How ‘ugly produce’ sellers fight food waste | 24CA News

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This week:

• How ‘ugly produce’ sellers combat meals waste
• The U.S. is chasing China on electric-vehicle adoption
• Why do not we speak about acid rain and the ozone gap anymore?

How ‘ugly produce’ sellers combat meals waste

Twisty carrots, lopsided apples and eggplants with fascinating scars aren’t one thing you usually see at your native grocery store. But you may get them delivered straight to your door due to companies throughout Canada devoted to preventing meals waste — and its greenhouse gasoline emissions.

The bonus? Amid rising meals costs, consuming “ugly produce” may prevent cash.

Supermarkets have strict beauty requirements for vegatables and fruits — they have to be comparatively uniform in measurement and form, with out blemishes resembling scarring. Produce that does not meet these requirements is difficult to promote and may find yourself in landfills.

Various Canadian on-line grocers are actually providing farmers an opportunity to promote that produce at a deep low cost in comparison with comparable fruits and veggies on the grocery store.

“As long as you can cut out a little blemish, you’re paying half the price for a 95 per cent usable product,” mentioned Micky Tkac, senior director of produce for on-line grocer Spud.ca, which has prospects in Calgary, Edmonton and B.C.’s Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and Thompson Okanagan areas.

Tkac began to supply “imperfect produce” alongside Spud.ca’s different groceries in 2016, after being struck by the near-perfect look of vegatables and fruits in Canadian supermarkets, which was so completely different from what he noticed rising up in Slovakia.

Companies that provide solely imperfect and “surplus” produce say they’ve seen numerous development these days amid rising meals costs. In truth, some say a key aim is making contemporary vegatables and fruits extra accessible to all.

“It’s been really nice to see that people are able to actually afford eating nutritious, whole foods,” mentioned Divyansh Ojha, founder and CEO of London, Ont.-based FoodFund, which serves southwestern Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area.

They additionally say they’ve had a big effect on meals waste. Thibaut Martelain began Montreal-based Marché Second Life in 2015 after being impressed by France’s efforts to combat meals waste, and says the corporate has rescued 1,500 tonnes of meals since then. 

Both Marché Second Life and FoodFund have expanded past produce to supply merchandise like cheese and packaged meals that may’t be offered attributable to issues resembling errors on their packaging or that have been in some way produced in surplus.

Some firms additionally produce other methods to cut back waste apart from promoting to prospects. Spud.ca donates what it would not promote to charities. Ojha mentioned his firm has managed to divert about 4,500 tonnes of meals, by not simply serving prospects but additionally connecting meals producers with meals processors who may not in any other case discover one another.

Some could surprise: why is not all imperfect produce processed into issues like juices, sauces and canned soups? Martelain mentioned there are extra producers that wish to course of sure objects, resembling oranges, in comparison with others, resembling cauliflowers and eggplants, and the amount wanted could not match what’s obtainable. 

Ojha added that enormous processors could not care in regards to the look of the tomatoes or apples they use, however could not be capable to get the regular and dependable provide they want in the event that they particularly goal lower-grade elements. For all these causes, counting on meals processors is not an entire resolution to meals waste.

For the identical causes, prospects who select to purchase solely imperfect and surplus produce will get extra of some varieties of vegatables and fruits (resembling apples, beets and yams) than others (berries). This could require a special strategy to meal planning, Odja acknowledges.

That mentioned, a lot of the produce that these firms promote is surplus and will not be “ugly” in any respect. Ojha mentioned that is certainly one of his prospects’ commonest “complaints” after they get their first supply.

While these efforts are diverting numerous meals waste, some suboptimal produce continues to be being missed.

Sang Le, co-founder of Peko Produce in Vancouver, famous that as a result of misshapen produce is difficult to promote, numerous it truly will get left on the farm and is rarely harvested. 

“So, that’s something that we’ve been thinking about how to tackle.”

— Emily Chung

Reader suggestions

Jenny Morrow:

“So great to see Emily Chung back on the beat! Your wonderful Climate-Friendly Supermarkets article sent me scurrying to my local grocery store where I played climate hero by taking pictures of as many refrigerant labels as I could find, which I promptly sent to the Climate-Friendly Supermarkets project. I had read several years ago in Project Drawdown that refrigerants were one of the worst climate culprits, and I had been pondering how to get involved beyond just personal choices. 

“This undertaking was excellent, and I thank Emily Chung to your article and for all of your environmental and local weather change reporting.”

Shea Sealey-Nelson:

“I’m positive it is previous news, however on this piece you may have an image of an individual strolling previous a freezer. An open-style freezer. [Ed.: It’s technically a fridge.]This article made no point out of the shift by some supermarkets to make use of closed show circumstances. The quantity of vitality utilized by the open fashion must also be taken into consideration, or at the least talked about.”

Tony Hendriks of Ottawa, who worked in the grocery business before retiring, wrote in to suggest that some supermarkets might be changing to greener refrigerants without updating the stickers on their fridges (and that the stickers might suggest a bigger climate impact than is actually the case).

He contacted a friend who now works for a refrigeration company changing supermarket refrigerants in the Ottawa region from R404A (with a GWP of 3922) to R449A (with a GWP of 1397).

“He confirmed for me they don’t change the knowledge on the stickers within the retail circumstances, solely on the rooftop items.”

Old issues of What on Earth? are right here. 

24CA News has a dedicated climate page, which can be found here.

Also, check out our radio show and podcast. This week, remote communities in northern Canada say they don’t have adequate weather forecasting. We hear why that’s a problem for hunting, health and preparing for climate change. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

The Big Picture: U.S. chases China on electric-vehicle adoption

Watching the world’s two biggest economies approach the problem of car-related CO2 emissions in recent years has been a study in contrasts. While the U.S. has lurched toward a coherent strategy, China has spent more than a decade carrying out a nationwide plan.

The issue seemed to be of little interest to U.S. president Donald Trump, although his administration did sue California for trying to raise the standards for tailpipe emissions. President Joe Biden has been far more proactive about reducing road emissions, most notably by providing tax credits to entice Americans to buy more electric vehicles (EVs). He has also been actively promoting American-made EVs; earlier this week, he was seen smiling for the cameras at the wheel of an electric Hummer.

China actually started providing subsidies to EV buyers back in 2010, which helped develop consumer demand and a domestic industry — in September, China’s BYD actually overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest EV manufacturer. Last year, four million EVs were purchased in China; the U.S. managed a quarter of that. 

This isn’t totally surprising given that China has four times the U.S. population. Where the Chinese have really flourished is in building public charging stations, a key pillar in convincing a populace that buying an EV is a safe choice. In a decade, China went from 30,000 public charging stations to 1.8 million. The U.S. currently only has about 140,000, although Biden has pledged to raise that to 500,000 by 2030. China’s 2030 target? Three million.

There are some extenuating factors to consider, including the fact that roughly 80 per cent of China’s electricity is generated with fossil fuel sources, compared to 60 per cent in the U.S. But as this analysis shows, an EV charged on a so-called dirty grid still produces fewer emissions than any other kind of car.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

Why don’t we talk about acid rain and the ozone hole anymore? Scientists debunk misinformation

If you’re over 30, you likely remember a time when there was a lot of hand-wringing over the ozone hole and skin cancer, or the threat of acid rain destroying ecosystems.

Those global environmental crises created buzz and grabbed headlines in the 1980s and ’90s, but in the decades that followed, the world turned its attention to another threat: climate change.

Yet the stories of how those threats were successfully tackled — through the co-operation of scientists, policy-makers and the public — are often overlooked, if not outright denied.

A barrage of misinformation on social media claims those issues were never real in the first place. This conspiracy theory takes various shapes, but the common thread is the false claim that climate change is just the latest in a series of hoaxes invented by governments to control the public.

One TikTok video (reminder: this is misinformation) with more than three million views dismisses several global threats as “politics,” listing off a series of examples: “In the ’80s, it was ‘acid rain will destroy all of the crops in 10 years’; within the ’90s it was ‘the ozone layer might be destroyed in 10 years’; within the 2000s it was ‘the glaciers will all soften in 10 years’…” The video claims it was all “fear-mongering nonsense” that never came true.

Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon knows this attitude well.

“I’ve heard that type of assertion previously,” said Solomon, a professor in the department of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a bit of bit like saying, ‘I had a coronary heart assault and my physician put a stent in. They informed me I needed to train and now I really feel nice. So I feel [the stent] was all simply nonsense to generate income for the medical institution.'”

It was Solomon’s research in the 1980s that helped establish the cause of the thinning ozone: refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Her work contributed to the growing body of evidence that ultimately led to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, phasing out these harmful refrigerants.

That treaty is working, according to a recent international report, which said the ozone is expected to recover by 2066.

“The incontrovertible fact that we have now truly achieved the proper issues and glued sure issues is a trigger for celebration. It’s not a trigger for pretending that these issues by no means existed,” Solomon said.

The reason acid rain doesn’t grab headlines anymore is another case of governments responding to the scientific community’s alarm bells with regulations, which worked.

“The acid rain story [and] the ozone story present that we’re able to coping with environmental issues and that we will make vital progress,” said Mike Paterson, a senior research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario.

Paterson wrote his master’s thesis on acid rain in the 1980s, and recalls the very real impacts at the time, such as declining fish populations in North America and northern Europe. Scientists established the cause —  sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides produced by burning fossil fuels — and North America eventually took action with a series of policy reforms in the 1990s that successfully curbed emissions and reduced the acidity of rain.

The fact that the global threat of climate change is happening in a digital age rampant with misinformation adds a novel layer of complexity to solving the crisis.

A government-funded report published this week by the Council of Canadian Academies — a non-profit that gathers experts to examine evidence on scientific topics — says “focused misinformation campaigns have performed a documented function in creating opposition to insurance policies addressing local weather change.”

The study warns of the threat that misinformation poses to dealing with future crises by eroding trust in science and making people more susceptible to falling down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

“Exposure to misinformation about local weather change leads individuals to take it much less significantly and to be much less prepared to assist coverage actions,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, the chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol in England and a contributor to the report.

Even if there is a strong scientific consensus on global warming, a steady stream of misinformation makes it difficult for people to sift through it all and sort fact from fiction, he said.

“If persons are uncovered to this blizzard of false details about local weather change, then their proper to be told about dangers is being undermined.”

— Jaela Bernstien

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Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty