Stop wasting food, to save energy
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COMMENTS 
Researchers have identified a painless way to achieve huge energy savings: stop wasting food. The United States alone could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year if they stopped wasting food
As Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar, researchers at the Centre for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas, Austin, explain, food contains energy and requires energy to produce, process and transport. Their study finds that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year’s worth of food in the United States.
Estimates indicate that between 8% and 16% of energy consumption in the United States went towards food production in 2007. Despite this large energy investment, the US Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the US waste about 27% of their food.
Indeed, Americans waste a lot of food -- 27% of all food produced wasn’t eaten back in 1995, the last time a study was conducted by the USDA. That number has no doubt gone up in the last 15 years, say the researchers. They realised that the waste might represent a largely unrecognised opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming. Their analysis of wasted food and the energy needed to ready it for consumption concluded that the US wasted about 2,030 trillion BTU of energy in 2007, or the equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil.
That represents about 2% of annual energy consumption in the US. “Consequently, the energy embedded in wasted food represents a substantial target for decreasing energy consumption in the US,” says the study, reported in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
“The wasted energy calculated here is a conservative estimate both because the food waste data is incomplete and outdated and the energy consumption data for food service and sales is incomplete,” the scientist duo adds.
The report, which is available for download from the American Chemical Society site http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/abs/10.1021/es100310d, breaks down food waste by type and looks at the energy used to produce, process and transport food.
Although this is the first time food waste has been quantified as energy, it has been a focus of company efforts for some time -- especially outside the United States. Last month, UK grocery retailers announced they had made progress in cutting their food waste, saving 1.2 million metric tonnes of food waste over the last five years.
Sainsbury’s, a leading UK grocer, announced earlier this year that it was investing in new technology to let grocery stores reduce food waste based on real-time supply chain decisions influenced by the weather. And, in 2009, Marks & Spencer (another UK retailer) set a goal to recycle all its food waste as a way of achieving its zero-waste objective.
In the US, Sodexo launched an education campaign urging students to reduce their food waste on campus. And the Minnesota State Fair this year experimented with using food leftovers and animal waste to power the fair.
Source: ANI, October 3, 2010
http://www.greenbiz.com, October 2010