World wastes at least a billion tons of food a year

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

UN HQ, May 2011: The United Nations said recently that about 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year, which amounts to roughly one third of all the food produced for human consumption.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization commissioned a report on food loss and waste, as rising prices and diminished production worldwide have contributed to an increase in food insecurity.

"The issue of food losses is of high importance in the efforts to combat hunger, raise income and improve food security in the world's poorest countries," the report states. "Food losses have an impact on food security for poor people, on food quality and safety, on economic development and on the environment."

According to the report, food losses occur as a result of inefficiencies in food production and processing operations that diminish supplies. Food waste, by contrast, is when retailers and consumers throw edible food in the trash.

Consumers in rich nations waste a combined 222 million tons a year, according to the report. That's almost as much as all the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa. The report puts much

of the blame on retailers in rich nations that throw out food simply because it looks unappealing, and the food industry's 'all-you-can-eat' marketing tactics, which encourage consumers to buy more than they need.

Food price hikes could push millions to poverty "Perhaps one of the most important reasons for food waste at the consumption level in rich countries is that people simply can afford to waste food," the report sates.

Food loss, on the other hand, is mainly a problem in the developing world, where nations lack the infrastructure and technology to efficiently produce food, according to the report.

"Given that many [small] farmers in developing countries live on the margins of food insecurity, a reduction in food losses could have an immediate and significant impact on their livelihood," the report states.

But food is not the only resource that is being wasted. By throwing away so much food, the world is squandering water, land, energy, labor and capital, the report found.

How much have your food bills gone up this year?

To reduce food loss, the report recommend increasing investment in the developing world to make food production more efficient.

In rich countries, the report recommends educating consumers about the extent and consequences of food waste. It also suggests that retailers should relax quality standards and sell produce that is grown closer to where it is sold.

The report says retailers should find ways to make better use of food that would otherwise be thrown out, such as donating it to charity.

Consumers should plan their food purchases more carefully, making sure to consume perishables before the expiration date, according to the report.

What also does not make any sense at all – and yes, I am back at one of my pet hates – is that int eh UK, for instance, we import “organic” green beans from Kenya. Those green beans are a vegetable crop that people there do not eat themselves and produce only for us on land that they could much better use growing food for Kenyans.

I have no problems with bringing in exotic foods and if there be a surplus of Kenyan specialities that we could import and thus give some income to the [poor] farmers in that East African country then that is fine. But what the UK and others do to have Kenyan farmers grow food stuff for us while taking away land and water resources from their own foods is unsustainable and cannot and must not be condoned.

On the other hand people in the developed world, such as the UK and the USA, for example, seem to have lost (one) the ability to cook from scratch and (two) understand the term “best before date” as “throw by date” or “throw just before day” and do not understand that much of that can still be used on the day or a day or so thereafter, maybe longer even depending on the product or produce. Thus, much food is, unnecessarily, thrown away.

In addition to that there are the leftovers which people today often have no idea what to do with. They may go and buy ready-made heat only “Bubble & Squeak” but that they could actually make that from leftover veggies they have no idea. Or, at least, so it would appear.

OK, we all do have stuff that goes off at times, and it happens to me as well, you bet. But knowing what to make from things that may be reaching the going off stage was something our grandparents knew and we must relearn those skills.

An apple that has a little spot of rot does not have to be thrown and neither a pear or a pepper. If a pepper is getting a little soft and maybe no longer good for a salad then use it in cooking. Then again, one would have to know how to cook and what to cook with a pepper now, would one not.

One of the greatest wasters of food, however, are stores and often all it needs is for them to find one veg with a spot on it of rot in order to throw out the entire box. And they not just throw it out; they also ensure that no one can salvage the thrown out box. In order to make sure no one will and can make use of the wasted veggies and such they will douse the boxes liberally in chlorine bleach. Not very environmentally friendly either.

When I was a child greengrocers would ply us with bags of stuff that was still good but needed a little sorting and cutting out a little spot here and there, whether apples, pears, peaches, tomatoes (my Gran made tomato sauce from such tomatoes for canning), and other stuff, for nothing, and the same was true with bread from the baker's at the end of the day. Today this, apparently, is illegal under British and EU laws. I think the law is an ass and it needs changing back not common sense.

© 2011

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Burning wood for the common good

Burning wood for heat and for electrical power generation

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The British government, just about capable of inventing the wheel, as I have said previously, has “discovered” that waste lumber form the building industry, for instance, does not have to end up in landfill but that it can be burned for generating heat and electrical power instead. Oh my, what a discovery. Real rocket science.

Millions of tons of waste lumber from construction sites, so it is said, go into landfill annually, which is very sad indeed. Why, pray, this waste in the first place? Also, aside from burning such “waste” wood, there certainly must be other uses for it as well.

However, apparently now, after a lengthy, and no doubt costly, study the UK government has found out that this waste lumber from the construction industry can be burned in furnaces to generate heat and even electricity.

Well, that is amazing! The early humans, and I believe even the Neanderthals, could have told them that and we ate the Green (Living) Review have been saying so already for a couple of years.

The excuse for doing nothing was always that power stations would have adapted to burn wood and that that would cost lost of investment. Duh? Why? Any coal-fired electricity generating station can just as well burn wood instead of coal. No need to alter and adapt anything whatsoever really. The BTU output with lumber might be a little lower but, so be it. That can be compensated for with a few turns and twiddles of knobs and dials and such.

They needed a costly and lengthy study, I guess, to tell them that.

Someone somewhere sure is making lots of money from all those studies regarding the environment and all that which the British government has carried out and commissioned to carry out. Money that, in most cases, is needlessly wasted, just like that lumber.

It should have been more than blatantly obvious that one can burn wood to produce heat – has this not always been done – and to generate electricity – which is also being done already in other countries, on small scales, and that is how it should remain – in combined heat and power plants (CHP plants). As I have already said, this is not directly rocket science and one does not require a scientific study for this.

Such CHP plants should, and this has been suggested also already not so long ago by this current UK government, be local plants, generating heat and electricity for a single village, a part of a town, or a city block. This would also do away with the need for the long distance overhead and underground power cables carrying tens of thousands of volts. Rather the current could be already of the domestic voltage, in the case of Britain 240v AC, as there would be no loss in the transmission, as is the case with the current arrangements, here and elsewhere.

In addition to the burning of waste lumber from construction sites, waste wood and such from the forestry and the aboricultural industry also could be used in the selfsame power plants. Nothing would need to get wasted and either needlessly burned on site, as is often the case in forestry operations with wood debris, or dumped in landfill.

There is also no need for the growing of “special” trees for the use in wood-fueled power stations such as eucalyptus or willow and such like. There should be enough waste about to run such power stations for a long time to come.

We could yet again talk about the use of such stations, if and when they would be set up or the coal-fired ones be converted, to combat the Dutch Elm disease. For, with the political will and the woodsmen being brought in for this, Dutch elm disease, as we know it, could be eradicated from the British Isles in a couple of decades. All that is required is to cut every dead and dying elm tree and to sanitarily burn them so as to destroy both the pathogen and the bark beetle that carried the pathogen from tree to tree.

Aside from burning wood in CHP plants, burning wood in a domestic and even commercial setting in stoves and furnaces for heat also is a good and environmentally friendly way. Again here too waste lumber could be used up; ideally, however, only that kind of waste that really is waste. Not simply burning pallets and even construction site waste lumber just for the sake of burning it. I am certain, as indicated before, that there could be other, better uses be found for such lumber than to simply burn it.

Burning wood, before anyone comes up and complains about CO2 emissions, only releases the carbon that it has stored during the lifetime of the tree and maybe not even that amount.

Wood is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to cook and heat, aside from power generated by the sun directly. Wood, in a way, is also sun energy, for it releases the energy of the sun stored in it during the grows of the tree.

© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008

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Burning more wood for the greater good

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The idea of using wood for fuel might not be new, but, according to Government, we need to burn more to take full advantage of the environmental benefits.

Who would have thought it that the British government wakes up to such revolutionary ideas as using wood and the world to the environmental benefits of burning (waste) wood.

Environment minister Joan Ruddock is pushing the potential of burning waste wood in an effort to divert the degradable material from landfill and make the most of its embodied energy.

The significant carbon and energy benefits of recovering energy from waste wood are detailed in a new information report on the sector that surveys the activities of producers, aggregators and users of waste wood.

Recycling and energy markets for clean, virgin wood have been growing in recent years but waste wood has been a largely overlooked resource.

While every homesteader in the USA and the UK has been talking about burning waste lumber for years for heating and cooking the rest of the world is just waking up, it would appear, to the fact that we throw a great resource into the landfill, namely waste wood.

However, before we burn those old pallets and (other) building lumber offcuts we should also have a look as to whether the same wood could not first be used for other products before, finally, after finishing its life, being burned in homes and power stations. In the latter instance, and the power stations is something the UK government is talking about, we all know, the ideal places where to use such waste lumber is in micro power plats, and ideally CHP units.

According to Government statistics up to 10 million tonnes of waste wood is being produced in the UK each year, most of which goes to landfill. That is a lot of wood. I wonder how many cords or cubic meters of virgin wood that equates to.

Ms Ruddock, Minister for Climate Change and Waste, said: "It has been estimated that recovering energy from 2 million tonnes of waste wood could generate 2600GWh electricity and save 1.15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, with greater benefits available by recovering heat as well as power.

"This is a huge potential resource that is being wasted."

Government acknowledges that the majority of waste wood is likely to be treated, painted or otherwise contaminated but argues that with more combined heat and power plants which meet the requirements of EU directives on the burning of contaminated waste, there is a huge potential for this waste stream.

Well, sure the wood will be treated, and probably pressure treated even, but under good heat most of those compounds burn off rather harmlessly. Why is no one actually mentioning this fact? Care needs to be taken, and we are all aware of that, I am sure, of wood that has been creosoted (and I mean where real creosote has been used) or waste wood of the likes of telegraph poles and wooden railroad ties. Both are dipped in boiling tar as mean of preserving them and the tar in such wood when being burned can cause real problems, as I can attest to, having had a chimney fire from burning railroad ties. Luckily the chimney was a metal one in a trailer home and was one of the double lined ones. No damage done and in fact in that case the heat clean-burned the chimney.

© M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008

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