The latest annual impact report of the Global Foodbanking Network – a nonprofit that works with regional food banks in more than 50 countries to fight hunger – found that its member organizations provided 1.7 billion meals to more than 40 million people in 2023. According to the nonprofit, this redistribution of food, much of which was recycled from farms or wholesale produce markets, mitigated an estimated 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
These numbers reflect an ongoing, high demand for food banks. Last year, the Global Foodbanking Network, or GFN, served almost as many people as it did in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic skyrocketed food insecurity. In order to respond to this urgent need in their communities, many of GFN’s member organizations have invested in agricultural recycling and are trying to save food from farmers before it is thrown away.
Their efforts show how food banks can serve the dual purpose of addressing hunger and protecting the environment. By intercepting perfectly good, edible food before it ends up in the landfill, food banks help mitigate harmful greenhouse gas emissions created by food loss and waste.
“There’s always food that goes to unnecessary waste,” said Emily Broad Leib, the founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, who previously worked with GFN but was not involved in the recent study. All that unnecessary waste means “there is a constant need to scale up food banks and food recycling operations,” Broad Leib added.
A recent analysis of the United Nations Environment Program estimates that 13 percent of food will be lost en route from producers to retailers in 2022. After that, 19 percent was wasted by retailers, restaurants and households. The world’s households alone waste 1 billion meals every day. The amount of food wasted around the world has been shockingly high for years: In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, of the United Nations released a study that suggested about one third of food produced worldwide is never eaten.
Food waste on this scale comes with massive planetary impacts. When food is not eaten, all the emissions associated with its growth, transport and processing are rendered unnecessary. Also, when food rots in landfills, release it methanea greenhouse gas that is approximately 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported this 58 percent of methane emissions of US landfills comes from food waste. Globally, food loss and waste is estimated to be responsible for 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissionsand reducing it is essential for achieving climate goals.
Food banks can play a special role in that reduction by rescuing more food before it is lost and redirecting it to people in need.
Christoph Soeder / photo alliance via Getty Images
“Our members have been building their redistribution capacity,” said Lisa Moon, the president and CEO of GFN. “I think that was our first challenge in the face of this increasing need: How do we as an organization capture more supply?”
To do this, food banks within GFN member organizations have coordinated more closely with farmers to divert excess food from landfills. GFN defines surplus food as food from commercial streams that has been grown for human consumption but cannot be sold for one reason or another. So-called “ugly” produce – misshapen food that never makes it to the grocery store because of its appearance – falls into this category.
Some of this redirection actually looks like cutting out food banks as the middleman. Moon gives the example of a food bank receiving a call from a farmer with excess green beans. Instead of traveling to the farm to pick them up, traveling back to the food bank’s distribution center, storing the green beans, and making people wait for the next distribution day to pick them up, the food bank in question might just reach out to beneficiaries in the area (think: soup kitchens) to inform them of how many green beans are available and where so they can pick them up. GFN refers to this as “virtual food banking” because of how members use technological platforms to match farmers with beneficiaries, rather than physically moving the products themselves.
The result of this emphasis on agricultural recycling is that fruits and vegetables now account for the largest portion – 40 percent – of food redistributed by GFN members by volume. Moon says the organization is “just scratching the surface” of possibilities for recycling fresh produce.
To calculate that 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were mitigated through these efforts, GFN used the Food Loss and Waste Protocol developed by the World Resources Institute. This framework takes into account a number of things, including where food is recycled would have ended up was it not intercepted from the waste stream. These waste destinations can be landfills, but also include animal feed, compost and anaerobic digesters (a waste management technology that converts organic waste biogas – but it can go together its own emissions problems). Moon acknowledged that GFN does not know in every case what would happen to the excess food if it is not rescued by a food bank – but pointed out that most of the places where the network works do not have a robust circular economy for food does not have.
Broad Leib, the Harvard Law food policy expert, described GFN’s estimate of mitigated carbon dioxide equivalent as “a good proxy for impact.” While other waste destinations are possible, “we also know that the vast majority of wasted food worldwide goes to landfills,” she said. “I think their estimate is probably not far off from actual emissions being avoided.”
