A report recently released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggests that if food waste were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest producer of greenhouse gases behind China and the US. That statistic is staggering, plain and simple. In the above video, Mathilde Iweins, an Environment and Sustainable Development Officer for the FAO, outlines some key facts from the report.

The media release associated with the full report states that, “Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere.” Again, staggering.

In more affluent societies, this waste is blamed on consumer behavior and supply chain communication. Put another way, people buy too much and producers produce too much. I think it’s safe to characterize the U.S. as affluent relative to other nations of the world; it’s also safe to say as a whole we buy more than we need and food production is excessive. Though, this report is aimed at the global community, there is much for the U.S. to learn from it about curbing our collective production of food waste.

A particularly useful component of the report is a companion ‘took-kit’ intended to help people understand how to reduce food waste at all levels of the food chain. Not surprisingly, anaerobic digestion, the specialty of Biogas Energy Partners, is a part of the tool-kit. See, we didn’t just make this stuff up!

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