Preventing food waste better strategy than turning it into biogas

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/nuos-pfw011116.php

Public Release: 12-Jan-2016
Preventing food waste better strategy than turning it into biogas
A first-ever effort to quantify the benefits of recycling food waste versus preventing it uses Norway as a case study and shows prevention is the best policy
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Turning your old banana peels and last night's leftovers into biogas sounds like a win-win situation for you and the environment: You don't have to feel guilty about having cooked too much pasta, and the use of biogas reduces CO2 emissions when it replaces fossil fuels.

But a new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) shows that it's not that simple.

In fact, encouraging people to work harder to cut food waste instead of collecting food waste and turning it into biogas cuts energy impacts more than biogas production and use, the researchers found.

Of equal importance, cutting food waste also helps cut the use of phosphorus, which is an increasingly scare but essential plant nutrient that is a key component of fertilizer. This matters because fully one-third of all food produced globally ends up as waste.

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