Latest News courtesy Worldwatch Institute Conserve Water Through Food Efficiency, Report SaysAs food prices escalate and water scarcity extends worldwide, the best solution to both issues would be a global reduction in wasted food, a new international report says.
Inefficient harvesting, transportation, storage, and packaging ruin 50 percent of food, according to the report, which was released last week by the Stockholm International Water Institute, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Water Management Institute. Add up how much food consumers simply throw away, especially in developed nations, and a whole lot of water is being wasted as well.
If government, industry, and civil society worked together to improve efficiency, wasted food could be cut in half by 2025, the report says. Water conservation recommendations included advanced technologies to capture more rainwater for agriculture, incentives for consumers to waste less food, and benchmark standards for industry to reduce water use in the entire food chain.
The water experts decided to target the food sector because agriculture requires 80 percent of the world's water resources. With populations set to grow in the coming years, and as developing nations eat more meat and dairy, water demand is expected to also surge. "It's likely we'll need two times the water by 2050 than what we need today. The challenge is to reduce the amount of water we need today," said David Molden, research director at Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute, in a press conference.
In the developing world, wasted food is mostly attributed to harsh climate conditions and crop-eating pests or organisms. Agricultural productivity could double, the report says, if farmers adopt existing water conservation technologies, such as small dams that supply rainwater run-off during times of drought.
Post-harvest food losses, which in Africa range from 25 to 50 percent, can be reduced through proper storage and transfer facilities, the report states. In addition to investments in silos, "processing of the products, to add value and keep freshness," would better preserve food resources, says Virginia-based Millennium Institute president Hans Herren, who is a World Food Prize laureate, when commenting on the report.
The report called for businesses to minimize wasted water during food processing and transportation by setting benchmark standards. Industry should also create labels that state how much water each product requires, said Molden, a report lead author. "If industry can demand a banana has a certain shape or a tomato has a certain color, why not say something about how much water it takes for farmers to produce those crops?" he said.
As the world suffers a burgeoning food crisis-grain prices rose 80 percent between 2005 and 2008-more attention is being dedicated to food waste. Waste in the developed world is particularly high. According to a 2001 study by the University of Arizona, Americans were throwing away three times as much food then as they were 20 years prior. A study released this month by the U.K. government said more food is being wasted there, too, costing the country 10 billion pounds ($19.6 billion) each year.
The international water report estimates that households in developed nations are wasting as much as a quarter of their food. "Very few people know about the water consumption related to the food that they eat," said Jan Lundqvist, a researcher with the Stockholm International Water Institute. "With increasing competition, increasing prices, it's now a very auspicious moment to try to push this type of message."
But Anders Berntell, the Stockholm International Water Institute's executive director, suggested that a public relations campaign may not suffice. "If a family can afford to throw away 25 percent of the food they eat, maybe the price is too low," he said.
Worldwatch Institute staff writer Ben Block can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.
U.S. Postal Service Begins E-Waste Recycling
In an effort to improve electronics recycling in the United States, the U.S. Postal Service is developing a free national collection program for small electronic items.
The program, now in a pilot stage, provides courtesy envelopes with pre-paid postage for patrons to deposit their unwanted digital cameras, printer cartridges, MP3 players, cell phones, and PDAs. International recycling company Clover Technologies Group processes the devices in its U.S. and Mexican facilities and then refurbishes and resells them if possible.
Now limited to select cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, the program may expand nationwide in the fall, and it eventually may accept a wider range of devices. "It doesn't cost us anything because [Clover] is paying for postage on the envelope," said Joanne Veto, a post office spokesperson. "For us, it's a really smart thing to do."
The program would be a de facto national electronic recycling program, the first for the United States. As the only industrialized nation not to ratify the 1989 Basel Convention, which requires its signatories to notify developing nations of incoming hazardous waste shipments, many environmentalists have criticized the country for its lack of action to reduce the international spread of electronic garbage, known as e-waste.
Americans discard at least 2 million tons of household electronics each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Less than 20 percent of that e-waste is recycled, although state-led initiatives are beginning to improve this recycling rate. Once recycled, however, e-waste is frequently sold to brokers who ship it to the developing world, where it is often dismantled with little regard for worker safety, then burned in the open air or dumped into bodies of water.
The postal service program made it a priority to avoid sending e-waste to developing countries. "Are all these shipped to non-approved third world countries? No. Not at all. That was a big concern of the contract," said Eric Martin, Clover's vice president of sales.
The postal service hired environmental consulting firm MBDC, which is led by "cradle-to-cradle" visionary William McDonough, to oversee Clover's procedures. As part of an audit of the company's environmental and occupational operations, MBDC made a pre-arranged visit to a Clover facility in Mexico where electronics are tested and dismantled. "Lots of people are very concerned about [e-waste], as we are. Everything we saw exceeds traditional global practices for responsible recycling," said Steve Bolton, an MBDC senior consultant. "Worker exposure was not an issue."
If a product is not recycled, it is shipped internationally to smelters that strip the item of its plastics and metals. The remaining waste - in some facilities as little as half of 1 percent of the total collected waste (by weight) - is burned as fuel. But even the best industry practices are incapable of removing all e-waste toxins. A typical cell phone, for example, contains hazardous lead, beryllium, chromium, arsenic, and flame retardants.
While a national program that refurbishes electronics is necessary, Sarah Westervelt, e-waste coordinator with the Basel Action Network, a hazardous waste watchdog group, said she remains critical of a program that encourages guiltless consumption of more electronics. "Consumers need to pay for hazardous waste to be managed," Westervelt said. "Free programs...allow the U.S. to continue externalizing the impacts on human health and the environment by not solving the problem upstream where it has to be solved."
But MBDC's Bolton said that if more electronics are recycled and returned to manufacturers, less electronics would need to be produced. "Ideally what we are trying to do is change design," he said.
While the United States is among the leaders of e-waste production, it is not alone. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the world produces 50 million tons of e-waste each year. But while the United States has encouraged manufacturers to reduce hazardous waste in their products on a voluntary basis, the European Union has made such reductions mandatory.
Worldwatch Institute staff writer Ben Block can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.
Population and Climate Change: Can We Talk?
This entry was originally posted to the Island Press blog, Island Interactive, at www.islandpress.org/blog. Robert will post periodic updates on population as he promotes his new book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.
ISTANBUL-The workshop I've been attending in this ancient city drew 31 people-ranging from a member of the British parliament to a Dutch women's rights advocate to a Hungarian environmentalist-to talk about whether it makes sense to bring population into the global debate on climate change.
Tough question, given that most of the responsibility for human-induced global warming stems from the past behavior of wealthier nations, most of whose populations are now growing relatively slowly or not at all. Workshop participants thus worried that taking on population would risk giving a pass to the disproportionately high carbon consumption these nations enjoy.
Many of these participants work to support a concept known by the unwieldy acronym of SRHR-for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Never heard of it? Neither have most people, and that makes the work of these dedicated professionals all the harder. They are promoting, after all, the right of all people to be sexually active when and as they choose, in safety and health, and to conceive a child only if and when they want. Should be pretty basic, but not much of the world prioritizes SRHR or strongly enough supports the health services needed to make it possible for all.
In More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, I mildly chide some in the SRHR community for eschewing a potential alliance with environmentalists who see the benefits of the concept in reducing unintended childbearing and thus slowing population growth. Disconcertingly, many on the SRHR side also see population as a purely "Southern"-or developing-country-issue. The reality is that unintended pregnancy is to varying degrees common in all countries, and it elevates the populations even of high-consuming nations above what they would be if all reproduction were intentional. The already populous United States, for example, grows faster demographically than some developing countries do-in part because nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended.
This workshop, at least, undermined the criticism I expressed in More. Though all my SRHR-focused colleagues worried-justifiably-about making too simplistic a link between population growth and climate change, almost all were prepared to accept that the link is real and important. Much of the debate was over whether or how to use it in advocacy aimed at improving access to reproductive health services in developing countries. Though no common statement emerged-this was merely a workshop to start a fresh dialogue-participants proposed exploring alliances with likeminded environmentalists in Europe. That's a step forward, especially given that concern about population growth has long been less common there than in North America.
The participation of two representatives from sub-Saharan Africa made this meeting even more exciting. Both had much to teach the rest of us about applying the connections between population, health, and the environment in communities. "Why don't we link these at the local level?" asked one participant, whose national government has endorsed the concept. "If we do, we're much more likely to solve the problems of poverty and energy."
I wish I could claim these encouraging outcomes came about because More, which treats the evolution of these linkages from the deep past to the near future, had been assigned reading on the planes to Istanbul. Not quite. But at least I was able to sell a few copies to new friends, whose reactions to the book will mean more to me than I would have predicted when I arrived.
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