Low Impact

Wasted food costs money as well as the environment

Most things that we buy or use go through a similar lifecycle.

1. The item is produced and transported to the customer
2. The item is used or consumed by the customer
3. The item is disposed of.

This general pattern is common to most things we consume, with minor variations.  An apple is produced by a farmer and delivered to the supermarket.  The customer eats the apple (so its useful life is pretty short!), and the apple core is thrown in the bin.  A fridge is manufactured, delivered to the customer, and after 5 or 10 years of faithful service, sent to the tip.

Where things get a little absurd is when we skip out on Step 2 - the step where we actually get some use out of the item!  So, the item is produced or made (typically with some environmental cost) and delivered to the customer (typically resulting in CO2 emissions), who then…. disposes of the item.

All of the environmental damage, with no end-benefit to the customer!

This is most common when it comes to food, and was brought home to me when tackling a cleanup of our fridge.  Over the last year or so, the fridge had got fuller and fuller… yet there never seemed to be anything to eat!  After a couple of hours of cleaning, we’d dug out jar after jar of expired foods and sauces. Some of them probably contained brand-new cures for cancer - mould that brightly coloured just has to have some use!

An embarrassing number of jars were mostly full.  Sometime in the last year, we’d bought a jar of tomato paste, used a spoon of it, and then pushed it to the back of the fridge.  Other jars of tomato paste had come and gone, leaving “Specimen 197A” (as I like to call it), to mutate in peace!

Pretty disgusting to look at, and a bit of a waste of $4.20, but it got me thinking about the environmental cost.

Somewhere, probably hundreds of kilometres away, a farmer grew tonnes of tomatoes.  Tractors burning diesel were driven, petroleum-based herbicides may have been used.  Some of these tomatoes were then trucked to a factory, where they were processed into paste and put into glass jars that had been molded in another factory from molten glass.  The finished product was then trucked to a distribution centre, before being trucked to our local supermarket.  We then walked to the supermarket, took it home, and used one spoon of it on our homemade pizza.

Then one year later, we threw the other nine tenths of the jar out!

There’s some saving graces in that story.  We did, after all, walk to the shops rather than drive!  We emptied the jar into our worm farm, rather than put it in the bin where it would have ended up in landfill and produced methane; a greenhouse gas over 20 times as potent as CO2.  And we recycled the glass jar, reducing the energy cost in making the next jar.  Still, the environment wore a fair cost for our one spoon of tomato paste!

The solution is, obviously, to waste less.  We’re going to try to keep a closer eye on the contents of our fridge and cupboard.  We’re also trying to plan our meals a little better.  This means that when we go shopping, we only buy the ingredients we need, rather than buying a whole new tin of tomatoes “just in case”.  It also means that we might pick a meal based on what food we already have in the house.

This has the dual benefit of both lowering our impact on the environment as well as lowering our grocery bill.  With any luck it should also mean less unpleasant surprises  when we next open the fridge!

(Image courtesy of Tomomarusan under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later)

Categories: environment, green, reduce

Tags: consumption, food, landfill, wastage