which is a serious environmental and economical concern all around the world. In addition to methane, food waste in landfills can cause nutrient problems in leachate and odor and vermin problems, along with taking up unnecessary space in the landfill. Methane’s shorter lifetime means that the usual CO2-equivalence does not reflect how it affects global temperatures. This is still nearly four times the mean footprint of chicken. In the visualization I compare the global average footprint of different food products, with and without including methane emissions.6. Nature Climate Change, 6(8), 773. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Lynch, J. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important greenhouse gas, but not the only one – gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also a driver of global warming. Methane accounts for 49% of its emissions. (2016) estimated the radiative forcing of the change in methane concentration from 1750 to 2011 to be 0.62 watts per meter squared. Scenarios (b) and (c) are very different to CO2, as rapidly or gradually decreasing CO2 emissions leads to further global temperature increases (only the rate of temperature increase slows). NRDC Report. Grinding pre-treatment of FW improves the surface property and bio-accessibility. The red and grey bar combined is therefore the total emissions including methane. This means that beef, lamb and dairy products are particularly sensitive to how we treat methane in our metrics of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. GWP100 is the accounting metric adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in inventory guidelines, although their Fifth Assessment report (AR5) did not explicitly recommend its use. By reducing food loss and waste in Canada, we can also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. These processes are efficient, with as Also soybeans and palm oil. We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. The average footprint of beef, excluding methane, is 36 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram. One is deforestation – especially for growing beef – with its own climate change impact. Or 10 to 100 times the footprint of most plant-based foods. The red bars show greenhouse emissions we would have if we removed methane completely; the grey bar shows the emissions from methane. Wasted food that ends up in the garbage, and ultimately the landfill, produces methane—a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. As I have shown before, there are large differences in the carbon footprint of different foods. succinic acid from orange peels, lycopene from tomato peels). Disposing of food in a landfill to rot is a leading source of toxic methane, which encourages global warming. Food wastage arises at all stages of the food supply chains for a variety of reasons that are very much dependent on the local conditions within each country. ‘Carbon dioxide-equivalents’ (CO2eq) aggregate the impacts of all greenhouse gases into a single metric using ‘global warming potential’. Learn how to combat climate change with composting by reading below! Our World in Data presents the data and research to make progress against the world’s largest problems. 3.11 Energy Benefit Comparison of Anaerobically Digested Food Waste and Anaerobically Digested Municipal Wastewater Solids..... 33 . This wasted food contributes to landfills being the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States.