Kate Stubbs | Group Marketing Director | Interwaste | mail me |
A third of the food that is produced in South Africa is destined for landfill sites, which are fast reaching full capacity.
According to statistics, South Africa produces 10 million tonnes of food waste[1] every year and reportedly, has the largest proportion of food wastage in Africa. Yet, an average of 14 million people[2] go to bed hungry every night and 2,5 million of these are children.
The recent pandemic has fuelled the food crisis, by increasing the level of food insecurity in the country, placing an even larger emphasis on the management of such food waste, and making sure that – where it can’t be mitigated, it should be repurposed through useful innovation.
Hard facts
Food waste occurs early in the supply chain during production and handling, from the moment it is farmed all the way into retail stores and ultimately into consumer’s homes.
At production level, food waste results from not having enough labour to harvest an entire crop, or retailers placing a premium on quality and deciding to turn away produce that might not be ‘attractive’. This food that is produced, but never consumed, ends up in landfills including; fruits, vegetables and cereals which alone account for 70% of this waste[3].
Looking at these figures, we simply cannot afford the amount of food waste produced. This is especially given the fact that global warming, the pandemic, and the biofuel boom are now threatening to push the number of hungry individuals even higher.
On an even darker side of the food waste crisis, over and above the struggle to divert waste from landfills, food waste carries components that lead to the production of methane gas – a greenhouse gas that is even more potent than carbon dioxide.
Innovation is key
The waste management industry is…
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Read the full article by Kate Stubbs, Marketing Director, Interwaste, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the December/January 2020/21 edition of BusinessBrief.
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