Food rescue, also called food recovery, is the practice of safely retrieving edible food that would otherwise go to waste, and distributing it to those in need. The recovered food is edible, but often not saleable. Products that are at or past their “sell by” dates or are imperfect in any way – a bruised apple or day-old bread – are donated by grocery stores, food vendors, restaurants, and farmers markets. Other times, the food is unblemished, but restaurants may have made or ordered too much, or may have edible pieces of food that are by products of process of preparing foods to cook and serve. In addition, food manufacturers may donate product that marginally fails quality control or that has become short-dated. Therefore, the environmental benefits of recovered food were determined across the following four indicators greenhouse gas benefits, energy savings, water savings, and landfill savings.
First of all, one of the benefits is greenhouse gas benefits. According to OzHarvest’s food rescue activity, Refrigerator CO2-eq emissions is 0.32 tonnes CO2-eq/fridge.year. On average, every kilogram of food that OzHarvest recovers will avoid 2 kg of greenhouse gas (kg CO2-eq) emissions, and avoid the consumption of 143 litres of water. That is mean 960 r refrigerators switched off for one year to prevent produce of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC).
With this food rescue, we are managing global warming in low cost and helps in lowering probability of skin cancer.
The Term Paper on Greenhouse Gas and Environment
Waste recycling in the past has not been feasible because of the difficulties associated with managing and recycling food waste. However an increasing demand for food waste recycling, has led Commercial Recycling to invest in creating a viable food waste recycling service for businesses throughout Dorset, Somerset and Bristol. Customers of our food waste recycling service are given bio-degradable ...
Secondly, energy savings would be one of the benefits too. According to SecondBite , Since 2005 they have rescued over 4.5 million kilograms of surplus fresh food, enough for nine million meals which is approximately over 6 million kilojoules of energy saved. At the same time the energy saved is equivalent to 1,245 years of the television being turned on.
Last but the least, water savings also gain its benefit from recovering food. The amount of water saved by not sending one million kilograms of food to landfill is equivalent to 39 fifty-meter olympic swimming pools. Imagine turning the shower on constantly for 62,058 hours, that’s 2,585 days. The amount of water that would have been wasted if this fresh foods are not rescue. That is not small volume of water, we could easily save for prevent drought.
All in all, Food is a simple medium through which powerful positive change can take place within our community. With the aid of SecondBite and OzHarvest, we encourage government, community and industry to join them and the time is ripe for a fresh approach to food. So, we should think about the power of food to achieve simultaneous social, environmental and health outcomes.
