Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 2

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part three is here.

So, I can tick off "renewable electricity" from my challenge. Let's have a look at the rest of the first email from Australian Ethical. What other personal actions can we take to live a 1.5c life, and do they match the science?

Number two on Australian Ethical's 1.5c lifestyle challenge is reducing food waste. This is a big one, and it's been at the forefront of Australia's mind ever since the ABC's War on Waste show aired back in 2017.

I'm going to get very concrete on this one; I'd like to think I do as much as is reasonable on this front, but I've never gotten specific. Am I actually doing enough? How do we stack up?

The average Australian, according to a report prepared for the Department of the Environment and Energy in 2018, produces 540kg of total waste, of which about 45% is recycled. That makes me ask - exactly how much is our two-person household producing?

This much.

This was about 300g of our household rubbish (yes, I got out the kitchen scales and weighed it). I might take out this bin every couple of days on average, so for simplicity's sake, let's say we produce 1kg of rubbish to landfill a week, or 52kg a year. Let's say the amount we throw away to landfill in bins at work or in public is the same again; 104kg total landfill a year. Much less than the 486kg an average household of two would produce. So far, pretty good!

The reycling weighs in a little more, at around 2kg. Again, I'd normally take this bag out every couple of days, so let's say that's 5kg a week, or 260kg a year.

Let's not forget the soft plastics! This bag is about two weeks worth for us (we don't recycle every single scrap that comes our way, only the things that wouldn't take a lot of effort to clean food from). That's 220g, or about 6kg a year. Our kerbside recycling service doesn't accept soft plastic, so this gets dropped off to collection bins at the supermarket. With extra work, we could probably recycle a little more, and shave another kilo or two off our landfill.

And last, the star of the show: our food waste to compost. It has the daily fruit peel and coffee grounds, as well as scraps from dinner. Since we moved into our current apartment we've been composting almost all our food scraps - first through saving them up and delivering to a neighbour I found on the ShareWaste app, and then, once the current pandemic brought that system to a halt, through our own Bokashi compost bin in the basement. This is a relatively small container for us - some nights after dinner there is an entire bowl full of scraps. It weighs 300g, so let's say on average we compost 2.5kg a week, or 130kg a year. If we weren't composting it, our household landfill waste would be more than doubled!

So my estimate of our total waste is an even 500kg a year, of which 53% percent is recycled, and 26% composted. Well under half as much as the average Australian produces, and composting the food waste and adding it to soil can increase soil carbon by 12% - actually drawing down some of the emissions involved in producing the food we eat or other sources. Not too shabby!

In the spirit of the challenge, though, I need to ask myself - how can we do better?

I am already on the composting, and usually shop to a list to avoid buying things I don't need. But Australian Ethical's tips include a couple of new ideas for me - especially storing carrots with the tops cut off and celery in water. I never seem to use a whole head of celery before at least some has gone to waste! And reading around elsewhere I've learnt that cucumbers should be stored at room temperature, not in the fridge - in fact, there's a good half a cucumber that went bad in the above photo of my compost. But citrus is the other way around - I've been keeping it in the fruit bowl when it should go in the fridge!

So, I've picked up a few practical tips to up my food storage game. Taking the challenge, I think we could reduce our waste to 90kg to landfill and 120kg composted a year.

What would happen to our greenhouse gas emissions if every Australian took this challenge, reduced their household waste from 560kg to 178kg?

The total waste generated at the local & council level in the 2018 DOE report was 13.8mt. With the per capita amount reduced threefold, that would come down to 4.38mt. This would result in a major reduction of landfill gas emissions - a major source of carbon dioxide as well as methane, which has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but a much higher impact over a shorter time-frame. It's hard to calculate how much of an impact landfill gas has overall, but the less rotting food waste, the less methane.

Quantifying food waste emissions, a 2017 study in the Journal of Cleaner Production has shown that it accounts for 6% of Australia's GHG emissions - 57,507 Gg CO2-eq. annually - as well as 9% of our water use.

Do these personal actions, cutting down food waste in the home, match the science for averting 1.5c of global warming?

As with buying renewable power, the shortest answer is yes. The longer answer is a little more complicated. Reading into the facts about food waste globally, we can see that, in developed nations, the share of food waste at the consumer end grows, while in the global south, more occurs from loss at the point of production or in the supply chain. A Food and Agriculture Office of the United Nations (FAO) report into food waste in 2013 found that, in North America and Oceania, food waste from consumers was 40%.

The top three bars are developed nations; section in aqua is waste by consumers

For Australia, the 2018 DOE report documents 16.1mt of agricultural waste which is managed on-site; this is more than all our current municipal landfill production, but it doesn't document how this waste is managed by the agriculture industry. The report also doesn't estimate the impact of food waste generated on-farm, and in many upstream food processing operations; however, worldwide, it is estimated that 50% of all fruit grown is wasted, and, as we saw in the War on Waste, much of that does occur by simply leaving food to rot. One of the chief climate impacts of the current pandemic has been a sudden spike in this kind of food waste, as closure of restaurants and large commercial purchasers have resulted in a sudden oversupply of that part of the market - even though there have been shortages on supermarket shelves!

Milk being tipped down the drain during the Covid-19 lockdowns

However, the food that reaches consumers is the most highly processed (and valuable) of all food waste. The 2017 study found that around half of all of Australia's food-waste emissions came from consumers - 2.8% of total food emissions - while 3.1% of total food emissions were from industrial food waste. Food eaten domestically accounts for 14.2% of total emissions, food exported 20.9% (and if the ratios are the same as in Australia, then at least a third of those emissions are going to food which ends up being wasted too).

And there is a double footprint for this wasted food; the remaining 59% of agricultural GHG emissions come from non-food products, such as the industrial processes required to farm and transport food. Composting can turn the 5.9% of greenhouse gas emissions from food waste into increased carbon in the soil; reducing food waste, and thus, total consumption, would allow these non-food emissions to never be spent in the first place.

There is one extra action we need to be taking to reduce food waste in line with the 1.5c challenge; after all, food consumtion isn't limited to the home. A 2016 RMIT study into food waste within restaurants, cafes and other food service businesses found that 40% of food they purchased ended up in the bin. So I'm also going to challenge myself to buy less takeaway food unless I know the business has good food waste practices in place.

So, the conclusion after reviewing the science is: in developed nations like Australia, the US and Europe, personal actions in the home to reduce food waste will definitely be necessary to keep ourselves under 1.5c of warming. Plan your meals, and don't be afraid to buy ugly food - you can make equally good stock or soups out of a bendy carrot or a skinny celery. There are limits; personal actions won't be able tackle some of big parts of the puzzle avoiding food waste - that wasted within food retail or on the farm, or avoiding producing food that isn't needed in the first place. In a society which is geared towards the generation of profit, choosing not to produce something profitable might sound crazy, but it is undoubtably what we need to do.

There are systemic actions, as well as individual ones, that will address these issues. For food waste within the hospitality industry, stronger laws or incentives are needed to ensure industry-wide changes. Right now, only 22% of businesses even measure the amount of food they waste.

When it comes to composting while living in an apartment, I've had to go to a lot of effort to get our systems up and running; municipal composting schemes can take a lot of the hard individual work out of capturing and sequestering these emissions. In my local area, Wollongong City Council is trialling municipal collection of Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) in a separate bin, to collectively prevent food waste emissions reaching the atmosphere.

There are also agricultural systems which can avoid a lot of the emissions in the first place. In our local area, Green Connect is a social enterprise which runs a permaculture farm, growing low-emissions food with minimal waste and delivering it straight to households in the local area. For people like us, where growing our own food and avoiding the whole supply chain is restricted by our available space, a local, sustainable model for urban agriculture is needed to avoid the food waste from industrial-scale agriculture.

In part three I'll finish with the first email - I promise! - and move on to the successive weeks of the campaign.