전 세계 음식물 쓰레기 문제 해결: 솔루션 및 전략

### 음식물 쓰레기 문제 해결: 지역 솔루션을 통한 글로벌 과제
* 🍽 지난 15년 동안 연사는 먹지 않은 음식에 대한 대화로 인해 **식사 경험을 불편하게 만드는 음식물 쓰레기**에 대해 깊이 고민해 왔습니다.
* 🌍 전 세계적으로 매일 **10억 개의 식사가 낭비**되어 **1조 달러의 손실**과 항공 산업의 **5배에 달하는 온실가스 배출량**을 유발하는 등 문제의 규모는 어마어마합니다.
* 💨 매립지는 메탄 배출의 중요한 원인이며, **거의 60%가 썩은 음식물에서 발생**하지만 더 큰 문제는 궁극적으로 먹지 않고 버려지는 음식을 생산하는 데 사용되는 자원과 에너지에 있습니다.
* 📈 2050년까지 식량 생산량은 **50% 증가**해야 하며, 연구자들은 음식물 쓰레기를 줄이면 이 수요의 **20%를 충족**할 수 있다고 제안하며, 이는 매우 중요한 개입 분야입니다.
* 💡 Refed와 같은 단체는 음식물 쓰레기를 줄이기 위한 **80가지 이상의 해결책**을 제시하며 가장 효과적인 전략으로 **예방**을 강조했고, 그다음으로 **음식물 기부와 재활용 방법**을 강조했습니다.
* 🌞 혁신적인 사례로는 식품의 유통기한을 연장하기 위해 **태양열을 이용한 냉장 보관**을 제공하는 나이지리아의 콜드 허브와 기업이 잉여 식품을 할인된 가격에 판매할 수 있도록 도와주는 **앱 Too Good To Go**가 있습니다.
* 📊 상당한 영향력을 발휘할 수 있는 잠재력에도 불구하고 **미국에서만 효과적인 솔루션을 완전히 확장하는 데 약 180억 달러**가 필요하며 투자 대비 수익률이 **4 대 1로 예상되는 등 진전이 더디게 이루어지고 있습니다.**
* 🛒 개인 차원에서는 **현명한 쇼핑, 남은 음식 아껴 쓰기, 음식 냉동 보관, 창의적인 식재료 사용, 식품 라벨 이해도 향상, 식량 자원을 소중히 여기는 문화 조성** 등을 통해 음식물 쓰레기 문제를 해결할 수 있습니다.

음식물 쓰레기를 줄이는 것은 기후 변화와 식량 불안에 대처하는 간단하면서도 영향력 있는 해결책입니다.

For the past 15 years, I have been obsessed with the amount of food we waste. This makes me like the last person anyone wants to have dinner with. Inevitably, we're sitting there at the end of the meal, they're pushing food around their plate, they don't want to eat, and they're looking at me with some awkward excuse. And I say, Look, we can't eat our way out of this. This is a systems problem, and it's just way too big. How big? Well, picture a farm. It's the size of the entire United States. It uses three times as much water as the whole country, and it grows food all year long. And when harvested, it produces enough to fill 100 tractor trailers every minute, all year long. Those trucks then drive, fly, and float all over the world, except instead of going somewhere to be eaten, they go straight to a landfill where the food rots and produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Seems crazy, right? But that's effectively what we're doing from science experiments in the back of our

refrigerators to truckloads of product that are too close to some arbitrary expiration date. Globally, 1 billion meals go uneaten every single day. That's more than a meal per person for everyone on this planet who faces hunger, not to mention it's worth $1 trillion. And this whole ridiculous exercise has five times the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire aviation industry. Now, I know it's not obvious why food waste would have such a big climate impact, so let me explain. First, landfills. Landfills are the third largest source of methane in the US, and almost 60% of that methane is coming from food rotting. And as big as that is, it's dwarfed by the huge amount of energy and resources it takes to grow, harvest, transport, cool, cook food, and get it to our tables. And there's an even larger reason, and that's land use. We are looking ahead at a future in 2050 where it's projected we'll need about 50% more food than we had in 2010. And the question is, where is

that food going to come from? Are we going to cut down more rainforests to grow it, or are we going to use the food that we already have? Researchers estimate about 20% of that gap could be met by simply wasting less. When I first came across these numbers, I thought to myself, Gosh, this is the dumbest problem, and I wanted to know why. And it turns out there are all sorts of reasons that are very different for a strawberry farm in California than a market in Africa. But to give you a sense, here are a few. One is, uh, we don't measure it, so it's invisible. And as we all know, you don't manage what you don't measure. Also, in some places, food is relatively cheap, and the fees to throw it away are even cheaper. In other places, there's simply not the infrastructure to keep food cold. At times, we're worried about running out because, God forbid, I don't have enough stuffed mushrooms for everyone. And then at other times, we're worried about it making us sick when in

doubt, throw it out right, and then there's my seven-year-old son who begs me for a peanut butter jelly sandwich in the morning and comes home in the afternoon with his lunchbox completely untouched. And when I ask him what he ate for lunch, he says, Oh, I just talked. Now, I don't know what you do about that one, but overall, fixing food waste is not rocket science. It's really just about managing our food better, and it's solvable. There's a lot we can do in our own lives, and I'll get to that in a bit. Um, and there is a lot we can do across the food supply chain. At Refed, the organization where I work that is entirely dedicated to reducing the amount of food we waste, we have identified over 80 solutions that can help. Many of them are about prevention, about making sure that extra food does not occur in the first place, which is really our priority because prevention gives you the most bang for buck, both environmentally and financially. After that, we look at donating food and only

when that's been exhausted at feeding it to animals, composting it, or other recycling methods, there are so many successful examples out there of these solutions. One is a Nigerian company called Cold Hubs. They build solar-powered cold rooms in markets and farms and in places that don't have electricity. This extends shelf life dramatically, giving farmers more time to sell their product and therefore the ability to fetch a better price. They have saved thousands of tons of food so far, all while increasing farmer incomes by 60%. Another is Too Good To Go. It's an app that restaurants and grocery stores can use to discount product at the last minute before they might otherwise throw it out. Businesses get extra revenue, customers score a deal, and it has spread like wildfire, now in 17 countries. They saved over 100 million meals last year alone. From a different angle, there's Compass Group. It's the largest food service company in the world, and they are busy trying a lot of unsexy things like tracking their waste, experimenting with smaller containers on buffets, or

offering different size portions so that there's a smaller option if you say don't want a massive burrito. They've had a lot of success across the world, even decreasing waste up to 50% in some of their largest sites. These are just a few of the many solutions that are being tried and tested. Some are high-tech, some are low, many are win-win, and they're starting to work, but it's not enough, and it's not fast enough. Countries and companies from around the world have signed on to the UN sustainable development goal to cut food loss and waste in half by 2030. The impact of this goal would be enormous. It could avoid converting an area of land the size of Argentina into agriculture, saving one-third of the biodiversity that were projected to lose, and avoiding as many emissions as taking every single car in the US and Canada off the road. Wood yet, despite that incredible potential and some beacons of progress, overall we are barely moving the needle, and unlike the energy and

transportation sectors' attention and investment into food waste have been completely incommensurate with the opportunity it presents. There are so many solutions that are working out there. Let's inject the funds to really scale them. Cold hubs have been quite successful across Nigeria, but we need that solution in every market without electricity in every country. Waste tracking, last-minute sale apps, and other technologies are demonstrating they work. Let's provide incentives so that every food business has those at their fingertips. And we need investment to spark new innovation as well. At Refed, we estimate that for the U.S. alone, it could take $18 billion to fully scale solutions—a large investment. But when you are throwing hundreds of billions of food away, it actually can have a 4-to-1 return on that investment and other incredible benefits like providing 4 billion additional meals in food donations, creating 60,000 jobs, and huge water and greenhouse gas savings. And because so much of the action needs to happen across the food supply chain.

We need food businesses to engage and prioritize this work. They can double down on streamlining their operations and adopting new solutions as well. We also need policy. Ecuador, Japan, France, and 10 states across the US are just some of the places that have laws that restrict food from going to landfills. Instead, they provide infrastructure for composting or other recycling methods, and that compost then goes on to improve soils and even sequester carbon potentially. In addition, in some of those places, they're seeing an increase in food donations and even closer tracking of waste. These laws should be everywhere. And then there's us. One of my favorite bumper stickers says, Hate traffic? You are traffic. Well, we as consumers are actually the largest source of food going to waste, more than grocery stores, farms, or restaurants. And in the US, as a culture, we have also become really numb to it. You know, I could walk down the street and throw half a sandwich on a sidewalk, and people would think I was crazy. But if I throw that same half

sandwich in a garbage can. They wouldn't think much of it. We need to be less accepting as a culture of wasting food, and we need to take steps in our own lives as well. But before I get to that, let me tell you what not to do. You are going to go out into the world now, and you are going to see food being wasted everywhere, and you're going to want to, well, eat it. This is not what we're going for, people. Trust me, I have tried, and I don't think it's what you're going for either. Instead, here are five tips that you can try to manage your food better in your own lives. First, shopping. Shopping is really where we commit to food, and so we need to be careful not to overbuy. Old school things like shopping lists and meal planning really help, and let me be frozen pizza and takeout are totally legit as part of your plan. Next, as I tell my friends at the end of dinner, love your leftovers. They are the only true free lunch, and

when you get sick of them, you can move on to number three, which is freeze your food. Your freezer is like a magic pause button, and so many things can be frozen that you don't think of: bread, milk, cheese, and that half jar of pasta sauce you didn't use. Next, use it up. In my house, this looks like my husband eating that peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner, but for you, it might be whipping up a stir fry with whatever veggies are wilting in your fridge. Whatever it is, be sure to shop your fridge before you restock it. And lastly, learn your labels. Best Buy and enjoy by are really just guesstimates of when food is at its best; they're not an indication that it's gone bad. So be sure to use your senses before you toss things. These strategies are not earth-shattering; they're things that many of our parents and grandparents did, and you can be sure that my son is learning them as well. Because as we tackle this massive climate crisis,

reducing food waste really is the low-hanging fruit, but no matter how sustainably we grow that fruit, it's only a good use of resources and nutrition if we all do our part to make sure that it actually gets eaten. Thank you.

How to Turn the Tables on Food Waste | Dana Gunders | TED

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음식물 쓰레기는 매일 10억 개의 음식이 버려져 1조 달러의 손실과 상당한 온실가스 배출량을 유발하는 전 세계적인 위기입니다.

음식물 쓰레기 문제는 측정 부족, 저렴한 처리 비용, 부적절한 인프라 등 다양한 요인으로 인해 발생하고 있습니다.

음식물 쓰레기 문제를 해결하면 2050년까지 예상되는 식량 수요 증가의 20%를 충족할 수 있으므로 지속 가능한 미래를 위해 반드시 해결해야 할 중요한 문제입니다.

음식물 쓰레기 문제 해결: 실용적인 솔루션

음식물 쓰레기는 흔히 발생하는 문제로, 관리 부실과 과도한 음식 생산에서 비롯되는 경우가 많습니다.

Refed는 음식물 쓰레기를 줄이기 위한 80가지 이상의 솔루션을 찾아냈으며, 예방과 효율적인 식품 유통에 중점을 두고 있습니다.

성공적인 사례로는 태양열을 이용한 냉장실을 이용해 농부들의 유통기한을 연장하는 Cold Hubs와 음식물 쓰레기를 줄이기 위해 막바지 할인을 제공하는 앱인 Too Good To Go가 있습니다.

음식물 쓰레기 문제 해결: 솔루션과 기회

일부 지역에서는 더 적은 양의 음식을 제공함으로써 음식물 쓰레기를 최대 50%까지 줄일 수 있었습니다.

2030년까지 음식물 손실과 쓰레기를 절반으로 줄이겠다는 유엔의 목표는 토지 이용, 생물 다양성, 배출량에 상당한 긍정적인 영향을 미칠 수 있습니다.

이러한 잠재력에도 불구하고 진전은 더디게 이루어지고 있으며, 더 큰 영향을 미치기 위해서는 성공적인 솔루션에 대한 투자를 늘리고 규모를 확대할 필요가 있습니다.

음식물 쓰레기 문제 해결: 기업, 정책 및 소비자의 역할

식품 기업은 운영을 간소화하고 새로운 솔루션을 도입해 폐기물을 줄이는 데 우선순위를 둬야 합니다.

에콰도르, 일본, 미국 여러 주에서는 음식물 매립을 제한하고 퇴비화 및 재활용을 장려하는 법이 시행되면서 음식물 기부가 증가하고 폐기물 추적이 개선되고 있습니다.

소비자인 우리는 음식물 쓰레기의 가장 큰 배출원이며, 생활 속에서 음식물을 더 잘 관리하기 위해 사고방식을 바꾸고 조치를 취해야 합니다.

음식물 쓰레기를 줄이기 위한 간단한 전략

냉동 보관하는 것은 식품의 수명을 연장하는 좋은 방법이며, 빵이나 우유와 같은 많은 품목이 냉동실에 적합합니다.

시든 채소로 볶음 요리를 만드는 등 남은 식재료를 창의적으로 활용하면 낭비를 최소화할 수 있습니다.

식품 라벨을 이해하고 오감을 이용해 신선도를 판단하면 아직 멀쩡한 식품을 불필요하게 버리는 일를 방지할 수 있습니다.