Reducing food wastage through Sustainable food waste management







The word “sustainable” is gaining a lot of traction all around the world these days. Some of you might have even heard of the phrase sustainable food waste management. But what does it actually mean?
Let's find out.

What is it? 

Sustainable food waste management is an approach that seeks to reduce food wastage and its impact on the environment during various stages of its life cycle starting with the use of natural resources, manufacturing, sales, and consumption and ending with decisions on recovery or final disposal. 

Why are we thinking about it?

Let’s face it. If you are living and breathing you need to consume food. Since you are reading this blog post, you are probably a human and let me take this opportunity to remind that you that humans occupy the top of our food chain. Every year the human population consumes a large amount of food. But the variance of this consumption is staggering. While in the well to do countries we have people wasting most of the food they have available for consumption there exists a larger population who struggling for one meal.

More food is created every day than all humans can consume. More food gets wasted every day than we consume. This is probably one of the greatest contradictions that our modern era faces. The other side of this coin is how food impacts the environment during its different stages. Food, like us, is carbon based and at every stage from creation to consumption to wastage a large amount of greenhouse gases gets released into the environment causing global warming.

But it is not just the gases, that troubles the environment. For every vegetable stew or chicken curry that you munch on, liters of water is needed to nurture the potato plant or the fowl. Similarly, if we go into each and every process that is needed to get food on your plant a large number of environmental resources are at use. The moment you waste what you have on your plate, the significance is indeed quite large. The efforts at food waste processing also take a considerable amount of resources. If crude methods like burning are used it will lead to the release of greenhouse gases further.

In short food wastage is a problem that has more indirect consequences that the direct ones. To tackle both direct and indirect consequences we needed a comprehensive waste management policy. Sustainable food waste management is one of the ways through which we get to tackle them.

How does it work?

Sustainable food waste management starts by analyzing when and where does the wastage occur- direct or indirect? All the steps covering from food production to processing is meticulously studied to understand the extent of wastage. Then at each step, the wastage is addressed. In steps in which wastage cannot be optimized the approach is look for how the waste can be reused.

The net amount of wastage that can be reduced by sustainable food waste management is very promising. Yes, it does help reduce pollution and promote a green future. But as a bonus sustainable food waste management have economic benefits too which individuals, businesses and governments can be happy about.

One last note

While it is tempting for us to wait for large scale adaptation of sustainable waste management policies to start thinking about doing it ourselves, I suggest we start whatever we can do right now. Reuse and recovery of wasted food products is a category in which we can start changing right now. Products like Solwearth’s SE food waste converter efficiently process food waste into materials that can be reused. Soil supplements produced by SE food waste converter is a fine example of how wasted food can be recovered and put to good use.

For more details of Solwearth Food waste converters: www.solwearth.com

Comments

  1. Some Waste Composting Machine has an inbuilt shredder that shreds the waste material thereby reducing the decomposition time and enhancing the efficiency and quality of the compost.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, inbuild shredders does decrease processing time for decomposition, but it will increase power consumption thereby reducing overall efficiency.

      Delete
  2. Get a Information of Food Waste Management Market it will help you to reducing food wastage.

    ReplyDelete

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