Today WRAP, the Waste and Resource Action Programme, published a report about the UKs waste food habits. The report highlights just how much food people waste and the economic costs it has at a time when food prices are rising and domestic budgets are being squeezed.
Some statistics first:
6.7 million tonnes of food thrown away each year.
Less than a fifth is avoidable (such as bones).
A quarter of the avoidable waste is thrown away whole or unused.
The food thrown away is responsible for 18 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
Some reasons why food waste will affect climate change and the environment:
1. Food dumped at landfill will produce Methane, a highly potent green house gas.
2. Food miles to transport the food that will eventually be wasted, produces more green house gas emssions.
3. Fuel and chemicals wasted producing the food (more green house gas emissions).
4. Extra waste collections or collection vehicles increase the costs to the consumer and produce more emissions.
5. Energy and fossil fuels used to produce the wasted packaging (addition green house gases).
6. Bigger supermarkets are unnecessarily built to cope with the addition demand (additional green house gases).
On top of the GHG emissions mentioned here, wasting food has a big financial burden on consummers, both directly and indirectly.
UNICEF, which has just joined the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, has launched a new report this week ‘Our climate, our children, our responsibility: the
implications of climate change for the world’s children’ showing that the world’s poorest and
most vulnerable children are being hit the hardest by the impact of climate
change.
New research is beginning to show that the IPCC may be conservative in its estimates on sea level rises. Some scientists are even now thinking that the IPCC is to slow to respond to new evidence.
60 metre rise - (Also mentioned in the New Scientist). Such a rise would require all the earths ice to melt. This may sound impossible, however a report submitted to Science magazine indicates that it may well happen. The authors of the research headed by James Hansen have looked at CO2 records dating back 50 million years and have shown we may be just a few decades from a major tipping point. They have found that the earths Antarctic formed its ice cap at a point when CO2 in the atmosphere was about 425ppm, back then CO2 was on it's way down. Today it is on it's way up, the implication being that we could see large amounts of ice melting soon. Why? Because in 20 years or so we will reach the 425ppm mark.
The report is currently held at Cornell University. Cite: arXiv:0804.1126v1 [physics.ao-ph]
Lord Stern of Brentford has warned that the gloomy predictions of
his high-profile review of the future effects of global warming
underestimated the risks, and that climate change poses a bigger threat
than he realised.
Stern said this week that new scientific
findings showed greenhouse gas emissions were causing more damage than
was understood in 2006, when he prepared his study for the government.
He pointed to last year's reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and new research which shows that the planet's
oceans and forests are soaking up less carbon dioxide than expected.
