If you haven’t heard the stats on food waste, they are staggering. According to a 2016 report by ReFED – a collaboration of over 30 businesses, nonprofit, foundation and government leaders focused on food waste – we collectively waste 40 percent of our food in the U.S. alone. On an annual basis, this equates to 400 pounds for every American, 1.3 percent of U.S. GDP, and $218 billion dollars. With a need to feed a growing population estimated to top 9 billion by 2050, reducing our food waste seems like a great place to start meeting this challenge.
Unlike many other societal issues, the need to solve the food waste issue seems pretty obvious. it’s a cause that people from all walks of life can get behind. And, the good news is, there are some feasible strategies to solve the issue. ReFED’s report presented a roadmap outlining cost-effective, scalable solutions to reduce US food waste by 20 percent in a decade, putting us on the path to achieve a national goal to cut food waste in half by 2030.
“If we can accomplish this goal, we will not only have reduced a tremendous amount of waste, we will also have an impact on all sorts of other problems – from food insecurity to climate change,” commented Chris Cochran, Executive Director of ReFED. “In many ways, food waste is an emerging industry, just like recycling was in the 1980s, or renewable energy in the early 2000s.”
So, how do we get there? The panelists at a SOCAP talk “Financing the Food Waste Free Future: Emerging Approaches to Funding Solutions” outlined one of the major actions needed to reach significant reductions in food waste, which is that we need to collectively galvanize hundreds of millions of dollars of new catalytic funding. It will take a spectrum of capital – from philanthropic to commercial – to get us here. An $18 billion dollar investment is what is estimated – and this equates to less than a tenth of a penny of investment per pound of food waste reduced.
The panel included representatives from the philanthropic, impact investment and innovation sectors to examine traditional and emerging approaches being used to fund solutions to reducing food waste. “$8 billion of government support, alongside $7 billion of market-rate private investments, and $3 billion of philanthropic grants will get us there,” says Cochran.
And the additional good news? This investment will yield an expected $100 billion in societal Economic Value over a decade. NRDC just published a report outlining key opportunities for investors on food waste reduction.
To read the full story, visit http://www.triplepundit.com/2017/10/food-waste-new-investment-frontier/.