Research project: how does Foodlab Brugge deal with food waste and is their solution sustainable?
Food Lab Brugge tries to solve all kinds of climate problems. For example, they encourage people to grow their own crops by making their own city garden. They also try to stop food waste, because this is also a big problem.
Food waste causes a lot of things:
- It wastes water. Water is needed for the production of food but when you throw away a big part of that food, you use all that essential water for nothing.
- Food waste that ends up in landfills produces a large amount of methane – a more powerful greenhouse gas than even CO2, they heat up the earth’s atmosphere causing global warming and climate change.
- Like water, oil is also needed for the production of food, so this is also wasted when the food has been thrown away.
- It takes up space because we need a place to throw the wasted food. Landfills are made but they take up a lot of space.
Food waste is clearly a bad thing and it needs to be slowed down. It doesn’t seem like it’s going away soon, but we sure can decrease its amount. Food Lab has a. few solutions to this problem or they try to educate people, but are they sustainably doing this? First of all, they give schools the chance to take measurements so students can also participate in a decrease in food waste. The organization already took some measurements in care centers and hospitals, and the results and solutions that were found are communicated right away to other care centers and hospitals so they can apply these solutions. They promote the app ‘ToGoodToGo’ more through retail, restaurants, and all the communication platforms of the city to stimulate restaurants to participate in this sustainable way to prevent food waste. They invest a lot in the prevention of food waste at homes but also in factories. At every town event, they try to attract as much attention as they can to food waste at the event. finally, they chart the surpluses of the city and OCMW.
I think that these solutions and/or ways of prevention are quite sustainable, and they are doing a good job bringing more attention to these problems. The greenhouse gasses that are produces by wasted food consists of 10% of all the greenhouses gasses in the atmosphere, so by buying the right amount of food and not throwing the surpluses away, you can help the planet and decrease little by little this kind of dumb way of warming up the planet.
Tine Buitink