SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Diners waste far less food when they're schooled on the harm their leftovers can inflict on the environment. But if they know the food is going to be composted instead of dumped in a landfill, the educational benefit disappears.
When composting enters the picture, educated diners waste just as much as those who haven't learned about shrinking landfill space, dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and water and soil pollution, a new study found.
This presents a tricky situation for policymakers figuring out how to manage food waste, because the top tactics are prevention (through education) and diversion (through composting), said lead researcher Danyi Qi, a graduate student in agricultural economics at The Ohio State University.
"When you do both, they cancel each other out -- they work at cross purposes," said Qi, who is presenting the findings this week at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations in Chicago.
The original article information is available on OSU's web site.
People don't feed their scraps to the dogs & hogs?
(Score: 1) by Moof123 on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:28AM
Seriously, landfills with food in them are not a big deal. The food will eventually break down and make some methane and carbon dioxide. Far more worrisome are the various household chemicals and lead solder in electronics than will some day leach out and potentially get into the ground water.
The actual land area used by landfills is just not a real issue. The remnants of your dinner are rounding error in the whole scheme of resource waste. What a waste of political capital to even worry about this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2017, @03:18AM
For that to work there needs to be air in those landfills. Many are sealed up and actually quite stable. I have seen landfills where they do a core sample and pull out newspapers that look like they just came off the press yesterday and are actually 50+ years old.