Final week, ReFED launched its newest version of the Meals Waste Monitor, which is a part of the ReFED Insights Engine, an interactive instrument that tracks meals waste sources, options, capital, and affect.
The group displays meals waste via the lens of extra meals manufacturing, which implies how a lot extra meals is produced that finally doesn’t get consumed. In accordance with ReFED, there have been 91 million tons of extra meals within the US in 2021 (the newest 12 months for which they’ve information), of which nearly 36%, or 32.7 million kilos, ended up in landfills.
Different locations for the surplus meals included sewer (6.91 million tons, 7.6%), composting (16.6 million tons, 18.3%), meals that’s not harvested on the farm (12.7 million tons, 14%), and animal feed (7.81 million tons, 8.6%) amongst others.
The Meals Waste Monitor additionally breaks down the place within the system meals waste is going on. Customers have lengthy been generally known as being the most important culprits in relation to meals waste, and we’ve solely gotten worse during the last 5 years, going from 45.6% (39.6M tons) of extra meals in 2016 to 48.4% (44.1M tons), which implies the house now accounts for nearly half of the entire extra meals within the US.
Along with quantifying the entire dimension of extra meals in our system and the way a lot is wasted, the ReFED Insights engine additionally has a options database that examines and quantifies the completely different options for decreasing meals waste. As could be seen within the graphic under, the database breaks options down by the place they contact the meals alongside the worth chain (every class is known as an ‘motion space’), from harvest to client environments and past, and quantifies the online collective monetary profit the assorted options focused at every cease alongside the best way might probably have.
In accordance with ReFED, reshaping client environments has the most important potential to cut back extra meals, with an annual web monetary affect of over $30 billion in whole meals worth. Inside that class, ReFED estimates that the most important potential lever for reshaping environments is client schooling campaigns, which might assist shoppers higher perceive the issue of meals waste and how one can handle it of their meal planning, how they retailer their meals, and so on.
A breakdown of the monetary and environmental advantages of client schooling campaigns is under. It breaks down not solely the direct greenback affect, however exhibits the entire quantity of meals diverted (3.22M tons), emissions discount (18.7M metric tons of CO2e), and water saved (795B gallons).
Whereas the ReFED options database touches on methods wherein shoppers can scale back meals by using know-how (good dwelling or meals life extension know-how) it doesn’t present the financial affect these kind of options might have. That’s probably not ReFED’s fault, as a result of the truth is there hasn’t been a complete lot of innovation on this house.
One class I didn’t see within the client options that may very well be added is client meals monitoring and meal planning apps, which have been lively areas by way of new merchandise and client adoption (although it’s unclear how impactful they’ve been).
There’s much more information and insights within the ReFED Insights engine, so you need to positively test it out for your self.
