Excerpt from an article on Vox, published on May 9, 2017 – the fourth installment of Climate Lab.
If someone asks you to picture where greenhouse gases come from, images of smoggy traffic jams or billowing smokestacks are likely to spring to mind. But your dinner? Probably not so much.
Your dinner isn’t simply a delicious, innocent bystander. From the farm to your plate, there’s food waste at every step. And decomposing food isn’t just stinky; it releases potent greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of methane.
Even so, food waste should still be a relatively small issue, except that we needlessly waste food on such a massive scale that it adds up to a global problem. Just under 7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from food waste worldwide. To put that in perspective, if all the world’s food waste came together and formed a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the US.
Andy Murdock 