While millions of people around the world go hungry, developed nations throw away enormous amounts of edible food: Around 88 million tons of food every year are wasted thus in the European Union alone, according to researchers. But some researchers are devising digital-tech solutions, using digital databases, analytics, and new apps to study the food-waste problem in depth and analyze ways to cut the waste.
ShareCity, a project started by Professor Anna Davies of the Geography, Environment, and Society Department at Trinity College in Dublin, is one initiative. ShareCity examined food-sharing programs in cities across Europe and, later, in cities in North America, Asia, and Australia. Davies and her team explored how the programs use digital apps and social media to gather food and distribute it to city residents in need, and how their work has impacted food sustainability, as well as how the programs could become more effective.
“As the project focuses on food sharing organizations that use (Internet communications technology), we could identify a digital trace of their activities from our desks and then use their public profiles to map and categorize activities,” she said.
She and her team mapped around 4,000 food-sharing programs and their outcomes in a massive online database. Later, they developed a free online toolkit, Share It, for food-sharing programs to measure and communicate their contributions to sustainability, combined with a new “manifesto” for sustainable food sharing. They crowdsourced much of the database formation, encouraging local programs to fill in their own entries and observations.
“We really needed to know from the grass roots what was going on. Revolutionizing the food system needs to be tailored to the local context,” Davies said.
Food waste is also an environmental sustainability issue, due to carbon dioxide being released from wasted food as it decomposes in landfills, warns the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The organization estimates that food waste is responsible for 8% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.
Another initiative, Model2Bio, focuses on recovering wasted food from farms. This includes liquid milk lost during butter or cheese production, vegetable and fruit produce lost during cultivation, and others.
Model2Bio uses software models to recreate cultivation methods and identify ways to save. Dr. Tamara Fernandez of CEIT Technology Centre in Spain, coordinator of the project, said that farms could recover 60% or more of the food they throw away.
“The entire value chain will be simulated providing recommendations from a holistic perspective, including technical, economic, environmental and social factors,” Fernandez said.