The Climate Change and Economic Impacts of Food Waste in the United States
By K. Venkat. International Journal on Food System Dynamics, 2011
269 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study analyzes the climate change and economic impacts of food waste in the United States. Using loss-adjusted national food availability data for 134 food commodities, it calculates the greenhouse gas emissions due to wasted food using life cycle assessment and the economic cost of the waste using retail prices. The analysis shows that avoidable food waste in the US exceeds 55 million metric tonnes per year, nearly 29% of annual production. This waste produces life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of at least 113 million metric tonnes of CO2e annually, equivalent to 2% of national emissions, and costs $198 billion.
Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc164202b5a51da2d0294e19f8c1078d28854990
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Citations in the corpus
- Recycling, recovering and preventing “food waste”: competing solutions for food systems sustainability in the United States and France (2016, background): “…a major focus has been the environmental impacts of food waste (Cu ellar and Webber, 2010; FAO, 2013; Hall et al., 2009; Kummu et al., 2012; Venkat, 2011) analyzed in particular through life-cycle assessments (Buratti et al., 2015; Eriksson et al., 2015; Lundie and Peters, 2005; Schenck…”
- Comparison of Twelve Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: A Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Perspective (2012, methodology): “FoodCarbonScope and CarbonScopeData have been used in other recent LCA studies of North American food systems (Hamerschlag and Venkat 2011; Venkat 2011), as well as in commercial LCA studies.”
- Food System Sustainability and Food Security: Connecting the Dots (2014, background): “Losses in the first part of the food chain - which are due to poor harvesting, transport, storage - are more important in developing countries [35,92], while in industrialised countries most losses occur at the retail and consumer level, i.”
- Estimating Food Waste as Household Production Inefficiency (2020, background): “Throughout its life cycle, discarded food is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions (Chapagain and James 2011; Quested and Parry 2011; Venkat 2011; Beretta et al. 2013; FAO2013).”
- The Estimated Amount, Value, and Calories of Postharvest Food Losses at the Retail and Consumer Levels in the United States (2014, result): “For comparison, another recently published study that used the same LAFA data but different assumptions and retail prices estimated that the economic and climate change impacts of food loss for 134 commodities in the United States cost $198 billion in 2009 (Venkat, 2012).”
- Quantity and quality food losses across the value Chain: A Comparative analysis (2020, unknown): “Mass balance data series from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, using alternative assumptions, show that 28.7 percent of the harvested product is lost between post-production and consumption in the United States (Venkat, 2011), and that 31 percent of the available U.S. food supply is lost during d”
- Drivers of food waste and their implications for sustainable policy development (2016, background): “Venkat (2011) estimated that 112.92 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year were emitted from the production, processing, and disposal of avoidable food waste in the U.S.”
- Food Losses and Food Waste in China: A First Estimate (2014, background): “, greenhouse gas emissions (WRAP and WWF 2011; Reynolds et al. 2012; Venkat 2012); and (ii) downstream waste disposal and environmental impacts (Dorward 2012; Garnett 2011; Kim et al.”