By Hannah McDonald
Human Environment Interaction
For my Mapping Mason project, I am choosing to focus on food waste on campus. Food waste is a troubling issue around the world not only for the environment but also for humans who rely on food as a source of energy. There can be various causes of food waste through the lifespan of food including production, processing, distribution, retail and consumption. For this project, I am focusing on food waste at the consumption stage at Southside Dining Hall on the George Mason University campus.
While people don’t often directly associate food waste with the environment, before the food even makes it to the consumers it has used up large amounts of environmental resources. To produce food, thousands of gallons of water, thousands of acres of land, soil nutrients, labor, fuel, energy, and even other natural resources are required. The use of land and need for nutrient dense soil in order to cultivate crops has contributed to soil degradation around the globe. “In Iowa, soil is eroding 10 times faster than regeneration rates…Across Europe, soil is eroding 3 to 40 times faster than regeneration rates…” (Nierenberg et al, 2018). Moreover, food waste ends up in landfills and decomposes releasing methane, a GHG 27 times more potent than carbon dioxide (Nierenberg et al, 2018). Furthermore, “Food waste accounts for one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and generates 8% of greenhouse gases annually” (Lewis, 2022). These are critical environmental factors and implications of the massive amounts of food wasted around the world on a daily basis.
Everyone is guilty of food waste from some point in time. Local and sometimes state governments are responsible for funding growth of food as well as waste management and disposal. This creates an anthropological/user side to the issue of food waste. “In 2015, food made up 15.1% (approximately 39.7 million tons) of total MSW (municipal solid waste); of this total about 2.1 million tons were composted, 7.4 million tons were combusted for energy generation, and 30.3 million tons were landfilled” (Muth et al, 2019). This proves that while some food waste can be used for composting or energy combustion, it most often ends up in landfills to decompose. Furthermore, “The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) established that food waste ends up wasting a quarter of our water supply in the form of uneaten food. That’s equated to USD$172billion in wasted water. They also determined that we spend over $220billion in growing, transporting and processing almost 70 million tons of food that eventually ends up in landfills” (Lewis, 2022). With the large amounts of waste that must be disposed of, the government is responsible for services to dispose of such waste including collecting waste and transporting it to the landfill which in turn costs governments more money for laborers and construction of landfills. Finally, the additional diesel and energy that goes into transporting food to consumers must also be taken into account.
Food waste can also be associated with several other systems including economic, political, and social. Food, which is required by all people to survive, can quickly become a scarce resource in both developed and undeveloped nations. Food takes up a large space in the world’s economy accounting for imports and exports and is a huge part of the supply chain worldwide. Food waste on all levels can contribute to supply chain issues. When food is wasted, so are resources, and when resources become scarce prices increase adding value to basic needs. When food values go up, people in poverty may no longer be able to afford it which only makes the issue of global hunger worse. Moreover, governments are forced to deal with the repercussions of malnourished people which can range anywhere from migration out of a certain area to social and civil unrest. Additionally, social systems also come into play when looking at food waste, groups including women and girls, ethnic minorities, and the rural poor suffer at higher rates from food insecurity, malnutrition and undernutrition than other populations. While people wasting food at Mason may not be directly contributing to the starving population in Yemen, “The later the food is wasted along the chain, the greater its environmental impact is…the more energy and natural resources are needed in the complete production process of the food” (Lewis, 2022). Meaning that once food gets to the plates of Mason students at dining halls and restaurants on campus, it has already used an immense amount of resources to grow and transport.
What Can We Do?
Food waste has many environmental and social implications which create the need for a multifaceted approach to resolve the issue. While Mason has made the effort to add more composting locations on campus, this alone is not enough. People do not realize the effects of throwing away even just a small amount of food. “Throwing away a kilogram of beef is equivalent to throwing away 50,000 litres of water…Pouring a glass of milk down the sink is nearly 1,000 litres of water wasted” (Lewis, 2022). Since there are such drastic effects on the Earth’s resources even from such a small amount of food being wasted, it is important for Mason to highlight the drastic impacts to students. While adding a new compost receptacle by Northern Neck might collect some food waste, most of the food is wasted at the dining hall and inside of restaurants on campus. Adding more compost receptacles in dining halls and restaurants as well as outdoor locations for residents can be an excellent step closer to sustainability. Moreover, signage communicating the impacts of food waste can help make people more self aware. Dining halls can also start giving students to-go containers for leftover food that has already been taken in hopes of reducing the amount of food waste at dining halls.
There also are many additional measures Mason can take to reduce the amount of food waste in dining halls including repurposing, which for example is practiced through turning stale bread into croutons, making soups with excess vegetables, freezing foods that are close to expiration and using them for things such as soup, and preparing food as a salad bar topping so people are not wasting food they don’t like/want (Saber et al, 2022). Food drives can also be implemented for people who have unopened food they will never eat, as well as for opened foods that can be donated to nearby farms for animals to eat. Moreover, improvements in the food preparation at restaurants and dining halls on campus and education of food waste reduction should be offered or even required for people working in the kitchens at campus. Food waste is a very complex issue and will require large amounts of creativity to solve. Since Mason prides themselves on being such a sustainable campus, it is important for them to take the extra step to achieve more sustainable practices on all parts of the campus.
References
Lewis, J. (2022). How Does Food Waste Affect the Environment? https://earth.org/how-does-food-waste-affect-the-environment/
Muth, M., Birney, C., Cuéllar, A., Finn, S., Freeman, M., Galloway, J… (2019). A systems approach to assessing environmental and economic effects of food loss and waste interventions in the United States. Science of the Total Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.230.
Nierenberg, D., Fisher, F., Frederick, B., & Peñuelas, M. (Eds). (2018). Nourished Planet: Sustainability in the Global Food System. Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition. https://link-springer-com.mutex.gmu.edu/book/10.5822/978-1-61091-895-4
Saber, D., Azizi, R., Drever, S., Sanford, D., & Nadeau, H. (2022). Hospital Food Waste: Reducing Waste and Cost to our Health Care System and Environment. Online Journal of Issues in Nursing. 27(2). 10.3912/OJIN.Vol27No01PPT33