Abstract
Food waste is a global problem. When discarded into landfills through traditional municipal solid waste disposal, food waste is costly, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and highlights disparities of food insecurity. Government and retail campaigns overwhelmingly target consumers as responsible actors for tackling food waste through prevention, reduction, and recovery activities. Multinational enterprises (MNEs), however, play significant roles in contributing to global food waste and therefore must also face responsibility for contributing to sustainable solutions. The organizational management of food waste through recycling strategies confronts multiple United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) with economic, environmental, and social implications.
Highlights
We routinely waste one-third of the food we produce in this world. This waste costs $940 billion USD and represents 8% of greenhouse gas emissions; over 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017; Hanson & Mitchell, 2017)
Most food waste is discarded through municipal solid waste streams into landfills, which is costly to transport and store, detrimental to the environment due to transportation carbon footprints and methane produced from landfills, and further marginalizes populations that incur the air, water, and ground contamination caused by this disposal method
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) can, should, and must be leaders in global sustainable development. One way they can tackle multiple Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) simultaneously is by treating food waste as a valuable resource
Summary
We routinely waste one-third of the food we produce in this world This waste costs $940 billion USD and represents 8% of greenhouse gas emissions; over 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017; Hanson & Mitchell, 2017). Despite being the most common destination for food waste, landfills are the last place food waste should go based on widely accepted food waste hierarchies (Dubbeling, Bucatariu, Santini, Vogt, & Eisenbeiß, 2016; US EPA, 2015) These hierarchies first prioritize activities focusing on prevention and reduction, recovery for human consumption, recycling for non–human-consumption purposes, with landfilling as a last resort. While these campaigns are important, they are limited in scope because of their narrow concentration on consumer
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