10. Earth to table & the food waste

10.

Earth to table & the food waste

Food waste is one of the most important sustainability issues we have to deal with. We must solve this problem to ensure future life on Earth. Today, we produce food for more than 10 billion people even though we’re “only” 7.5 billion people on the planet. And still people are starving.

Of the total amount of food that we grow, almost one third is thrown away, both in the supply chain to our home and after that. Swedes eat around 800 kilos of food and drinks every year per person, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and Statistics Sweden (SCB). In addition, we throw away 81 kilos of solid food waste per person and year in the sink, plus 26 kilos of liquid food and drinks via the sewer every year. A total of 107 kilos! Of these, 28 kilos are decent food that could have been eaten instead of discarded. These figures are based per person in a family of four. In a single household it’s even more. About a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions that Swedish consumption causes comes from the food industry. Swedish households throw away food equivalent to a carbon footprint of 442,000 tons a year. It takes 360,000 cars to create that much pollution, referring to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The Swedish Parliament has decided that the Swedish emissions of climate-changing gases should be reduced with 40% by 2020. To succeed we must change our consumption habits.

Three professors at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) stated that we will have a 40% harvest reduction – if 100% of our cultivation would be organic/eco – that requires a vast expansion of cropland. Our current arable area of 2.6 million hectares would have to be expanded by an additional 1.7 million hectares. If we go 100% eco the outcome will be less food on the same area as we grow today, less food to feed the world population with. Therefore, it is very important to do this transformation with care. Not only as a plea to consumers to spend more money on eco to feel good and have a better conscience, believing that it will help save the world. A greener and intensified local farming with less meat production can help make an agro ecological conversion, in the words of The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. This will help the world becoming more eco-smart. As I mentioned earlier, we produce food worldwide for about 10 billion people, but there are “only” 7.5 billion human beings on this planet – and still people starve. That tells you a lot about the magnitude of food waste. By turning farming into 100% eco, there will be even less food around. It will become more expensive and fewer crops will be grown. We must find a middle ground and take it step by step.

In 2016, Sweden imported 1.5 million tons of waste/garbage from other countries like the Baltics to feed our township heating energy plants. That’s a quarter of the total amount of waste we burn to get energy. Importing waste and garbage is an economic factor. Our Swedish plants get paid to take care of the waste and then paid again for the energy. The Swedish government now plan to tax the townships for this waste management. The EU has invented a staircase, the so-called waste hierarchy. The staircase shows the priority regime for legislation and policies in the waste area. The priority system shows that waste is primarily to be “prevented”, secondarily “reused”, thirdly “recycled”, fourthly “recovered” by other means (for instance, energy recovery) and as the last alternative being “disposed” of in another way. The scheme is valid provided it is environmentally justified and economically reasonable.

When it comes to packaging, we can help and improve a lot. Today’s consumers have a lot of opinions and feelings concerning packaging. Many are convinced that too much packaging and too many packages are bad for the sustainability of the world. However, in most cases, it is actually the opposite. The more we protect our food and products the less waste we generate and the less we have to produce. It’s a fact. This transformation within the packaging industry will help a lot. We move toward new, digital packaging and modern food packaging, combined with new fossil free, recyclable, and compostable media. Packaging will turn into being smarter and then also more intelligent.

The key, and the most important use for a package, is to protect the product inside from the outside, physical damage, contamination, etc. Other important uses of packaging are for example identification, information about the product and attractants, helping the product to stand out against competition. Food packaging will also become smarter, with less waste and converting to a more agro ecological society. In the food industry, the time from farm to table is crucial and the size of packaging, from family pack toward portion pack, will save plenty of unnecessary waste. For example, salad filled with modified atmosphere (MAP) is an ideal solution. When you break an ordinary package for using only a part of the salad and then put the rest back in the fridge – that salad will turn bad very quickly because salad covered with plastic without the MAP rapidly turns into waste. Otherwise, storing salad normally is in fact storing it not too cold and covered in paper… Instead, we could use right-sized packaging for the exact amount we’ll use that day; here MAP’s have significantly increased the lifespan of salad and reduced salad waste. Packaging makes food last longer and reduces the mountains of waste that increases worldwide. This fact is often forgotten in the everyday conversation. Take the Japanese example of bananas; in Japan they pack bananas one by one. They don’t understand us Europeans who put ten bananas in one package. We only eat one banana at the time and the Japanese bananas live 5 times longer than ours after we open the package. It’s the same as the discussion about the cucumber – with or without the plastic sleeve. Research shows that a wrapped cucumber lasts more than three times longer than an unwrapped one. And a longer life for the cucumber means fewer deliveries, less transportation, and less food waste. So, if you consider yourself an environmentalist, think about the plastic sleeve next time you choose your cucumber at the grocery store.

The flexible packaging industry of today still mainly uses fossil-based plastic media. Here, the industry must convert according to new regulations and the vast and growing green demands from us consumers. We will see not only none-fossil and recyclable media but also compostable, bioplastic. First industrial composting that can scale, manage, and optimize the conditions together with the bioplastic development. Later, it will also involve home composting. Digital print and the conversion of packaging and reducing the food waste (maybe down toward “zero waste”) involve many stages to go through step by step. Getting rid of the fossil-based media is prioritized, as is producing more on demand instead of to stock. Speeding up the T2M with a shorter delivery time of both the packaging and the product produces a faster response time and less waste. Variations with more SKUs dramatically increases the local approach and adds value by having the right thing at the right time in the right place. Digital by default means less waste also when it comes to waste in the setup of a print job, in many cases going from hundreds of meters of waste to only a few meters.