The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact

By Kevin D. Hall, Juen Guo, Michael J. Dore, Carson C. Chow. PLoS ONE, 2009

748 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. Here, we calculate the energy content of nationwide food waste from the difference between the US food supply and the food consumed by the population. The latter was estimated using a validated mathematical model of metabolism relating body weight to the amount of food eaten. We found that US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ∼50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ∼300 million barrels of oil per year.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09181aac86856d36a7ce8fbbb7f2836cfcc0353c

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Citations in the corpus

Postharvest losses and waste in developed and less developed countries: opportunities to improve resource use* (2010, neutral): “When translated into loss of resources, food wastage in the USA is extraordinary with the production of wasted food requiring 300 million barrels of oil and 0·25 of the total freshwater consumption (Hall et al. 2009).”
Assessing U.S. Food Wastage and Opportunities for Reduction (2016, background): “Parallel to the growing food challenge are the widely recognized problems of dwindling natural resources, continued environmental degradation, and climate change.”
Where are the best opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food system (including the food chain)? A comment (2012, background): “3 million tonnes of food a year (22% of the total bought), two thirds of which is avoidable waste (Quested and Johnson, 2009) while in the US consumers are reported to waste as much as 40% of consumers’ food supplies (Hall et al., 2009).”
Where are the best opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food system (including the food chain) (2011, background): “In rich countries, a high proportion of the food people buy is wasted (Waste Resources Action Programme, 2009; Hall et al., 2009).”
Two-echelon multiple-vehicle location-routing problem with time windows for optimization of sustainable supply chain network of perishable food (2014, background): “Moreover, according to Lundqvist (2009), approximately half of all food grown is lost or wasted before and after it reaches to the consumers (Hall et al., 2009).”
Identifying critical supply chains and final products: An input-output approach to exploring the energy-water-food nexus (2018, background): “However, many authors have demonstrated the importance of the agricultural sector in various water-energy [10] and water-land use [41] nexus studies.”
Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight (2011, neutral): “36,114 However, additional longitudinal validation studies over extended periods are needed, ideally with the doubly-labelled water method to assess longitudinal changes of free-living total energy expenditure.”
Food Losses and Food Waste in China: A First Estimate (2014, background): “Top-down total food supply minus calculated food consumption (Hall et al. 2009)”