How food banks prevented 1.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions last year

The latest annual impact report from the Global Foodbanking Network – a nonprofit organization that works with regional food banks in more than 50 countries to fight hunger – found that its member organizations provided 1.7 billion meals to more than 40 million people in 2023. According to the nonprofit, this redistribution of food, much of which was reclaimed from farms or wholesale produce markets, mitigated about 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent .

These figures reflect continued high demand for food banks. Last year, the Global Foodbanking Network, or GFN, served almost as many people as it did in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased food insecurity. To address this pressing need in their communities, many of GFN’s member organizations have invested in restoring agriculture, working to save food from farmers before it is thrown away.

Their efforts show how food banks can fulfill the dual purpose of fighting hunger and protecting the environment. By intercepting perfectly good, edible food before it reaches the landfill, food banks help mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas emissions created by food loss and waste.

“There’s always food that goes to waste unnecessarily,” said Emily Broad Leib, founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, who has worked with GFN before but was not involved in the recent study. All this unnecessary waste means “there is a continued need to expand food banks and food recovery operations,” Broad Leib added.

Read on

One in 11 people was hungry last year. Climate change is an important reason.

A recent analysis by the United Nations Environment Program estimated that 13% of food was lost while making its way from producers to retailers in 2022. Subsequently, 19% was wasted by retailers, restaurants and households. The world’s households alone waste 1 billion meals every day. The scale of wasted food around the world has been shockingly high for years: In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, of the United Nations released a study suggesting that about a third of the food produced globally is never consumed.

Food waste on this scale has a massive planetary impact. When food is not eaten, all the emissions associated with growing, transporting and processing it become unnecessary. In addition, when food rots in landfills, it emits methanea greenhouse gas that is approximately 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that 58 percent of methane emissions from US landfills come from food waste. Globally, it has been estimated that food loss and waste are responsible for 8 to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing them is essential to achieving climate goals.

Food banks can play a special role in this reduction by saving more food before it is lost and redirecting it to people in need.

“Our members have strengthened their redistributive capacity,” said Lisa Moon, GFN’s president and CEO. “I think that was our first challenge in the face of this growing need: How can we as an organization capture more supply?”

To do this, food banks within GFN member organizations coordinated more closely with farmers to divert surplus food from landfills. The GFN defines surplus food as food from trade streams that has been grown for human consumption but which, for one reason or another, cannot be sold. So-called “ugly” produce—deformed food that never makes it to the store because of its appearance—falls into this category.

Part of this redirection actually looks like eliminating food banks as an intermediary. Moon gives the example of a food bank receiving a call from a farmer with excess green beans. Instead of traveling to the farm to pick them up, traveling back to the food bank’s distribution center, storing the green beans, and letting people wait for the next distribution day to pick them up, the food bank in question would could simply contact beneficiaries in the area (think: soup kitchens) to let them know how many green beans are available and from where, so they can pick them up. GFN refers to it as a “virtual food bank” because of how members use technology platforms to match farmers with beneficiaries, rather than physically moving produce themselves.

Read on

The people who feed America are hungry

The result of this focus on agricultural recovery is that fruits and vegetables now account for the largest share—40 percent—of food redistributed by GFN members by volume. Moon says the organization is “just scratching the surface” of fresh produce recovery possibilities.

To calculate that 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent have been mitigated through these efforts, GFN used the Food Loss and Waste Protocol developed by the World Resources Institute. This framework takes into account a number of things, including where the recovered food would have ended up if it had not been intercepted from the waste stream. These waste destinations can be landfills, but also include animal feed, compost and anaerobic digesters (a waste management technology that turns organic waste into biogas – but which can come with its own emissions problems). Moon acknowledged that GFN doesn’t know in all cases what would happen to surplus food if it wasn’t rescued by a food bank — but pointed out that most places where the network operates don’t have a robust circular economy for food.

Harvard Law food policy expert Broad Leib described GFN’s estimate of mitigated carbon dioxide equivalent as “a good proxy for impact.” While other waste destinations are possible, “we also know that the vast majority of food wasted globally goes to landfill,” she said. “I think their estimate is not very far from the actual emissions avoided.”