What happens to the food you trash?

“I overbought veggies and they went bad sitting in the fridge”

“The bread I bought expired before I could finish it”

“I didn’t bother bringing my leftover back from the restaurant”

“I forgot to keep the milk in the fridge and now it’s spoilt”

How many times have we all said these sentences?

If we’re being honest, this is not uncommon.

And segregation of waste is unfortunately not common in most places.

The food we throw away in trash ends up in landfills. Landfills are large dumping grounds with heaps (or more like mountains?!) of waste. As we humans keep piling this wet waste mixed with all other waste, these eventually form tightly packed heaps that have no contact with ground soil. Since this food waste is not going back to the soil, it ROTS instead of getting properly degraded.

What happens when food rots in these landfills?

We all can imagine the plethora of flies and other insects, pests lurking around the rotting food. These put the trash handlers and people living in the vicinity at severe health risks.

BUT

There is a much bigger problem with the rotting wet waste at landfill sites.

The stink - comes mainly from a gas called METHANE. This rotting food which is not in contact with the soil releases lots of methane. Methane, a greenhouse gas is known to be 28x more potent than ill-famed carbon dioxide gas touted for the majority of man-made global warming.

A staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year globally while more than 700 million people starve. This is equivalent to 1/3rd of the total food produced in the world. AND, this is enough food to feed 2 billion people.

Now, imagine the total wasted food and the methane it produces while sitting in landfills! We are literally eating (or rather throwing) our way into bad bad climate change.

Check out related posts to learn how to avoid food waste or use it to make compost/ fertile soil instead of methane!

References:

UN Environment Programme

US Dept. of Agriculture