World making little progress on food waste, a big climate problem – The Peninsula

World making little progress on food waste, a big climate problem – The Peninsula

Every Thursday, California resident Richard Redmond takes a gallon-sized container of food scraps to the farmers market in the city of South Pasadena where it is collected and composted for use in gardens - an effort to reduce the amount of household waste he sends to landfill.

"It's just stunning," the web designer, who is in his 60s, said. "You can see how separating it just reduces the amount of garbage you are putting out."

Redmond's experience is a tiny window into a huge global problem, and not enough people are with him.

Every year, the world throws away around 931 million tons of food, most of it ending up in landfills, where it decomposes to produce around a tenth of the world's climate-warming gases, according to the United Nations.

That's a major challenge for countries tackling global warming at the COP27 climate summit underway in Egypt. Nations around the globe pledged in 2015 to halve food waste by 2030, but few are on track to do so, according to officials from the United Nations, sustainability watchdogs, and governments interviewed by Reuters.

"Eight years to go and we are nowhere close to reaching that goal," said Rosa Rolle, the team leader for food loss and