Grantham Scholars Jonas Cromwell and Eunice Oppon work on Defra funded Sheffield Food Works project about food waste.
Food Works is a Sheffield based project that upcycles surplus and locally grown ingredients. Recently, they won a Defra grant to look at Food Waste. And they reached out to 2 of our Scholars to help with this work. Now this report is available to read.
Both Jonas Cromwell and Eunice Oppon are experts in food waste. Recently they worked with a local school to help reduce their waste. Now they have used their knowledge to help find a better definition for the resource value of food.
The importance of the environmental impact of food meant they chose an approach using embodied emissions as a proxy for the resource value of food. Plus they used an alternative measurement of impact of redistribution. This method (see appendix 2) has been used in the second and third reporting phase of the project.
Jonas and Eunice said: ‘We are thrilled that as sustainability scholars we have been able to make small but significant contributions to a non-for-profit organisation in the fight against food waste and hunger. And, that we have improved the Food Works reporting protocol for the project funded by Defra.’
To discover the real impact of Food Work operations, Jonas and Eunice modelled emissions from their resources, such as energy (fuel, gas and electricity) and water. Alongside this, they looked at emissions from food waste disposal to landfill or anaerobic digestion (AD) and animal feed (hilly farms).
Importantly, this means that Food Works can now report the ‘value of food’ in terms of the embodied greenhouse gas emissions saved by redistribution.
Overall, this approach is important because it does not only consider the social impact of the food redistribution but also the resource value of food. Plus it accounts for the organisation’s own environmental impact. Most surplus food redistribution focuses on the social value of food; this work provides an alternative measurement of the impact of redistribution.
If you want to know more, then you can read the full report here.
The University of Sheffield’s PREP scheme funded Jonah and Eunice’s work.
If you want to find out more about food redistribution, then read this interview with our volunteers at Food Hall.
Or, you can read Grantham Scholars Jonah and Eunice’s blog about food waste in schools.
After that, why not read how Grantham Scholar Gloria reduced food waste for Sheffield Students’ Union.
The main image shows Jonas Cromwell and Eunice Oppon during their project to reduce food waste in schools.