Our fundamental motivations in our attempts at back yard homesteading include environmental benefits such as reducing waste, growing some of our own food, and making more food at home to minimize our total carbon footprint. A lot of what we’ve implemented at our home had this in mind, but just recently I decided to look up more about the problem of food waste specifically. I was surprised at just how big it is.
The size of the problem
A 2023 report from the EPA this pdf reveals the scope of this problem. In 2019 over 66 million tons of food waste was generated in the US with a staggering 40% of that generation coming from households.
Also revealed in this report is where these food wastes end up, with 60% still being sent to landfills.
The scope of this problem is so big that the amount of food waste accounts for 24% of the municipal solid waste going to landfills. Think of that; nearly 1/4 of the waste in a landfill was the food that was scraped off of a plate after supper or the food that went bad in your refrigerator because you didn’t eat the leftovers.
The problem with food waste
There is a two fold problem with food waste; wastefulness and carbon footprint.
Wastefulness
When the food is wasted all of the resources that were used to produce, transport, and store the food are also wasted; such as land, water, energy, and labor. This is not strictly a US problem, globally about 30% of the food produced is lost or wasted each year. That means that nearly 30% of the land globally that produces food is wasted growing food that is never eaten.
Carbon footprint
This food waste problem creates an increase in carbon foot print throughout the system. On both the creation and waste sides this carbon footprint comes from wasted resources like production, transportation, and land for the food that wasn’t eaten.
On the waste side there is an additional affect to consider; decomposition.
When food is sent to a landfill and buried it does breakdown over time, but because it’s buried it will not be constantly exposed to oxygen and the decomposition process will be anaerobic, and this anaerobic process creates methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas which has an even high greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
What you can do to help
The EPA has published this chart showing and prioritizing which actions are most influential at reducing these effects from food waste.
This lists aligns very well with our frugal urban homesteader mentality:
- Prevent wasted food – Produce, buy, and serve only what is needed.
- This aligns well with a frugal mentality.
- Donate or upcycle
- Upcycling food waste means to turn what could be food waste in to a different food product. For us this is done by dehydrating or canning our surplus foods for consumption in a different form or at another time.
- Feed animals
- At our house this is easy, we feed our scraps to the chickens as a first path to dispose of food waste.
- Compost
- Another easy one for us. What the chickens don’t or won’t eat gets sent to the composter, along with other things like chicken poop, coffee grounds and such. I have another post on how we handle our composting.
- Drain or landfill
- If we truly cannot do one of the above paths with our food waste in our house, we will put it in the trash can.
- We have made one purchase in particular that has helped keep more food waste out of the landfill, and this is the Vitamix Foodcycler. It’s often described as a counter top composter, but it does not actually create compost, it simply dehydrates and grinds food scraps in to a powder. The benefit of this device is that we can put things in it that wouldn’t do well directly in our composters such as meat, dairy, and even chicken bones. This device acts as a sort of pre-composter for these alternate food wastes which we then mix in to our normal compost bins.
Here are some links to other EPA websites and studies if you’re interested in learning more about this topic:
- Sustainable food management website
- Environmental Impacts of US Food Waste Management Pathways (198 page pdf)
- 2019 Wasted Food Report (59 pages pdf)
- EPA – Composting at home website
What do do next.
If you’re here reading this you are probably also environmentally conscious, that’s a great first step. Keep your eyes open when you go out to eat or go shopping for ways to reduce the amount of food you and your family wastes.
It’s nearly impossible to get food waste to zero, so when you do have something on the verge of getting too old, can you upcycle it? Maybe you can turn those eggs from 3 weeks ago in to some hard boiled eggs and pickle them? Maybe vacuum seal and freeze those steaks you didn’t get to this week. Maybe cut and pickle the onions on the counter so you have some toppings for another meal.
Finally, if the food has gone bad, or simply made too much, I recommend composting. If you have a back yard and don’t already have a composter now is the time to get one. In addition to keeping food waste out of the landfill there are other benefits to composting. I’ll expand in another article about our composting setup, how we manage it, and lessons learned.