But wasteful consumers in wealthy nations are not the only culprits. Poor countries, too, are tossing out perfectly good food, sometimes at the same scale, according to Elliot Woolley, lecturer in sustainable manufacturing at Loughborough University in Britain.
What’s notable, though, is that developed and developing countries have different causes and solutions for their waste, whether it’s food or any other items that could wind up in landfills.
In poor places like Chad, Woolley said, food is usually lost while still in the field or during storage and transportation, thanks to business inefficiencies. Once the produce is sold, families tend to eat everything they buy. That’s in contrast to British, American, and other consumers, who discard as much as half of their food purchases.
“I think this is a disgrace,” Woolley said Wednesday at the 13th annual Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing, this year hosted by the Vietnamese-German University.
Similarly, rich and poor nations have different ways of preventing waste — in other words, recycling. Australia and Britain, for instance, recycle 30-40 percent of their garbage, compared with just 10-20 percent in Vietnam and Malaysia, said Brendan Moloney, a doctoral candidate in engineering at Australian National University.
And yet in the latter countries recyclers make far more money, Moloney said in a presentation at the conference, because infrastructure costs are lower, as are wages among the informal sector of trash pickers. Plus, some recyclables like glass and metals can fetch international prices, no matter the geography where they’re retrieved.
“You end up with a much more profitable industry in emerging markets,” Moloney said.