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This study aims to identify global food loss and preventative methods for future food waste.

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How New York Is Turning FoodWaste Into Compost and Gas

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How New York Is Turning FoodWaste Into Compost and Gas

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NY Times talks about New York's efforts in the fight against green house emission. They discuss the ways compost can be turned into reusable clean energy.

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New Yorkers already have blue and green bins for recycling glass, metal, paper and plastic. But now brown bins for organic waste are starting to appear all over the city. These plastic totems are part of the city's multimillion-dollar campaign to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on landfills, and to turn food scraps and yard waste into compost and, soon, clean energy.

In the 19th century, the city had a simple method for dealing with organic rubbish: It enlisted scavenging swine to nose through the gutters for leftovers. Now, the city is employing the primal chemistry of decay.

About 14 million tons of waste are thrown out each year. It costs the city almost $400 million annually just to ship what it collects from homes, schools and government buildings (by rail, barge or truck) to incinerators or landfills as far away as South Carolina. (In addition, dozens of private companies put trucks on the road to take away refuse from office buildings and businesses.)

The largest single portion of the trash heap is organics, or things that were once living. That apple core, that untouched macaroni salad, that slice of pizza and the greasy paper plate it was served on are heavy with moisture, which makes shipping expensive. As they decompose, they release methane, a greenhouse gas.

Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared food waste the " final recycling frontier " when his administration began its ambitious curbside program in 2013 as the linchpin of the city's sustainability goals.

That effort has continued under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the project is on the verge of an expansion that could change how all New Yorkers deal with refuse, and test the city's ability to manage organic materials on a scale never seen in the United States.

Smaller cities like Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; and Seattle all have mandatory programs. But the population of those three places combined is smaller than Brooklyn or Queens alone.

New York's residential organics collection program is already the largest in the country: More than a million residents in parts of all five boroughs have curbside service. By the end of next year, officials say, all city residents will have a way to recycle their food scraps and other leaf and yard waste.

On her first day as sanitation commissioner, in 2014, Kathryn Garcia said that she wanted her agency to lead the nation in organics recycling. While businesses are gearing up to use machinery and technologies that will turn food waste into new products, the department has to make sure there are enough facilities (and willing neighbors) to accommodate and sort tens of thousands of tons of putrescible materials.

So how will it work?

Picking Up
New York's dense, vertical landscape makes collection a labyrinthine endeavor. Creating all-new routes just to fetch organics would be expensive and snarl traffic. The city is finding ways to modify existing routes, using trucks with separate compartments for trash and organics.

"Without the citizenry of New York, I don't think our team could have gotten our program off the ground," said Ron Gonen, the city's deputy commissioner of recycling and sustainability during the Bloomberg administration.

To persuade skeptical city officials that New Yorkers would participate, he pointed to the tens of thousands of people already hauling leftovers to collection points in vacant lots, community gardens and farmers' markets, set up by pioneering composters and groups like the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

In 2013, the city began handing out countertop buckets and large outdoor rolling bins made with thick, chew-resistant plastic and raccoon-proof lids to about 3,000 households on Staten Island.

Last year, about 23,000 tons of orange peels, apple cores and other organic materials were collected from about 300,000 households, 722 schools, agencies and institutions and 80 drop-off points, according to the city. That means about 2 percent of the organic waste collected by the city was diverted from landfills.

The program was adopted in neighborhoods like Park Slope, Brooklyn, with little resistance. But wooing the managers of tall buildings hasn't been as easy. The trash rooms of large buildings require reorganization and new routines to accommodate organics collection. Porters must carry extra bins to the curb. So far, 774 apartment buildings have signed up, a small fraction of the city's high-rises.

Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, the 110-building complex on the East Side of Manhattan that is home to 27,000 people, has signed on. Its management company leveraged the enthusiasm of committed composters and campaigned residents with text messages and emails emphasizing that pest activity would not increase.

Not everyone will have trucks pick up their food scraps or dead leaves at the curbside by the end of next year, especially those in densely populated neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Bronx, unless their building owners apply for the program. To reach those sections, the city is expanding the number of drop-off sites, especially in high-traffic areas near subway stations. It is also experimenting with bin-sharing programs and partnerships with libraries and local businesses willing to adopt containers.

Making Compost
The composting process employs billions of microorganisms to break down organics into the essential component of soil called humus. Grass clippings, food scraps and coffee grounds ("greens") are mixed with dry leaves or branches ("browns"), spread into piles and churned by hand or machine to promote decay. It can take six to nine months for the materials to decompose completely. Compost is known to farmers as "black gold" because it helps plants take root and prevents soil erosion.

The earth has been recycling organics for billions of years. But according to Jean Bonhotal, the director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute, humans have interrupted that circular system by entombing valuable nutrients in landfills and relying on chemical fertilizers.

"Our soils, really, in the whole world, are pretty trashed," Ms. Bonhotal said.

Paradoxically, for nature to retake its course, human intervention is required. After organics are tossed in the back of a city truck, they are driven to a waste transfer station operated by a private company. (Staten Island's scraps are taken directly to a composting site in Fresh Kills.) The compostables, which often arrive in plastic bags, are then separated from contaminants before being transported to a composting site or an anaerobic digestion facility, ideally no more than 100 miles away.

Robert Buffolino, the general manager at American Recycling Management, one of six companies paid by the city to manage the bulk of the compostables, has seen all manner of inorganic material come through: pencils, water bottles, phones, even a computer. Schools especially, he said, need to educate their students about what goes in the bin.

"They still have some work to do with that," he said.

Even utensils and plates marketed as "biodegradable" don't always break down as advertised. Instead of using fingers and rakes to remove unwanted materials, the city now uses expensive machines to pulverize the material and separate plastics with paddles and centrifuges.

Composting facilities may reject a whole truckload if it isn't clean enough, sending it to a landfill. There is also the critical question of whether there are enough facilities to process the waste, clean or not.

"There's definitely enough capacity for what's collected now," Ms. Garcia, the sanitation commissioner, said.

"The challenge is moving the program rapidly, but not overwhelming the processing capacity in the region," she added. "The state does not have unlimited capacity yet."

The city has only two composting sites that can handle food waste. One is at the jail complex on Rikers Island, and the other is in Fresh Kills, what used to be city's largest dumping ground.

The majority of the city's organics will be sent to private facilities in the region. Hauling companies pay composting sites a so-called tipping fee to take in and process materials. For now, about 10 facilities take in the city's scraps, and the Sanitation Department is meeting with other sites that could assist in the coming year.

Finding enough land far enough from neighbors but close enough to the city is one challenge. And many private composting sites are accustomed to processing farm waste like rotting vegetables, which is somewhat different from handling the Chinese takeout and fettuccine Alfredo that city dwellers toss.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation, which regulates organic recycling facilities, said that by the end of the year, new regulations would allow existing facilities to take in more food scraps.

While the government is counting on private industry to build and operate the processing infrastructure, businesses are reluctant to go into debt without an assured flow of material, said Brian Fleury, a vice president of WeCare Organics, which manages the city's Staten Island composting site.

"They can't guarantee a voluntary program," Mr. Fleury said.

McEnroe Organic Farm in the Hudson Valley, about 100 miles north of the city, is the largest recipient of the city's feedstock. More than half of the approximately 16,000 cubic yards of finished compost it makes a year is reused on its own crop beds, and the rest is sold for about $48 per cubic yard to farmers and home gardening stores on the East Coast.

The challenges ahead are similar to the ones that recyclers of metals, glass and plastic have confronted over the past three decades: Will residents properly sort their food scraps? Can processors sufficiently clean up what is collected? And will compost be treated as a valuable commodity?

Making Biogas
Like the human stomach, anaerobic digestion facilities use microbes to break down organics into biogas, which is primarily methane and carbon dioxide. The same way humans chew to accelerate digestion, machines grind organics into a slurry the consistency of a milkshake, which is fed into a large, airtight tank heated to about 100 degrees, called a digester. What comes out are biogas and a mix of water and solids. The biogas must be refined before it can be put into a utility's natural gas pipeline, or used as fuel for trucks and buses. It can also be converted to electricity and heat to power homes and businesses.

It might sound like Doc Brown's harebrained scheme to power his DeLorean time machine in "Back to the Future," but using leftovers to create energy is now commonplace in Europe. And cities across the United States are following suit, including New York.

Brian Paganini, a vice president of Quantum Biopower, which recently opened a $14 million facility in Southington, Conn., said anaerobic digestion was "the next revolution in recycling."

Quantum is one of several companies looking at the city's feedstock.

One upside is that digesters occupy a much smaller footprint than composting fields. But the initial capital costs are much greater. The remaining solids must also be processed or discarded. And like human stomachs, digesters can get upset. It can take several months to calibrate the mix of microorganisms that will break down organics.

"You can't feed a baby French fries on Day 1," Mr. Paganini said.

Instead of relying on private developers to build new facilities for the digesters, cities are adapting existing infrastructure: wastewater treatment facilities.

In a testing program that began in 2012, the city is adding commercial food waste to some of the tanks at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, to generate higher levels of methane gas, a byproduct of wastewater treatment.

Since the pilot began, the plant's biogas production has increased by as much as 17 percent, according to the city's Department of Environmental Protection.

For now, most of that biogas is simply burned off, or flared, though some helps heat the plant's boilers, said Pam Elardo, a deputy commissioner for the department. (While wasteful, excess methane must be flared for safety reasons and to reduce fugitive methane, a greenhouse gas.)

To create usable methane, the utility National Grid plans to build a $30 million system for the plant, which will essentially squeeze out water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as filter out chemicals and conditioners flushed into the sewer system.

A small group of National Grid customers could be warming their homes with gas made from the plant by the first cold day near the end of next year, the company said.

For now, only a small portion of the city's food waste is converted into biogas. But there may come a day when sanitation vehicles pick up our leftovers, drive to one of the city's 14 wastewater treatment plants, process the organics for digestion, then drive a few yards to refuel with compressed gas.

"It would save the city millions of dollars annually," Mr. Gonen, the former deputy sanitation commissioner, said. "In addition, from a resiliency standpoint, it's an opportunity to cleanly generate a portion of the city's fuel and energy needs."

Mr. Gonen, who now runs an investment fund called Closed Loop Partners, estimates that when the city's program scales up, anaerobic digestion will cost around $35 to $50 per ton, which is more than composting but about half the average price of burying a ton of city waste in landfills.

What's Next?

In the year ahead, the department has earmarked $27.7 million to distribute new bins, educate residents and pick up and transport materials.

"Organics processing is not free," Ms. Garcia said. But when looking at long-term costs to transport and bury trash, she said, "we think this is a much better model."

One of the most expensive pieces is collection: Each truck must have two workers, no matter how many pounds of organics it carries. Increasing residential participation, which is still relatively low, will be critical to making the overall system more cost-efficient.

One way to do that is to make the program compulsory. The city's metals, glass and plastic recycling program was mandatory when it was rolled out in 1989. Ms. Garcia intends to keep this program voluntary until more New Yorkers are involved.

The city is also focusing on the commercial sector. So far, about 300 establishments including restaurants, food manufacturers, hotels and stadiums are now required by law to separate organics. More will be added as processing capacity increases.

Other states, like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, are phasing in bans on the burial of organics in landfills, beginning with the refuse of large businesses. (Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo proposed similar legislation, which stalled in the New York Legislature.)

In addition to political momentum, social forces could drive the program. Thanks to national campaigns focused on f ood waste prevention by nonprofits like ReFED and the Natural Resources Defense Council, people today are increasingly conscious about how their food is grown, and where it ends up. About 40 percent of all of food produced in the United States ends up in the garbage, according to a study by ReFED.

"I'm extremely optimistic about where this program is going," Ms. Garcia said. Still, she said, "We have a lot to learn."

Q. and A.
What Counts as Compostable?
The motto is, "If it grows, it goes." The Sanitation Department's guide has a few tips for what to include. Some neighborhood drop-off sites that process food scraps may not take meat or dairy because they don't break down as readily and can attract rats.
What Do I Do if I Have a Tiny Kitchen?
The city has a small plastic caddy for your countertop, but you can put scraps in any lidded container or bag and store it in the freezer.
When Will I Receive a Brown Bin?
Check the department's website to find out when your neighborhood will get service. You may not automatically receive a bin if you live in a large building, or above a store. Buildings with 10 or more units, nonprofits and residences along commercial strips can apply for service. To keep bins clean, the city recommends using compostable liners. If stolen or damaged, the city will replace or repair them.
Will I Be Fined if I Do It Wrong?
Not yet. For now, the program is voluntary for residents. "We're not serving enough of the population to require some and not all New Yorkers do this," Ms. Garcia said.
Will This Create a Where Can I Drop Off My Food Scraps? Rat Infestation? Where Can I Buy Compost?
The bottom of the bin is actually a few inches off the ground (out of the smell range of rats) and designed to discourage burrowing animals. Because they're made of thick plastic, it's more likely that rodents would chew through a trash bag sitting on the curb, said Andrew Hoyles, who manages the city's outreach teams.

You can drop off scraps at about 100 sites run by the city, or one of its partner organizations like GrowNYC or The Compost Project. There are more than 200 community operations that will also process food scraps or yard waste locally.

The city plans to hold several events to give away compost. But you can go to nyc.gov/getcompost to make a request. You can also buy locally produced compost from several community composting groups, like the Lower East Side Ecology Center or Big Reuse.

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How New York Is Turning Food Waste Into Compost and Gas

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New Yorkers already have blue and green bins for recycling glass, metal, paper and plastic. But now brown bins for organic waste are starting to appear all over the city. These plastic totems are part of the city's multimillion-dollar campaign to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on landfills, and to turn food scraps and yard waste into compost and, soon, clean energy.

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Harvard University discusses the food industries expiration date policies in this short film created to bring awareness to food waste.

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Every year, 40% of the food produced in the United States goes uneaten, leading to 160 billion pounds of wasted food in our landfills.

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This information gives statistical data of food waste and its effects on climate change.

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How Reducing Food Waste Could Ease Climate Change

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How Reducing Food Waste Could Ease Climate Change

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Roff Smith, for National Geographic, talks about the implications of food waste and what it means to consumers.

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More than a third of all of the food that's produced on our planet never reaches a table. It's either spoiled in transit or thrown out by consumers in wealthier countries, who typically buy too much and toss the excess. This works out to roughly 1.3 billion tons of food, worth nearly $1 trillion at retail prices.

Aside from the social, economic, and moral implications of that waste-in a world where an estimated 805 million people go to bed hungry each night-the environmental cost of producing all that food, for nothing, is staggering. (Read more about causes and potential solutions to the problem of food waste.)

The water wastage alone would be the equivalent of the entire annual flow of the Volga-Europe's largest river- according to a UN report. The energy that goes into the production, harvesting, transporting, and packaging of that wasted food, meanwhile, generates more than 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. If food waste were a country, it would be the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the U.S. and China. ( Read about the author who's waging a war against global food waste.)

John Mandyck, the chief sustainability officer of United Technologies, a U.S.-based engineering and refrigerated transport firm, says that food waste can be mitigated by improving the "cold chain," which comprises refrigerated transport and storage facilities. His company hosted the first World Cold Chain Summit in London last November. This week, Mandyck is in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Summit, where he's talking up the problem of food waste. He answered questions via e-mail from Davos.
Why does the issue of food waste seem to slip below the radar?
We tend to take our food for granted in the developed world. Since food is so plentiful, we aren't aware of the tremendous amount that's wasted and the impact that has on world hunger, political stability, the environment, and climate change. Yet when it comes to looking for ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions, food wastage is a relatively easy fix-the low-hanging fruit, so to speak-and it is literally rotting on our tables. It doesn't require any new technology, just more efficient use of what we already have. ( Read about the effort to rethink "use by" labels on food.)
Food could hardly be a more important industry to humanity. Every living thing on the planet depends upon it. And yet a third of what we produce never reaches the table. Why are we so inefficient?
Food wastage comes in two forms. About one-third occurs at the consumer level, where we buy too much and throw it away. Approximately two-thirds happens at the production and distribution level. For example, a lot of food rots in fields, or is lost as a result of poor transportation networks, or spoils in markets that lack proper preservation techniques. We can make a big difference by transporting and storing our food under proper temperature conditions to extend food supplies.
What can we do better? Where should industry's and governments' focus be on reducing food wastage?
Governments can enact food safety standards where they don't exist. This will jump-start the system to properly transport and store perishable foods like meat, fish, dairy, and produce. It will also ensure that more food is safe for consumption. Industry has a role to innovate and scale technologies so they are affordable in the developing economies. Industry can also serve a useful role by raising awareness of the impacts of food wastage.
What would be the dividends?
The dividends of avoiding food waste can be historic. We produce enough food to feed everyone on our planet today and the 2.5 billion more people to come in the next 35 years. We have to waste less to feed more. Farming already uses 38 percent of our ice-free land, compared to just 2 percent for cities, and uses 70 percent of our fresh water. We can't keep growing more food, and continuing to waste as much, to feed more people. The environmental dividends are no less significant: lower climate emissions from a major source and more water efficiency to combat growing water scarcity.
And at the consumer level?
We can all take small steps that will accumulate to make a meaningful difference. Let's buy just the food we need so we throw away less. Let's accept that produce can be top quality and delicious even if it has a slight imperfection in appearance. Let's bring meals home that we don't finish in restaurants. Small changes will yield big results.
What exactly is the "cold chain"?
The cold chain is the network that transports and stores perishable foods like meat, fish, dairy, and produce under proper temperature conditions to avoid spoilage. It involves technologies like marine container refrigeration, truck-trailer refrigeration, cold storage warehouses and rooms, and food retail display cases.
Are there clever new technologies that could help improve that chain?
There are effective and affordable technologies to track and monitor food in transit to ensure it's being maintained within the proper temperature parameters. It's a proactive way to prevent spoilage at the distribution level. New entry-tier technologies are also being deployed to provide affordable truck refrigeration units for emerging markets like India. On top of that, environmental technologies like the use of natural refrigerants and energy-efficient technologies are lowering the environmental footprint of the cold chain.
How does one make these cold-chain technologies affordable in the poorest countries, where often the need is greatest?
We have to think differently. We can't take today's sophisticated refrigerated truck-trailer systems available in the U.S. and Europe and expect they can be immediately adopted in emerging countries. In many cases, the roads in these countries can't accommodate large truck systems, the technical skill is not yet present to support the systems, and the economy can't yet afford the systems. So we have to scale the technology to the local needs-smaller systems, fewer features, more affordable.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

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How Reducing Food Waste Could Ease Climate Change

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More than a third of all of the food that's produced on our planet never reaches a table. It's either spoiled in transit or thrown out by consumers in wealthier countries, who typically buy too much and toss the excess. This works out to roughly 1.3 billion tons of food, worth nearly $1 trillion at retail prices.

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One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted: What Can Be Done

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One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted: What Can Be Done

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The implications of food waste are a problem most do not want to face. National Geographic sheds light the problem food waste is causing globally.

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It's lettuce season in the Salinas Valley, a carrot-shaped lowland in the central California region that produces about 70 percent of the leafy greens sold in U.S. retail markets. On a typically foggy morning, tractor trailers stuffed with salad stream from valley processing plants to points north, south, and east.

Meanwhile, a single roll-off truck trundles into the Sun Street Transfer Station, not far from downtown Salinas. The driver pauses atop a scale, then positions his battered Dumpster over a concrete pad. A flick of a lever, a pneumatic whoosh, and 20 cubic yards of lettuce and spinach tumble onto the ground. Packaged in plastic boxes and bags, the greens-piled seven feet high-appear to be in the pink of health: dewy, crisp, and unblemished. The misdemeanor for which they'll soon be consigned to a landfill? Their containers have been improperly filled, labeled, sealed, or cut.

Anyone would say this heap-the size of two African elephants-represents a tremendous, even criminal, waste. But this is nothing. Over the course of the day, the transfer station will receive another 10 to 20 loads of perfectly edible vegetables originating from nearby grower-packers. Between April and November, the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority landfills between four and eight million pounds of vegetables fresh from the fields. And that's just one transfer station out of the many that serve California's agricultural valleys.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which keeps tabs on what's grown and eaten around the globe, estimates that one-third of food produced for human consumption worldwide is annually lost or wasted along the chain that stretches from farms to processing plants, marketplaces, retailers, food-service operations, and our collective kitchens.

At 2.8 trillion pounds, that's enough sustenance to feed three billion people. In the United States, the waste is even more egregious: More than 30 percent of our food, valued at $162 billion annually, isn't eaten. Pile all that food on a football field and the layers would form a putrefying casserole miles high.

Careful readers may wonder: What's the difference between food loss and food waste? Waste occurs toward the back end of the food chain, at the retail and consumer level. In general, the richer the nation, the higher its per capita rate of waste. Loss, on the other hand, mostly occurs at the front of the food chain-during production, postharvest, and processing-and it's far less prevalent in industrialized nations than in the developing world, which tends to lack the infrastructure to deliver all of its food, in decent shape, to consumers eager to eat it.

Take Africa, for example. Without adequate storage facilities and transportation, 10 to 20 percent of the continent's sub-Saharan grain succumbs to enemies such as mold, insects, and rodents. That's four billion dollars' worth of food, enough to nourish 48 million people for a year. In the absence of refrigeration, dairy products sour and fish ooze. Without the capacity to pickle, can, dry, or bottle foods, surpluses of perishables like okra, mangoes, and cabbage can't be converted into shelf-stable foods. Bad road and rail conditions slow tomatoes' trek from farm to market, poorly packed fruit gets jostled into mush, vegetables wilt and rot for lack of shade and cooling. Facing similar challenges, India loses an estimated 35 to 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables.

In developed nations, hyperefficient farming practices, plenty of refrigeration, and top-notch transportation, storage, and communications ensure that most of the food we grow makes it to the retail level (the piles at the Sun Street Transfer Station notwithstanding). But things go rapidly south from there. According to the FAO, industrialized nations waste 1.5 trillion pounds of food a year, an amount almost equal to the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.

Calories are wasted at restaurants that serve overly large portions or fashion elaborate buffets-where diners help themselves to excessive portions and employees dump everything at closing time, even if it's been under the sneeze guard for only five minutes.

Though they do their best to hide it from public view, American food retailers typically experience in-store losses of 43 billion pounds of food a year. Store managers routinely overorder, for fear of running out of a particular product, losing customers, and consequently, their jobs. Entire shelves of perfectly edible shell peas are transferred into Dumpsters to make room for incoming ones; pallets of zucchini are rejected because they curve too much. If the affected wholesaler can't quickly find another market nearby (a discount chain that tolerates curvy vegetables, for example, or a food bank with refrigerated space), the load will be dumped. The British supermarket chain Tesco, which publicly committed to reducing waste in recent years, still admitted to throwing out more than 110 million pounds of food within their U.K. stores during the latest fiscal year.

Consumers are also complicit: We overbuy because relatively cheap and seductively packaged food is available at nearly every turn. We store food improperly; we take "use by" dates literally, though such stamps were designed to communicate peak freshness and have nothing to do with food safety. We forget to eat our leftovers, we leave our doggy bags in restaurants, and we suffer little or no consequence for scraping edible food into a bin.

No matter where waste occurs, it represents a lost opportunity to feed people. And, on the home front, it's costing us plenty: An American family of four trashes an average $1,484 worth of edible food a year. Squandering food also squanders the vast quantities of fuel, agricultural chemicals, water, land, and labor needed to produce it. According to Jonathan Bloom, author ofAmerican Wasteland, the production of uneaten food in the U.S. gobbles 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Globally, it guzzles the annual flow of the Volga, Europe's longest river.

In 2007 a collective 3.5 billion acres of land, an area significantly larger than Canada, was plowed to grow food-or to support livestock and dairy production-that no one would eat. To compound the environmental insult, food buried in the airless confines of dumps generates methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. If global food waste were a country, it would be the third largest generator of greenhouse gases in the world behind China and the United States.

Eating the food we produce seems like a no-brainer-a prerequisite of a sustainable food system. But hard-nosed economics thwarts simple fixes. It's no secret that the more yogurt consumers toss after reading its "use by" date, the more yogurt retailers can sell. For supermarkets, it may make more sense to tip surplus apples into Dumpsters than to lower their price, which would undercut sales of full-priced apples. Loath to come up short on supermarket contracts, big commercial growers typically overplant by 10 percent.

Farmers will also leave entire blocks of fruit or vegetables in orchards and fields for fear of flooding the market and depressing prices. Sometimes the cost of labor to harvest a crop exceeds the value of selling it: Known as a walk by, the acreage is plowed under. Yes, superior technology moves ever more food to market, but the resulting abundance-which keeps food prices low-only encourages more waste. As one Virginia farmer told me, gazing over 60 acres of broccoli he planned to disk under, "Even if I could get all this food to market, do you think there are enough mouths to eat it before it starts to rot?"

If there's anything good about the shocking scale of global food waste, it's the huge number of opportunities it presents for improvement. In developing nations, for example, aid organizations are providing small-scale farmers with storage bins and multilayer grain sacks, tools for drying and preserving vegetables and fruits, and low-tech equipment for cooling and packing produce-with losses shrinking, in the example of tomatoes in Afghanistan, from 50 percent to 5 percent.

Farmers are also learning how to cure or pack their harvest for longer storage. "The farmers we work with in East Africa haven't historically had a surplus-they ate everything they grew within three months," said Stephanie Hanson, senior vice president of policy and partnerships for the Africa-based One Acre Fund. "Now that they're able to grow more food, they need to learn new storage practices."

After the FAO gave 18,000 small metal silos to farmers in Afghanistan, loss of cereal grains and grain legumes dropped from 15 to 20 percent to less than 2 percent. Storing grain also potentially allows farmers to sell crops for two or three times the price at harvest, when markets are saturated.

In the U.S., scrutiny of food waste from the media, government agencies, and environmental groups has pushed a growing number of restaurants to start measuring what they toss, a crucial first step in curtailing loss. Dismayed by the amount of food their customers waste, TGI Friday's now offers smaller portions. By removing trays from their cafeterias, scores of U.S. colleges have cut by 25 to 30 percent the amount of food that students take, and waste. Overseas, some restaurants have even experimented with banning diners for leaving food on their plate or charging them extra.

Farther up the food chain, orchardists are working with juice companies and packers to develop more secondary markets for less-than-perfect fruit. Engineers at Georgia Tech's Integrated Food Chain Center have devised sensors to be placed on produce in the field, in the hopes that knowing their strawberries' temperature, humidity, and travel history will help store managers better track and promote this perishable stock.

Innovation is saving eggs too. For years, Walmart found it expedient to dump an entire carton of eggs if one was cracked, rather than replacing the egg with one of equal freshness. Now the company is launching a pilot program that uses a laser system to etch individual eggs with product information, enabling workers to easily sub in a new egg with the same specs. If adopted across the nation, Walmart suggests the system could save roughly five billion eggs a year from premature scramble.

There are other systemic fixes on the horizon. The Natural Resources Defense Council is urging the U.S. government to standardize the confusing jumble of "sell by," "best by," and "use by" dates, which leads to unnecessary refrigerator purges. And scholars and academics are lobbying schools to resurrect home economics classes, which could teach our youngest consumers to embrace oddly shaped produce, store food properly, preserve surpluses, request smaller portions in restaurants, eat leftovers, share food they can't eat (often with the help of apps and social media websites), and compost everything that remains.

In the U.K., where government has made food waste reduction a national priority, a grassroots group called Feeding the 5000 collects high-quality produce from farms and packers that has been rejected by supermarkets and cooks it into elaborate lunches served to 5,000 lucky diners, for free, in the name of raising awareness and celebrating creative solutions.

Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal and founder of Feeding the 5000, has called for groceries to discount goods close to expiration and to fairly share the cost of their overordering with suppliers, and for processors and retailers to publicly divulge their food waste tonnages. Rising to these challenges, Tesco has shrunk its arrays of breads, removed "display until" dates from fruits and vegetables, hung its bananas in protective hammocks, and started buying more fruit directly from growers, which lengthens its shelf life.

More recently, Stuart launched the Pig Idea, which is pressing the EU government to lift its ban on feeding food waste to swine, enacted following a 2001 British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease linked with pigs eating uncooked scraps. Stuart, who is also a National Geographic emerging explorer, argues that collecting and sterilizing commercial food waste would lower feed costs for farmers, protect vast swaths of tropical forests from being cleared to grow soy for swine meal, and save businesses the cost of food waste disposal. Feeding livestock on the food we currently waste, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, would globally liberate enough cereals to feed three billion people.

Feeding our excess to animals makes good economic and environmental sense. But the best use for superfluous food is, of course, feeding the hungry, who globally number 805 million. In the U.S., 49 million people are officially food insecure: They don't always know where their next meal is coming from.

To address this need, the charity Feeding America expects in 2014 to distribute around four billion pounds of food, most of it donated by manufacturers, supermarkets, large growers, and the federal government. At the grassroots level, gangs of Boy Scouts, Future Farmers of America, and church groups organized by the Society of St. Andrew inch through the nation's farm fields, gleaning more than 20 million pounds of produce a year for food pantries and kitchens. And on some large California farms, field laborers pack ideal produce into one box, bound for the market, and cosmetically challenged produce into another, bound for food banks, in an innovative approach called "concurrent picking." Still, says Ron Clark, a produce broker who pioneered this program in the Salinas Valley, the food that's recovered by this process is just a drop in the bucket, with exponentially more left behind.

The first step in reducing food waste and food loss is getting people to perceive that there is a problem. Denial reigns supreme. But attitudes are slowly changing as the price of food rises, and as we become more aware of both the myriad ways that climate change will lower food production and the imperative to sustainably coax ever more calories from land already under cultivation.

Having too much food sounds like a wonderful, First World sort of problem. But filling cornucopias with an abundance that no one is even expected to eat is no longer something the world can abide. It's too expensive, and it's trashing the planet while millions go hungry. "Food waste is a stupid problem," Nick Nuttall, of the UN Environment Programme, acknowledges. "But people love stupid problems because they know they can do something about it."

Elizabeth Royte wrote about freshwater conservation in the April 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine and is the author of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.

This coverage was made possible with support from the GRACE Communications Foundation.

Contribute to National Geographic's ongoing food coverage by submitting your photos to Your Shot, where you can share photos, take part in assignments, lend your voice to stories, and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe. Use #yourplate when you upload your favorite food photos to Your Shot.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated that a volunteer was packing food in Lisbon, Spain. She is in Lisbon, Portugal.

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One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted: What Can Be Done

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It's lettuce season in the Salinas Valley, a carrot-shaped lowland in the central California region that produces about 70 percent of the leafy greens sold in U.S. retail markets. On a typically foggy morning, tractor trailers stuffed with salad stream from valley processing plants to points north, south, and east.

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Tristan Stuart, an author and activist for global food waste, provides data on food waste and what we can do to use our resources in responsible ways.

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Western countries throw out nearly half of their food, not because it’s inedible -- but because it doesn’t look appealing. Tristram Stuart delves into the shocking data of wasted food, calling for a more responsible use of global resources.

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Helpful tips on how to reduce food waste in order to reduce one's carbon footprint.

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Most people don't realize how much food they throw away every day - from uneaten leftovers to spoiled produce to parts of fruits and vegetables that could be eaten or repurposed.

One-third of all food in the United States goes uneaten. EPA estimates that in 2019, about 96 percent of households' wasted food ended up in landfills, combustion facilities, or down the drain to the sewer system. The remainder was composted.

Preventing food from going to waste is one of the easiest and most powerful actions you can take to save money and lower your climate change footprint by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and conserving natural resources.
On this page:

Save money by buying only what you need, eating what you buy, and avoiding throwing away food. The average family of four spends $1,500 each year on food that ends up uneaten.

Reduce your environmental and climate change footprint.

Conserve resources and energy. When food is wasted, the land, water, energy, and other inputs that are used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing the food are wasted as well.

More than 85 percent of GHG emissions from landfilled food waste result from activities prior to food entering a landfill, including the production, transport, processing, and distribution of food. Plus, when food decomposes in a landfill, methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is emitted-and food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States

Ways to Prevent Wasted Food at Home

Planning, prepping, and storing food can help your household waste less food. Below are some tips to help you do just that:

Making a list with weekly meals in mind can save you money and time. If you only buy what you expect to use, you will be more likely to keep it fresh and use it all.

Keep a running list of meals and their ingredients that your household already enjoys - that way, you can easily choose, shop for, and prepare meals that you are likely to consume.

Look in your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry first to avoid buying food you already have. Make a list each week of what needs to be used up and plan upcoming meals around it.

Plan your meals for the week before you go shopping and buy only the things needed for those meals.

Make your shopping list based on how many meals you'll eat at home. Consider how often you will eat out, if you plan to eat frozen precooked meals, and if you will eat leftovers for any of your meals.

Include quantities on your shopping list noting how many meals you'll make with each item to avoid overbuying. For example: "salad greens - enough for two lunches".

Buying in large quantities (e.g., buy one, get one free deals) only saves money if you use all the food before it spoils.

Buying food from bulk bins can save you money and reduce food waste and packaging as you can purchase the amount of food you need as opposed to a pre-determined amount. When buying in bulk, remember to store food properly in airtight, labeled containers.

Purchase imperfect produce or upcycled products. Imperfect produce may have physical imperfections but is just as safe and nutritious and can sometimes be found at discounted prices. Upcycled products are made from ingredients that might have otherwise gone to waste.

Toolkit for Your Home and Your Community

The Food: Too Good to Waste Toolkit will help you figure out how much food is really going to waste in your home and what you can do to waste less. By making small shifts in how you shop for, prepare, and store food, you can save time and money. It can also keep the valuable resources used to produce and distribute food from going to waste!

Food: Too Good to Waste also contains an Implementation Guide that is designed to teach local governments and community organizations how to implement a Food: Too Good to Waste campaign in their community using the Toolkit.

If You Can't Reduce Wasted Food, Divert It From Landfills

Resources

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA):
Information for Consumers
Infographic- Easy Steps to Prevent Food Waste ( English, Chinese, Spanish)
Video - Tips to Reduce Food Waste at Home
Video- Plan Ahead to Reduce Food Waste ( English, Spanish)

Video- Serve Smart to Reduce Food Waste ( English, Spanish)

Video- Love Your Leftovers to Reduce Food Waste ( English, Spanish)
MyPlate- Meal Planning Refrigeration and Food Safety FoodKeeper App
U.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA):
How to Cut Food Waste and Maintain Food Safety
Date Labels on Packaged Foods & Infographic

Tips to Reduce Food Waste (including three infographics)
Food Waste Facts Infographic Animated Videos with Information on:

Tips to reduce food waste

Understanding date labels on packaged foods

The impact of food waste

Imperfect produce

Sources

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Most people don't realize how much food they throw away every day - from uneaten leftovers to spoiled produce to parts of fruits and vegetables that could be eaten or repurposed. One-third of all food in the United States goes uneaten.

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Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change

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Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change

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According to Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming written by Paul Hawken, these are the top ten solutions, ranked in terms of emissions reduction potential over a 30-year period.

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Paul Hawken and the Project Drawdown experts thought they knew what to expect when they modeled and ranked 80 solutions that could reverse climate change. But the data had some surprises in store.

Most prominently was that even when the solutions are modeled in terms of what they call a "Plausible Scenario"-a conservative measure of projected solution implementation that is "reasonable yet optimistic"-society still makes great strides toward achieving drawdown, the point where greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere begin to decline.

Together, all 80 reduce or sequester carbon by 1,051 gigatons by 2050 in the Plausible Scenario. Using the scenario that gets us to drawdown-which requires ramping up the solutions a bit more than the conservative measure, particularly renewable energy-they reduce or sequester carbon by 1,442 gigatons by 2050.

Below are the top ten solutions, ranked in terms of emissions reduction potential over a 30-year period. For the other 90 solutions, we highly recommend you read Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017), edited by Paul Hawken. -the Green America editors

Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change

1. Refrigerant Management
Tell Walmart to eliminate HFCs
The problem: Every refrigerator, supermarket case, and air conditioner contains chemical refrigerants that absorb and release heat, making it possible to chill food and keep buildings and vehicles cool. Refrigerants, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), were once key culprits in depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, which is essential for absorbing the sun's ultraviolet radiation. Thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, CFCs and HCFCs have been phased out of use.

It took two short years from the discovery of the gaping hole over the Antarctic for the global community to adopt a legally mandated course of action. Now, three decades later, the ozone layer is beginning to heal.

Refrigerants continue to cause climate change, however. Huge volumes of CFCs and HCFCs remain in circulation, retaining their potential for ozone damage. Their replacement chemicals, primarily hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), have minimal deleterious effect on the ozone layer, but their capacity to warm the atmosphere is 1,000 to 9,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, depending on their exact chemical composition.

Solutions in progress: In October 2016, officials from more than 170 countries gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to negotiate a deal to address the problem of HFCs. Despite challenging global politics, they reached a remarkable agreement. Through an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the world will begin phasing HFCs out of use, starting with high-income countries in 2019 and then expanding to low-income countries-some in 2024, others in 2028. HFC substitutes are already on the market, including natural refrigerants such as propane and ammonia. Unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, the Kigali deal is mandatory, with specific targets and timetables.

Work to be done: The process of phasing out HFCs will unfold over many years, and they will persist in kitchens and condensing units in the meantime. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 700 million air conditioning units will have come online worldwide by 2030.

Refrigerants currently cause emissions throughout their life cycles, but 90 percent of emissions happen at disposal. After being carefully removed and stored, refrigerants can be purified for reuse or transformed into other chemicals that do not cause warming.

The Kigali Accord ensures a step change is coming, and other practices focused on existing stocks could reduce HFC emissions further.

Green America resources: Green America's Cool It! Campaign urges supermarkets to curb their extremely harmful HFC use, starting with the biggest offender: Walmart. You can also get tips on reducing your need for air conditioning and saving energy at home in our article," Ten Easiest Ways to Cut Your Energy Use in Half."

Impact

Project Drawdown analysis includes emissions reductions that can be achieved through the management and destruction of refrigerants already in circulation.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction (Plausible Scenario): 89.74 gigatons (GT) of reduced CO2-equivalent (CO2-e-the common measure for all greenhouse gases) by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires greater refrigerant management): 96.49 gigatons of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): The costs to establish and operate recovery, destruction, and leak avoidance outweigh the financial benefit: -$902.8 billion net savings.

2. Wind Turbines (Onshore)

The problem: Fossil fuels sidelined zero-emission wind energy during the mid-twentieth century. Wind energy has its challenges. The weather is not the same everywhere. The variable nature of wind means there are times when turbines are not turning. Critics argue that turbines are noisy, aesthetically unpleasant, and at times deadly to bats and migrating birds.

Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil-fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion worldwide in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015. In comparison, the US wind-energy industry has received $12.3 billion in direct subsidies since 2000.

Solutions in progress: Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply 3.7 percent of global electricity. It will soon be much more. In 2015, a record 63 gigawatts of wind power were installed around the world, despite a dramatic drop in fossil-fuel prices. In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity.

In the US, the wind-energy potential of just three states-Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas-would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast.

Current technologies make it easier to overcome fluctuations in supply and demand. Interconnected grids can shuttle power to where it is needed. Newer turbine designs address concerns over bird and bat deaths with slower-turning blades and siting practices to avoid migration paths.

Ongoing cost reductions will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of installed electricity capacity, perhaps within a decade.

Work to be done: The ways and means for the United States to be fossil-fuel- and energy-independent are here. What is often missing is political will and leadership to reverse climate change.

On the policy side, energy portfolio standards can mandate a share of renewable generation. Grants, loans, and tax incentives can encourage construction of more wind capacity and ongoing innovation.

Wind energy is part of a system. Investment in energy storage, transmission infrastructure, and distributed generation is essential to its growth. For the world, the decision is simple: Invest in the future or in the past.

Green America resources: Green America's Divest/Invest campaign encourages people to divest from the top 200 fossil-fuel companies and reinvest in sustainability.

Impact

An increase in onshore wind from 3 to 4 percent of world electricity use to 21.6 percent could result in:

GHG gas reduction (Plausible Scenario): 84.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires greater wind-energy increase): 146.5 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $1.2 trillion, though costs are falling annually and could deliver more savings.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Onshore wind turbines can deliver a net savings of $7.4 trillion over three decades of operation.

3. Reduced Food Waste

The problem: A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere each year-roughly eight percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.

In places where income is low and infrastructure is weak, food loss is typically unintended and structural in nature-bad roads, lack of refrigeration or storage facilities, poor equipment or packaging, a challenging combination of heat and humidity. Wastage occurs earlier in the supply chain, rotting on farms or spoiling during storage or distribution.

In regions of higher income, unintentional losses tend to be minimal; willful food waste dominates farther along the supply chain. Retailers reject food based on bumps, bruises, coloring-aesthetic objections of all sorts. Other times, they simply order or serve too much, lest they risk shortages or unhappy customers.

Similarly, consumers spurn imperfect spuds in the produce section, overestimate how many meals they will cook in a week, toss out milk that has not gone bad, or forget about leftover lasagna in the back of the fridge.

Basic laws of supply and demand also play a role. If a crop is unprofitable to harvest, it will be left in the field. And if a product is too expensive for consumers to purchase, it will idle in the storeroom.

Regardless of the reason, the outcome is the same. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources-seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital-and generates greenhouse gases at every stage-including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin.

Solutions in progress: The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals call for halving per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030, as well as reducing food losses along production and supply chains.

Work to be done: The interventions that can address key waste points in the food chain are numerous and varied. In lower-income countries, improving infrastructure for storage, processing, and transportation is essential. Strengthening communication and coordination between producers and buyers is also paramount for keeping food from falling through the cracks. Given the world's many smallholder farmers, producer organizations can help with planning, logistics, and closing capacity gaps. In higher-income regions, major interventions are needed at the retail and consumer levels. Most important is to preempt food waste before it happens, for greatest reduction of upstream emissions, followed by reallocation of unwanted food.

Standardizing date labeling on food packages is an essential step. Currently, "sell by" or "best before" dates and the like are largely unregulated designations, indicating when food should taste best. Though not focused on safety, these markers often confuse consumers about expiration.

Education is another powerful tool, including campaigns celebrating "ugly" produce and public feasts made from nearly wasted food. National goals and policies can encourage widespread change, as well.

Green America resources: Get ideas from our " Tackling Food Waste " issue of the Green American.

Impact

If the world reduces its food waste by 2050, it would see the following:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 70.53 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires greater food waste reduction): 83.03 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

4. Adoption of a Plant-Rich Diet
A vegan dessert from Candle Cafe, a vegan, local, and organic restaurant in New York City that also offers frozen vegan meals and vegan cookbooks. Photo courtesy of Candle Cafe.
The problem: The Western diet comes with a steep price tag for climate change. The most conservative estimates suggest that raising livestock accounts for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gases emitted each year; the most comprehensive assessments of direct and indirect emissions say more than 50 percent.

Outside of innovative, carbon-sequestering managed-grazing practices described in another section of Drawdown, the production of meat and dairy contributes many more emissions than growing their sprouted counterparts-vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes.

Ruminants such as cows are the most prolific offenders, generating the potent greenhouse gas methane as they digest their food. In addition, agricultural land use and associated energy consumption to grow livestock feed produce carbon dioxide emissions, while manure and fertilizers emit nitrous oxide. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Overconsumption of animal protein also comes at a steep cost to human health. Eating too much of it can lead to certain cancers, strokes, and heart disease. Increased morbidity and health care costs go hand in hand.

Solutions in progress: With billions of people dining multiple times a day, imagine how many opportunities exist to turn the tables. It is possible to eat well, in terms of both nutrition and pleasure, while eating lower on the food chain and thereby lowering emissions.

Work to be done: A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs). The model also calculates a reduction in global mortality of six to ten percent.

The case for a plant-rich diet is robust. That said, bringing about dietary change is not simple because eating is profoundly personal and cultural. For individuals to give up meat in favor of options lower on the food chain, those options should be available, visible, and tempting.

Meat substitutes made from plants are a key way to minimize disruption of established ways of cooking and eating. Between rapidly improving products, research at top universities, venture-capital investment, and mounting consumer interest, experts expect markets for non-meats to grow rapidly.

Beyond promoting "reducitarianism," if not vegetarianism, it is also necessary to reframe meat as a delicacy, rather than a staple. First and foremost, that means ending price-distorting government subsidies, such as those benefiting the US livestock industry. Debunking protein myths and amplifying the health benefits of plant-rich diets can also encourage individuals to change their eating patterns.

Green America resources: Read about how the world could eat less meat and the impacts it could have in our " Don't Have a Cow " issue of the Green American.

Impact:

If the world reduces its meat consumption by 2050, it would see the following:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 66.11 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires further reduction of meat consumption): 78.65 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

5. Tropical Forest Restoration
Sustainable forest management in Indonesia. At least 751 million acres of land in the tropics could be restored to intact forests, reducing 62.1 gigatons of CO2. Photo by Biosphoto via Alamy.
The problem: In recent decades, tropical forests-those located within 23.5 degrees north or south of the equator-have suffered extensive clearing, fragmentation, degradation, and depletion of flora and fauna. Once blanketing 12 percent of the world's land masses, they now cover just five percent.

When we lose forests, primarily to agricultural expansion or human settlement, carbon dioxide discharges into the atmosphere. Tropical forest loss alone is responsible for 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions caused by human activity.

Solutions in progress: Restoration of tropical forests, both passive and intentional, is now a growing trend. As forest ecosystems come back to life, trees, soil, leaf litter, and other vegetation absorb and hold carbon, taking it out of global-warming rotation.

In 2011, the Bonn Challenge set an ambitious target of restoring 370 million acres of forest worldwide by 2020. The 2014 New York Declaration on Forests affirmed that aim and added a cumulative target of 865 million acres restored globally by 2030. Should the world accomplish that goal, a total of 12 to 33 gigatons of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere and become terrestrial once again.

Work to be done: "More than 4.9 billion acres [of forests] worldwide offer opportunities for restoration-an area larger than South America," a team of researchers from the World Resources Institute reports. Three-quarters of that land would be best suited to a "mosaic" forest-restoration approach, blending forests, trees, and agricultural land uses. Up to 1.2 billion acres are ripe for full restoration of large forests with dense canopy cover. The opportunities are enormous, and the majority of it lies in tropical regions. In a median time of 66 years, tropical forests can recover 90 percent of the biomass that old-growth landscapes contain.

Given the interconnectedness of people and forests, a particular framework for restoration has emerged: forest landscape restoration. The approach, proposed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, means "regarding the landscape as an integrated whole ... looking at different land uses together, their connections, interactions, and a mosaic of [restoration] interventions."

It means there is no single formula for forest restoration. Making restoration a collaborative process can ensure it is done with and for local communities, and that root causes of forest damage are addressed.

The bulk of restoration opportunities lies primarily within low-income countries in tropical regions. Those countries cannot manage the level of investment required, nor should they, since the benefits of restoration provide value and a service to all. The relevant stakeholders are the entire human race, and some bear greater responsibility for the problem of climate change than others.

Because forest restoration is such a potent solution to climate change, commitments and funding need to be a global priority. And because restoration efforts have ranged from success to failure, we need to analyze why, scale best practices, and eliminate those that do not work. Initiatives need to respect land rights and tenure, especially those of Indigenous people.

Green America resources: Green America's Skip the Slip campaign helps forests around the world by urging companies to shift away from using millions of pounds to unrecyclable paper receipts and use online receipts instead. In other sectors, Green America's campaigns work to protect our forests by moving towards recycled paper or online.

Impact

In theory, 751 million acres of degraded land in the tropics could be restored to continuous, intact forest. Project Drawdown's Plausible Scenario assumes restoration could occur on 435 million acres, resulting in:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 61.2 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires more restoration): 89 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

6. Educating Girls
Sunita was once forced to weave carpets and perform domestic work from 4 a.m. late into the night. Now, she attends school through GoodWeave's education program. GoodWeave rescues child weavers from carpet looms in South Asia and invests in their education and rehabilitation. It also certifies carpets and looms as being free from child labor. Photo by U. Roberto Romano for Goodweave.
The problem: Today, more than 130 million girls are denied the fundamental right to attend school and lay a foundation for their lives. The situation is most dire in secondary classrooms.

Economic barriers include lack of family funds for school fees and uniforms, as well as prioritizing the more immediate benefits of having girls fetch water or firewood, or work a market stall or a plot of land.

Cultural barriers encompass traditional beliefs that girls should tend the home rather than learn to read and write, should be married off at a young age, and, when resources are slim, should be skipped over so boys can be sent to school instead.

Schools that are farther afield put girls at risk of gender-based violence on their way to and from, while other dangers and discomforts are present at school itself. Disability, pregnancy, childbirth, and female genital mutilation also can be obstacles.

The education gap also matters for global warming. According to the Brookings Institution, "The difference between a woman with no years of schooling and with 12 years of schooling is almost four to five children per woman." Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their own reproductive health.

In the poorest countries, per capita greenhouse-gas emissions are low. From one-tenth of a ton of carbon dioxide per person in Madagascar to 1.8 tons in India, per-capita emissions in lower-income countries are a fraction of the US rate of 18 tons per person per year. Nevertheless, changes in fertility rates in those countries would have multiple benefits for girls and women, families, communities, and society.

Solution in progress: Nobel laureate and girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai has famously said, "One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world." An enormous body of evidence supports her conviction. For starters, educated girls realize higher wages and greater upward mobility, contributing to economic growth. Their rates of maternal mortality drop, as do mortality rates of their babies. They are less likely to marry as children or against their will. They have lower incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Their agricultural plots are more productive and their families better nourished. They are more empowered at home, at work, and in society.

Education is the most powerful lever available for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, while mitigating emissions by curbing population growth.

Education also shores up resilience to climate change impacts. For example, a 2013 study found that educating girls "is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters." This decreased vulnerability also extends to their children, families, and the elderly.
[Editor's note: Increasing women's involvement in the energy sector also leads to "more effective clean-energy initiatives, greater returns on investment in clean energy, and expanded emissions-reduction opportunities, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.]
Work to be done: In 2011, the journal Science published a demographic analysis of the impact of girls' education on population growth. It details a "fast track" scenario, based on South Korea's actual climb from one of the least to one of the most educated countries in the world. If all nations adopted a similar rate and achieved 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school by 2050, there would be 843 million fewer people worldwide than if current enrollment rates sustain.

The encyclopedic book What Works in Girls' Education ( Brookings Institution Press, 2015) maps out seven areas of interconnected interventions: 1) Make school affordable. 2) Help girls overcome health barriers. 3) Reduce the time and distance to get to school. 4) Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for mothers. 5) Improve school quality. 6) Increase community engagement. 7) Sustain girls' education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps.

Green America resources: Green America's Labor programs and End Smartphone Sweatshops campaign promote solutions that raise family income, get children out of factories and fields, and allow more children to go to school.

Impact

Because educating girls has an important impact on family planning (#7), Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential emissions reduction to each solution.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires helping more girls attend school): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): By closing an annual financing gap of $39 billion, universal education in low- and lower-middle-income
countries could be achieved.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): The return on investing in girls is incalculable.

7. Family Planning
Kenya has made significant gains in education, with more than 80 percent of all boys and girls currently enrolled in primary schools, and 50 percent of boys and girls in secondary schools, Poverty is the main reason for low enrollment, and boys receive priority for higher education when there are financial constraints.Courtesy of Project Drawdown.
The problem: Securing the fundamental right to voluntary, high-quality family-planning services, so women can have children by choice rather than chance and can plan their family size and spacing, is a matter of autonomy, dignity, and, yes, climate change.

225 million women in lower-income countries say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but lack the necessary access to contraception-resulting in some 74 million unwanted pregnancies each year. The need persists in some high-income countries as well, including the US, where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended.

Challenges to expanding access to family planning range from basic supply of affordable and culturally appropriate contraception to education about sex and reproduction; from faraway health centers to hostile attitudes of medical providers; from social and religious norms to sexual partners' opposition to using birth control.

Currently, the world faces a $5.3 billion funding shortfall for providing the access to reproductive health care that women say they want to have. After being silent on the topic of family planning for more than 25 years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change included access to reproductive health services in its 2014 synthesis report and pointed to population growth as an important factor in greenhouse-gas concentrations. (See #6 for statistics on per capita emissions.) Growing evidence suggests that family planning has the additional benefit of building resilience-helping communities and countries better cope with and adapt to inevitable changes brought by climate change.

Solutions in progress: The success stories in family planning are striking. Iran put a program into place in the early 1990s that has been touted as among the most successful such efforts in history. Completely voluntary, it involved religious leaders, educated the public, and provided free access to contraception. As a result, fertility rates halved in just one decade.

In Bangladesh, average birth rates fell from six children in the 1980s to two now, as the door-to-door approach pioneered in the Matlab hospital spread across the country: female health workers providing basic care for women and children where they live. Family planning requires social reinforcement-for example, the radio and television soap operas now used in many places to shift perceptions of what is "normal" or "right."

Work to be done: Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about centralized governments forcing the birth rate down-or up through natalist policies. Nor is it about agencies or activists in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. It is most essentially about freedom and opportunity for women and the recognition of basic human rights.

Currently, family-planning programs receive just one percent of all overseas development assistance. That number could double-a moral move that happens to have meaning for the planet.

Green America resources: Green America's Labor and Clean Electronics programs support solutions that help women earn their own incomes and determine their own futures.

Impact

Because educating girls (#6) has an important impact on family planning, Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential
emissions reduction to each solution.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires providing more women with family-planning access): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost & savings (Plausible Scenario): Inappropriate to monetize a human right.

8. Solar Farms
OCI Solar Power's 60-acre Alamo 3 solar farm in Converse, TX, generates 5.5 megawatts (AC) of power for nearly 1,240 homes. Courtesy of OCI Solar Power (OCISolarPower.com)
The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present.

Solutions in progress: Solar farms are large-scale arrays of hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, in some cases, millions of panels that achieve generating capacity in the tens or hundreds of megawatts. These solar farms operate at utility scale, more like conventional power plants in the amount of electricity they produce.

The first solar photovoltaic (PV) farms went up in the early 1980s. Now, these utility-scale installations account for 65 percent of additions to solar PV capacity around the world.

If Ukrainian officials have their way, Chernobyl, the site of a mass nuclear meltdown in 1986, will house a 1-gigawatt solar farm, which would be one of the world's largest.

Public investment, tax incentives, technology evolution, and brute manufacturing force have chipped away at the cost of creating PV, bringing it down to 65 cents per watt today. The decline in price has always outpaced predictions, and drops will continue. Informed predictions about the cost and growth of solar PV indicate that it will soon become the least expensive energy in the world. It is already the fastest growing.

Compared to rooftop solar, solar farms enjoy lower installation costs per watt, and their efficacy in translating sunlight into electricity is higher. When their panels rotate to make the most of the sun's rays, generation can improve by 40 percent or more.

Work to be done: No matter where solar panels are placed, they are subject to the diurnal and variable nature of solar radiation and its misalignment with electricity use, peaking midday while demand peaks a few hours later. That is why, as solar generation continues to grow, so should complementary renewables that are constant, such as geothermal, and that have rhythms different from the sun, such as wind, which tends to pick up at night.

Energy storage and more flexible grids that can manage the variability of production from PV farms will also be integral to solar's success.

The International Renewable Energy Agency already credits 220 million to 330 million tons of annual CO2 savings to solar PV. Could solar rise from two percent of the global electricity mix to meet 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027, as some University of Oxford researchers calculate? Thanks to complementary government interventions and market progress, there are many promising signs.

Green America resources: Green America's Solar Catalyst and Solar Circle programs have played a major role in accelerating solar in the US and abroad. Our new campaigns put pressure on AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon to power their massive servers with clean energy.

Impact

Utility-scale solar is currently 0.4 percent of global electricity generation. Project Drawdown assumes it will grow to ten percent.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 36.9 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-assumes higher growth): 64.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): -$80.6 billion. (Solar farms are cheaper to install than fossil-fuel alternatives, so there's actually a
savings on implementation.)

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $5.02 trillion in net savings.

9. Silvopasture
A silvopasture field in Sweden, combining pastureland with climate-cooling trees. Photo by Bo Jansson (Alamy).
The problem: In Brazil and elsewhere, headlines condemn ranching as a driver of mass deforestation and attendant climate change. Cattle and other ruminants require 30 to 45 percent of the world's arable land, and livestock produce roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Solutions in progress: Conventional wisdom says cows and trees do not belong together. The practice of silvopasture challenges this assumption of mutual exclusivity and could help shape a new era for the acreage dedicated to livestock and their food.

From the Latin for "forest" and "grazing," silvopasture is just that: the integration of trees and pasture or forage into a single system for raising livestock, from cattle and sheep to deer and ducks. Rather than seeing trees as a weed to be removed, silvopasture integrates them into a sustainable and symbiotic system. Silvopasture is currently practiced on 351 million acres of land globally.

The dehesa system of silvopasture, famous for the jamón ibérico (Iberian ham) it yields, has been cultivated on the Iberian Peninsula for more than 4,500 years. More recently, silvopasture has taken root in Central America, thanks to the work of champions such as the Center for Research in Sustainable Systems of Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia. In many places in the US and Canada, livestock and trees can be found intermingling.

That intermingling takes a variety of forms. Trees may be clustered, evenly spaced, or used as living fencing. Animals may graze in grassy alleys between rows of arboreal growth. Most silvopastoral systems are similar in spacing to a savanna ecosystem. They can be created by planting trees in open pasture, letting those that sprout mature, or by thinning a woodland or plantation canopy to allow for forage growth.

Soil is the other essential component-and key to the potential silvopasture has for mitigating climate change. Silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass above ground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless.

Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher, it may curtail the need for additional pasture space and thus help avoid deforestation and subsequent carbon emissions.

Some studies show that ruminants can better digest silvopastoral forage, emitting lower amounts of methane in the process.
From a financial and risk perspective, silvopasture is useful for its diversification. Livestock, trees, and any additional forestry products, such as nuts, fruit, mushrooms, and maple syrup, all come of age and generate income on different time horizons. Because the land is diversely productive, farmers are better insulated from financial risk due to weather events.

Silvopasture can also cut farmers' costs by reducing the need for feed, fertilizer, and herbicides. Because the integration of trees into grazing lands enhances soil fertility and moisture, farmers find themselves with healthier, more productive land over time.

Work to be done: Though the advantages of silvopasture are clear, its growth has been limited by both practical and cultural factors. These systems are more expensive to establish, requiring higher up-front costs in addition to the necessary technical expertise. There is less incentive to plant trees and protect them where pastures are plentiful, fire poses a risk, or land ownership is unclear.

Layered on these challenges is the stubborn belief that trees and pasture are not compatible-that trees inhibit the growth of pasture fodder rather than enrich it. Farmers may ridicule one another for shifting to an alternate approach.

These social impediments make peer-to-peer engagement and direct experience of silvopasture's benefits key accelerants. To address economic obstacles, international organizations such as the World Bank and NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy are making loans to enable silvopasture installation-loans a typical bank would not provide.

As the impacts of global warming progress, silvopasture can help farmers and their livestock adapt to erratic weather. Trees create cooler microclimates and more protective environments, and can moderate water availability. Therein lies the climatic win-win of silvopasture.

Green America resources: Green America's Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming programs are accelerating the shift to regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture practices.

Impact

Project Drawdown estimates adoption of silvopasture expanding to 554 million acres by 2050 out of 2.7 billion theoretically suitable:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 31.19 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires higher rate of adoption): 47.5 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $41.6 billion net cost.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $699.4 billion net savings.

10. Rooftop Solar
An Uros mother and her two daughters live on one of the 42 floating islands that the Uru constructed from totora reeds on Lake Titicaca. This solar panel replaced kerosene and provided electricity to the family for the first time. Photo courtesy of Drawdown.
The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present.

Solutions in progress: Solar photovoltaics (PV) have seen exponential growth over the past decade. In 2015, distributed systems of less than 100 kilowatts accounted for roughly 30 percent of solar PV capacity installed worldwide.

While the production of PV panels, like any manufacturing process, involves emissions, they generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases or air pollution. When placed on a grid-connected roof, they produce energy at the site of consumption, avoiding the inevitable losses of grid transmission. They can help utilities meet broader demand by feeding unused electricity into the grid, especially in summer. This "net metering" arrangement can make solar panels financially feasible for homeowners, offsetting the electricity consumers buy at night, when the sun is not shining.

Rooftop PV is accelerating access to affordable, clean electricity and thereby becoming a powerful tool for eliminating poverty. It is also creating jobs and energizing local economies. In Bangladesh alone, 3.6 million home solar systems have generated 115,000 direct jobs and 50,000 more downstream.

Roof modules are spreading around the world because of their affordability. Solar PV has benefited from a virtuous cycle of falling costs, driven by incentives to accelerate its development and implementation, economies of scale in manufacturing, advances in panel technology, and innovative approaches for end-user financing.

Small-scale PV already generates electricity more cheaply than it can be brought from the grid in some parts of the US, in many small island states, and in countries including Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Work to be done: See #8 "Solar Farms."

Green America resources: Join with your neighbors to drive down the costs of rooftop solar. Read our " Community Solar for All " issue of the Green American.

Impact

Project Drawdown estimates that rooftop solar PV can grow from .4 percent of electricity generation globally to 7 percent by 2050.

Carbon reduction (Plausible Scenario): 24.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Carbon reduction (Drawdown Scenario-requires more solar rooftops): 43.10 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $453.1 billion net cost.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $3.46 trillion net savings.

How Green America Campaigns Stack Up

We thought it would be fun to see where Green America's climate-related campaigns stack up on the Project Drawdown
top 100 climate-change solutions. The solutions are ranked by the amount of greenhouse gases they reduce by 2050. Here's how our efforts came out:

Climate Action: Growing Renewables: A big part of our Climate Action program aims to grow renewable energy generation in the US. In 2002, our Solar Catalyst project mapped out the future of solar power in the US. Today, Climate Action supports tax incentives for solar and wind, and helps investors move their money into companies coming up with climate solutions. We also developed the idea for Clean Energy Victory Bonds, which would allow individuals to invest in green energy for as little as $25, through a government Treasury bond. Ranking: Rooftop solar: #10, with 24.6 gigatons (GT) CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) reduced. Solar Farms: #8, with 36.9 GT reduced. Wind Turbines: #2, with 84.6 GT reduced.

Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming: These campaigns aim to promote regenerative agriculture-through encouraging farmers to practice it, retailers to sell products farmed in this manner, and consumers to look for products grown through regenerative methods. Ranking: Regenerative Agriculture is #11, with 23.14 GT of CO2-e reduced.

Better Paper Project: Our Better Paper Project aims to conserve the world's forests by advocating for recycled paper
use. Currently, we're working with magazine publishers to switch them from virgin-pulp paper to paper with at least
some recycled content-particularly Smithsonian Magazine and college and university alumni magazines. The Project's new "Skip the Slip" campaign asks retailers to offer digital receipts and consumers to skip paper receipts. Ranking: Recycling is #70, with 0.90 gigatons of CO2-equivalent reduced. Saving tropical forests ranks #5 (see p. 23), and saving temperate forests ranks #12, with 22.61 GT of CO2-e.

Fair Trade: Our Fair Trade program empowers women and girls by increasing family income, allowing girls to go to
school (see #6).

Green Living: Our website and publications are filled with practical articles on many of the Project Drawdown solutions, including the ones corresponding to our program areas mentioned above, as well as ride-sharing (#75), investing in
women (#62), composting (#60), saving water (#46), buying an electric car (#26), eating less meat (#4), reducing food waste (#3), and more.

In addition, our "Climate Justice for All" issue of the Green American highlights leaders around the world who are working to reduce climate-change impacts to communities of color, who are often hardest hit by them.

The solutions to climate change are within our abilities, and they improve life for every being on this planet.

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Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change

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Paul Hawken and the Project Drawdown experts thought they knew what to expect when they modeled and ranked 80 solutions that could reverse climate change. But the data had some surprises in store.

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After the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, this article discusses 12 simple ways anyone can help to reduce effects on climate change.

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Rising sea levels. Raging storms. Searing heat. Ferocious fires. Severe drought. Punishing floods. The effects of climate change are already threatening our health, our communities, our economy, our security, and our children's future.

What can you do? A whole lot, as it turns out. Americans, on average, produce 21 tons of carbon a year, about four times the global average. Personal action is, of course, no substitute for meaningful government policies. We still must limit carbon pollution and aggressively move away from dirty fossil fuels toward cleaner power.

But it's important to remember the equally vital contributions that can be made by private citizens-which is to say, by you. "Change only happens when individuals take action," says clean energy advocate Aliya Haq. "There's no other way, if it doesn't start with people."

Here are a dozen easy, effective ways each one of us can make a difference.

1. Speak up!

What's the single biggest way you can make an impact on global climate change? "Talk to your friends and family, and make sure your representatives are making good decisions," Haq says. By voicing your concerns-via social media or, better yet, directly to your elected officials-you send a message that you care about the warming world. Encourage Congress to enact new laws that limit carbon emissions and require polluters to pay for the emissions they produce. "The main reason elected officials do anything difficult is because their constituents make them," Haq says. You can help protect public lands, stop offshore drilling, and more here.

2. Power your home with renewable energy.

Choose a utility company that generates at least half its power from wind or solar and has been certified by Green-e Energy, an organization that vets renewable energy options. If that isn't possible for you, take a look at your electric bill; many utilities now list other ways to support renewable sources on their monthly statements and websites.

3. Weatherize, weatherize, weatherize.

"Building heating and cooling are among the biggest uses of energy," Haq says. Indeed, heating and air-conditioning account for almost half of home energy use. You can make your space more energy efficient by sealing drafts and ensuring it's adequately insulated. You can also claim federal tax credits for many energy efficiency home improvements. To help you figure out where to start, you could also get a home energy audit, which some utilities offer free of charge. (Alternatively, you can hire a professional to come to your home and perform one; the Inflation Reduction Act offers a partial tax credit for this.) The EPA's Home Energy Yardstick gives you a simple assessment of your home's annual energy use compared with similar homes.

4. Invest in energy-efficient appliances.

Since they were first implemented nationally in 1987, efficiency standards for dozens of appliances and products have kept 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. That's about the same amount as the annual carbon pollution coughed up by nearly 440 million cars. "Energy efficiency is the lowest-cost way to reduce emissions," Haq says. When shopping for refrigerators, washing machines, heat pump water heaters, and other appliances, look for the Energy Star label. It will tell you which are the most efficient. (There may also be rebates to earn from your purchase of Energy Star-certified products.)

And when you're ready to swap out your old machines, don't just put them on the curb: Recycling an old refrigerator through the EPA's Responsible Appliance Disposal Program can prevent an additional 10,000 pounds of carbon pollution because the global-warming pollutants in the refrigerants and foam would be properly captured rather than vented to the air.

5. Reduce water waste.

Saving water reduces carbon pollution, too. That's because it takes a lot of energy to pump, heat, and treat your water. So take shorter showers, turn off the tap while brushing your teeth, and switch to WaterSense-labeled fixtures and appliances. The EPA estimates that if just one out of every 100 American homes were retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, about 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year would be saved-avoiding 80,000 tons of global warming pollution.

6. Actually eat the food you buy-and compost what you can't.

Approximately 10 percent of U.S. energy use goes into growing, processing, packaging, and shipping food-about 40 percent of which winds up in the landfill. "If you're wasting less food, you're likely cutting down on energy consumption," Haq says. As for the scraps you can't eat or the leftovers you don't get to, collect them in a compost bin instead of sending them to the landfill where they release methane. Recycling food and other organic waste into compost provides a range of environmental benefits, including improving soil health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recycling nutrients, and mitigating the impact of droughts.

7. Buy better bulbs.

LED light bulbs use one-sixth the amount of energy to deliver the same amount of light as conventional incandescents and last at least 10 times longer. They're also cheaper in the long run: A 10-watt LED that replaces your traditional 60-watt bulb will save you $125 over the light bulb's life. And because the average American home has around 40 to 50 light bulbs, this is a simple swap that will reap huge rewards. If every household in the United States replaced just one incandescent with an Energy Star-labeled LED, we would prevent seven billion pounds of carbon pollution per year. That's equivalent to the emissions of about 648,000 cars.

8. Pull the plug(s).

Taken together, the outlets in your home are likely powering about 65 devices-an average load for a home in the United States. Audio and video devices, cordless vacuums and power tools, and other electronics use energy even when they're not charging. This "idle load" across all U.S. households adds up to the output of 50 large power plants in the country. So don't leave fully charged devices plugged into your home's outlets, unplug rarely used devices or plug them into power strips and timers, and adjust your computers and monitors to automatically power down to the lowest power mode when not in use.

9. Drive a fuel-efficient vehicle.

Gas-smart cars, such as hybrids and fully electric vehicles, save fuel and money. And once all cars and light trucks meet 2025's clean car standards, which means averaging 54.5 miles per gallon, they'll be a mainstay. For good reason: Relative to a national fleet of vehicles that averaged only 28.3 miles per gallon in 2011, Americans will spend $80 billion less at the pump each year and cut their automotive emissions by half. Before you buy a new set of wheels, compare fuel-economy performance here.

10. Maintain your ride.

If all Americans kept their tires properly inflated, we could save 1.2 billion gallons of gas each year. A simple tune-up can boost miles per gallon anywhere from 4 percent to 40 percent, and a new air filter can get you a 10 percent boost. Also, remove unnecessary accessories from your car roof. Roof racks and clamshell storage containers can reduce fuel efficiency by as much as 5 percent.

11. Rethink planes, trains, and automobiles.

Choosing to live in walkable smart-growth cities and towns with quality public transportation leads to less driving, less money spent on fuel, and less pollution in the air. Less frequent flying can make a big difference, too. "Air transport is a major source of climate pollution," Haq says. "If you can take a train instead, do that." If you must fly, consider purchasing carbon offsets to counterbalance the hefty carbon pollution associated with flying. But not all carbon offset companies are alike. Do your homework to find the best supplier.

12. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.

In the United States, the average person generates 4.5 pounds of trash every day. Fortunately, not all the items we discard end up in landfills; we recycle or compost more than one-third of our trash. In 2014 this saved carbon emissions equivalent to the yearly output of 38 million passenger cars. But we could be doing so much more. "Reduce should always be the number-one priority," says NRDC senior resource specialist Darby Hoover. And to reap the environmental benefits of "recyclable" goods, you must recycle according to the rules of your municipality, since systems vary widely by location. Search your municipality's sanitation department (or equivalent) webpage to learn exactly what you can place in the recycling bin, as counties and cities often differ in what they accept.
This story was originally published on April 20, 2022 and has been updated with new information and links.

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There are many ways to prevent global warming from becoming worse. Many nations have put laws into place to fight climate change -- here's what you can do.