Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. Now, our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show, all this year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, landfills are the third largest cause of methane emissions in the United States, that's greenhouse gas, and much of what ends up in landfills is food waste. As much as 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to food waste, according to a new book.

What does targeting food waste really look like if we're going to make a difference for the climate in this area, if individuals and policymakers were to get serious about it? Joining us to outline the costs to the environment of waste we discard, as well as efforts to address it, is Oliver Franklin-Wallis. He's the author of a new book called Wasteland: A Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. He's also the features editor for the British GQ magazine. Oliver, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Hi, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You write, "If it were a country, food waste would be the third highest emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth, behind only China and the United States." Wow. Can you take us into the science of that a little bit, to start out?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: As you say, the numbers on food waste alone are absolutely staggering. The UN estimates that about a third of all food grown worldwide is wasted. It's not eaten. When you translate that to farmland, that's enough hectares of land in the world that it used to grow food that's never eaten. That farmland would cover the entire subcontinent of India. About one in five liters of fresh water extracted worldwide are used to grow food that's never eaten.

As a climate challenge, it's a huge one, but also, it's a huge challenge because we have about 2 billion people in the world who don't get enough to eat every year, 130 million or so who are starving. It seems to me to be this really low-hanging fruit, in terms of problems that we need to solve, climate problems, and yet, there's all sorts of reasons that we seem to not be making enough progress, not quickly enough, but yes, the figures are quite staggering.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some of the details of that match that you're saying is there to be made, between helping to solve hunger in the world and helping to protect the climate, but I just want to stay on what happens in landfills for a few minutes. Landfills give off methane, which is especially bad for global warming. A lot of people, I think, are still not aware of methane as a greenhouse gas.

We always think in terms of carbon, and decarbonizing the economy, but you write, "Methane is at least 28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide." Can you explain that a bit further?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Well, whenever you throw anything away that decomposes-- We're talking about food waste, but also our clothing, cardboard, or anything like that, and it ends up in a landfill. Now, landfills are these hot, dark, underground bubbles, essentially. These days, they're wrapped in plastic. It's not just earth shoved over the top. There are these big, sealed cells, and in there, bacteria goes to work.

The bacteria that live inside the landfill produce methane, which, as you say, is this tremendously effective greenhouse gas, hugely more heating than carbon dioxide. Now, there's been some amazing breakthroughs in understanding this problem in the last few years, because we have these satellites now circling the globe every day that can image, and they can see heat, and they can see methane emissions.

They can see now that in the US, but also all over the Global South, landfills are less secure, that there are these gigantic plumes of methane streaming out. In places like Bangladesh, these gigantic mega landfills around the mega-cities in the Global South, are producing the same amount of methane as tens of thousands of cars every day.

Brian Lehrer: Despite--

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: It's a gigantic-- Sorry, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: A gigantic contributor to global warming. Despite all the methane produced, you write about how landfills are less biologically active than assumed. If we were to dig into a landfill, what would we find, and what is that biological activity that you're even referring to?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Yes, exactly. There was always this assumption that if you shut things away in a landfill and bury it underground for long enough that bacteria would do their work, and it would decompose and leave behind an active mulch, I guess, but in the last few years, through work of sociologists, geographers, and things, we found out that that actually isn't true, and particularly at the center of these landfills, there's a huge amount of pressure and things separating these from light and air.

There's quite a lot of toxic chemicals, which tend to actually kill off the bacteria that would be doing the digestion. The center of these things are more like coffins, or something like that. They're actually sealing this stuff away, but a lot of the time, it's not degrading, and certainly not as fast as you think. For example, while I was reporting this book, I visited a historic landfill where, thanks to coastal erosion, based on the edge of the sea, this beach is eroding away, and exposing the landfill that goes back to the 1930s.

I could pull out pieces of newspaper that were still readable from 1935 or the mid-30s, and you could see old clothes, and in some cases, people can even pull out food that is recognizable, for many decades ago. It's not this solution that we thought it was. In fact, we're just filling the ground with these time capsules, as it were, that thanks to global warming, and erosion, and other things of that nature, are starting to break open in places, and we're starting to realize the problem we've left for ourselves.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I think I'm learning from this conversation that Americans say methane, and people in the UK say methane. I guess it's like-- Aluminum is what it's really called, but for some reason, you people say aluminium. That keeps you on schedule, which is the wrong word for schedule, but okay, methane. The other problem with landfills, you note, is that they leak. I think you were just alluding to that. All of that is made worse by climate change. What's the interaction, or the vicious cycle there?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Well, as I mentioned, you have these big underground bubbles now, that are surrounded in plastic. Now, the problem with some of those plastic liners is that they have a tendency to be ferreted open by wild animals, or they get eroded away by the weather, particularly if they're exposed by winds or water. Yes, unfortunately, you do have this tendency for landfills to leak.

Anything built right around the 1990s didn't really have any of those security blankets as it were anyway, which is why about 130 or so, perhaps more than that, of the sites on the Superfund cleanup list are former landfills. In a lot of these cases, we don't really know what's in these things. If you go back decades, people were dumping all kinds of toxic chemicals.

You got lead batteries, you've got house cleaning, you got paint, all this kind of stuff that mixes up together into this toxic soup, and has a tendency to leak its way out into our rivers and into our ecosystems. Yes, unfortunately, we're only really seeming to discover now the extent to which this is a problem, and working out how to clean up after ourselves, as it were. Landfill really doesn't seem like a solution that we want to continue, except in the most extreme circumstances.

Yes, particularly in the US, landfill is still seen as the go-to for our waste. We're not really recognizing the extent to which this may turn into a big problem later on.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. We are in our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on The Brian Lehrer Show this year, with our guest Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of the new book Wasteland.

I gave the US subtitle a minute ago. I see it has a different subtitle in the UK, where you are, which I'll give now-- The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters. I don't know if we should spend time talking about why publishers give the same book different titles in the US and the UK, but there you go. Listeners, wondering if any of you have taken steps to reduce food waste or any other waste in your own homes, food waste, in particular, really, right now.

How do you stay on top of composting, especially if you're living in an area that doesn't yet offer it, or you don't have an outdoor space with which to do it on your own, or any questions you may have for Oliver Franklin-Wallis, again, author of the new book Wasteland, 212-433-WNYC. Call or text, 212-433-9692. Even though I just invited listeners to talk about controlling food waste in their own lives, with the magnitude of the problem, as you were describing it before, and as your book describes it, I don't think individuals can do it.

We can't rely on that relatively small, I think it's fair to say, percentage of individuals who are concerned about this enough to take matters into their own hands, and compost, or otherwise minimize their food waste. As individuals, what we need is large-scale public policy. Would you agree?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: I would absolutely agree. I think that one of the big challenges that we face, and this is true of all the climate stories that you'll be covering, is that the big companies and industries like to frame this as an individual problem and make you think about what you can do, when, actually, the real solutions need to be much bigger. You talk about composting, in the US, I think only 5% of food waste is composted.

That's largely because we don't have enough cities that have collections and proper food waste management programs. That's an easy fix. It's like a low-hanging fruit. Also, I think we need to talk to about the big companies, supermarkets, food companies, about the size of portions and things, and give people the option. If you're a two-person household, do you need to be buying these huge family packs that are going to go off in your refrigerator?

There's things like that, that we could take immediate steps. I think farmers, as well, care hugely about this problem, because they see their fields-- They have big orders coming in from supermarkets, only to be canceled at the last minute, dry spells, or what have you. There's huge amounts of food waste that go rotting in fields, that we're not using. That's just a failure of the free market to fix that problem.

Also, I think there's a huge amount that food retailers could do to step in, to help farmers to make sure that food isn't wasted, and make sure that they can sell it at a healthy profit margin and help our farmers, because it seems crazy that we're throwing away food and people are going hungry.

Brian Lehrer: A few New York things here, you write in the book, the US buried or burned 81% of the food they threw out in 2018. Here in New York City, the sanitation department puts that figure at around 37% of all trash could be diverted into compost. That's an incredible stat. Also in New York, though, as composting local landfill also emits methane and carbon dioxide, but can be harnessed for energy.

Therefore, here in New York City, the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant began to consistently inject the gas into the national grid for the first time ever in March of this year, but I see the UK has been doing this for a while. Can you explain how that works, and how much this, you think, can be scaled up?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: There's lots of ways that we can harness the methane from food waste, or sewage as well, in some cases, they're the same thing, and we can burn that for relatively clean energy. A city like New York, composting has been coming in and out of favor, because it's just so difficult to do if you have people living in big high-rise apartments, and trying to separate that.

Now, some countries, like South Korea, and parts of China, have solved this through the use of technology, they have smart municipal bins and things that you can do to centralize the problem. I do think that, as you say, harvesting energy and doing that makes sense, where it's difficult to collect and compost, because as you say, it's not always clear cut exactly what's going to be the best thing for your city.

It seems pretty clear to me that the US needs to do a lot better at composting, there's so many environmental benefits of composting for the soil, for farmers, and for our food supply. It seems like a simple solution that we need to get right, and the US, I beg your pardon, is fairly behind on that subject. You're right, there's going to be all sorts of solutions here. The great thing about spending time researching the story is coming across some of these solutions and seeing the energy there is to do better.

Brian Lehrer: You write about how the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a global target of cutting food waste in half by 2030. How are other countries around the world doing at meeting that goal? We're halfway there, in time.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: We are seeing a huge amount of that work going on across the global South. In Africa, for example, we have a huge amount of food waste that is happening at farm level, things that are lost because of heat or pests, things like that, or things where they get to market and there isn't adequate refrigeration. Very simple things, like storage and refrigeration technology, and rolling that out across the world is making big strides there.

Generally speaking, I think it's been interesting to see different countries take different approaches. There have been tremendous success stories. I mentioned South Korea as one, Wales, here in the UK, is strangely another, but there are other countries that are still lagging behind. If we're going to meet this target, then we need to get everyone on the same playing field as it were, and everyone behind this issue, because as I said, when it comes to tackling climate change, this is one of the easiest steps we can take.

It's such a low-hanging fruit, and it makes such a huge difference. 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and the side effect is you get to feed some people. It seems crazy to me that we aren't talking about this more regularly.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I try my best to eliminate food waste in our home, when I buy full turkeys or chickens, I eat the meat, make soup with the carcass, bone broth, and goes on from there." Listener writes, "Your guest said that the US uses landfills, which makes it sound like other countries use other methods of waste disposal. What are those?" Can you answer that?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Oh, for sure. The US is among the world leaders in landfills, for obvious reasons, you've got a huge amount of space, which is a luxury that we don't have in the UK, for example, and to the same extent, the side effects, for food waste, the alternatives really are composting, or they are waste to energy, which we have mentioned earlier, which is something that has seen a huge explosion in Europe, and in parts of Asia.

That seems like a sensible solution in places where it can be done safely and well, and the emissions can be managed. My issue with waste-to-energy plant is incinerating your waste, essentially, and trying to draw some energy from that, is that it competes with recycling, which we haven't really talked about here just yet. The waste to energy plants really survive off burning things that burn well, which are plastics and paper, which we need to recycle for the carbon benefits there.

I'd be careful to support incineration too strongly, but it does seem that we have alternatives to landfill, that are going to be a better part of the solution, going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Since you brought up recycling, you detail in your book, how corporate greenwashing started the recycling movement. Can you explain that connection? Should people who consider recycling a good thing start to see it as a bad thing?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: No, you should see recycling as a good thing, although, as you say, it's a slightly murky one, the stories of it are fascinating, and the ethics of it are complex. Broadly speaking, in the 1950s, that post-war boom, when America was suddenly being flooded with all of these amazing new consumer products, we have this social problem of, "Okay, what are we going to do with it? It can't just end up filling the verges off the highway," which is what it was doing at the time.

There was a big question of, "Okay, how do we legislate against the packaging companies, for example, in order to cut down on our waste problem?" Now, the packaging companies all got together, and they formed this action group called Keep America Beautiful. Their strategy was to reframe waste as an individual problem, much in the same way that companies like British Petroleum invented the carbon footprint to try and blame individuals rather than big corporations.

It was tremendously successful, some of your listeners may remember the crying Indian ads from the 1970s. As a result, we've seen waste as the result of litterers, litterbugs, those kinds of things, because of this messaging over the last few decades. We're seeing now a bit of a fight back against that, and a recognition that actually, maybe some of the companies that are pumping out unrecyclable plastics, for example, should be paying a little bit more to help fund cleanup operations, or maybe not putting on recyclable materials out there in the first place.

There's all sorts of discussions going on at high levels, both in the US and internationally. The UN, at the moment, is having this big plastics convention, trying to work out how to legislate against the plastic industry in order to stamp down on recyclable products. We're seeing a huge amount of energy going into fighting back a little bit about that narrative that it's all down to individual choices, and maybe some of the answers are a bit bigger picture.

Brian Lehrer: Timothy in East Berkshire, Vermont, you're on WNYC. Hi, Timothy.

Timothy: Hello, gentlemen.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Timothy: Where I live, the largest farm in the entire state is about three miles away from me. We're talking tens of thousands of cows, therefore, you've got some manure going on. The owner of the farm owns some very large methane digesters, and he's working with Vermont gas systems to start a natural gas, or methane gas pipeline, to heat homes and whatnot, which I think is a reasonably good alternative to the fact that, typically, where I live, you just have manure trucks going up and down the road all the time.

They have all this manure, therefore, they fertilize it, use it as fertilizer. Then, what happens with that fertilizer is that there's so much of it that it runs off into the river and creates all this phosphorus in the river. I've got the second-largest river right in my backyard, and there's so much phosphorus and nitrogen. The damn river looks British racing green, the color of the water.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to [crosstalk] see, Timothy?

Timothy: What? Pardon me.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to see happen?

Timothy: Well, regarding the rivers, when they use the fertilizer in that capacity in these open fields, I feel what they need to do is create a perimeter where there's aeration, so it can go into the soil, as opposed into the river, or just create a perimeter. You can only--

Brian Lehrer: So that it runs off into something else other than the river. Timothy, thank you for that very vivid report, and we're almost out of time, but I want to make sure that we get to the idea of how not just to dispose cleanly of food waste, like by composting, is the main thing we've been talking about, but also to reduce the amount of food waste by the match that we were talking about at the beginning, that you referenced in your book.

How by implementing the right policies, the food that's grown around the world, that actually never even gets delivered. We're talking about food waste as what we leave over on our individual plates for the most part, but part of what you write about is how things that are grown never actually get consumed by people, and we could use the opportunity of trying to save the climate to also help alleviate world hunger. Can you talk about how?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Sure. As I mentioned earlier, when we think about food waste, one of the big things that I'd like to think about is not just what we're throwing away, but the lost opportunities that we've therefore lost by throwing that away. For example, we throw enough tomatoes away in the UK every year, that if you use the same amount of farmland and energy to grow wheat, that wheat could feed more than a hundred million people.

These things are not alike. You could be growing things that last longer, could be shipped overseas, could be feeding people who need it. There are some fairly simple solutions that I'd like to see. A big one is, supermarkets and food companies need to work with farmers. First of all, to treat farmers more fairly, but also to make sure that when they're putting in their orders, they're buying orders. They're not over-ordering for what they're being sold.

Now, that seems a relatively simple technological fix, and we're seeing some retailers do that already. There needs to be wide rolled out and widespread technological fixes to make sure that we aren't leaving edible food rotting in fields, and farmers out of pocket, as one. A second thing I'd like to see is a control on the amount of food that we are sold needlessly in supermarkets. We're sold two for one, buy one get one free, these offers, all the time.

A lot of the time, that's to reflect the fact that supermarkets have overordered, and it means that stuff goes to waste. There's a big link. Scientists have found that there's a big link between being sold those offers and the food that gets thrown away in our fridges. A third one, which is relatively simple as well, is that restaurants are a hub for quite a lot of food waste. We're seeing some very interesting technological fixes there now.

Simple stuff, there are companies where they weigh the amount of food that restaurants throw away, and they use a camera that goes in the bin to see what they're throwing away, most often, they say, "Hey, well, next time you're ordering, you don't need to order this many tomatoes, because you throw away 20% of what's [unintelligible 00:24:45] you're using." Those kind of solutions, which are relatively low cost, you could roll them out across industries relatively quickly.

Particularly talking about big fast food chains as suppliers, the Starbucks of the world, that can make a big difference. We could start reducing food waste pretty quickly tomorrow. I'm not saying that we're going to eradicate it outright, but if this is something that we can bring down, it's such a low-hanging fruit for our climate target, and it means that we can have less hungry people in the world every day, so it seems to me something that we could all get behind starting today.

Brian Lehrer: I want to thank you for translating tomato into tomato for the American audience. I want to thank you for being here overall, Oliver Franklin-Wallis, features editor for British GQ Magazine, in his day job, is now author of the new book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste, and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. I also want to acknowledge that the book is about a lot more than food waste.

He gets into clothing waste, he gets into all kinds of other things, but because we were doing this conversation in the context of our climate story of the week here, on The Brian Lehrer Show, the most relevant seeming portion to the climate was the food waste sections of the book, so we focused on that, but there's a lot more really interesting stuff in there. Oliver, thank you very much for the book, and thank you very much for sharing these pieces of it with us.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that's our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday, all year, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

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