US food waste worth more than offshore drilling
US nourishment waste worth more than offshore drilling
30 July 2010
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MORE energy is wasted in the perfectly esculent food discarded by people in the US each year than is serviceable in oil and gas reserves off the nation's coastlines.
Recent estimates remind of that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to generate food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted reaped ground year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin tell that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules absent each year.
That's more than could be gained from various popular strategies to improve energy efficiency. It is also more than projections beneficial to how much energy the US could produce by making ethanol biofuel from grains.
Dairy foods and vegetables are the greatest culprits, by around 466 and 403 trillion kilojoules lost as waste each year, particularly (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es100310d).
The numbers are that may be liked to be conservative, the team says, as they are based in successi~ food-waste figures from the US Department of Agriculture from 1995 - the latest to be availed of. Since then food prices have dropped and waste is likely to have increased. What's more, the figures do not take into report waste on farms and from fishing. Estimates suggest between 8 and 23 per cent of fish caught worldwide are by-catch, and are ~times thrown dead or dying back into the sea.
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