Trinational Cooperative Aims to Help Cut Food Waste, Boost Sustainability

In North America $278 billion of food is wasted every year that could otherwise feed nearly 260 million people. That translates to approximately 168 million metric tons; about 4.7 million gallons of water (enough to fill 7 million Olympic-size pools); and about 193 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (the equivalent of running 41 million cars continuously for a year).

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) was formed to help protect that continent’s environment while supporting sustainable development, specifically in three founding countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And addressing food loss and waste is high on the agenda of their trinational work.

The details of how projects play out in practice is unique to each country and community. But while the local context may vary from coast to coast, north and south, the type of environmental work is the same, and it’s done collectively, says Patrick Tonissen, head of Communications, Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

Addressing food loss and waste became a CEC priority in 2015, when the intergovernmental organization convened a steering committee to gather representatives from the three countries and guide the projects.

At its core the commision’s aim is to raise awareness and empower stakeholders to be the ones to affect change, explains Armando Yáñez, head of Green Growth unit of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

Experts, with CEC’s support, define long-term strategy. It’s done in three phases: guiding participating countries in understanding what food loss and waste means for North America; developing tools and research to help stakeholders address the issues; testing and improving resources and promoting their use.

CEC works with a network of stakeholders with funding from the Environment and Climate Change Canada, from the government of the United States of Mexico through the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“We have a North American perspective. We are trying to see where food loss and waste are happening through different sectors in the food value chain, why, and options to address this,” Yáñez says.

What he and others engaged in the work observe is that this waste occurs across the supply chain for different reasons, from improper handling or insufficient storage infrastructure to ineffective packaging. 

At the post-harvest stage waste typically happens because of inaccurate supply and demand forecasting, low market prices, lack of markets for second-grade products, and refrigeration problems. At the manufacturing stage it could be from trimming for product consistency, degradation, or contamination. At the wholesale and retail stages waste commonly is due to barriers like damage and spoilage, delays during transport, and overstocking.  

Measuring is key to identifying the problems, then coming up with approaches to tackle them. So CEC put out a  guide explaining to businesses and governments how and why to measure food loss and waste, how to track root causes, address common barriers, and evaluate and select solutions.

The publication provides sector-specific guidance along the supply chain and makes business cases highlighting real scenarios, for instance showing how a Canadian bakery saved over C$200,000 (Canadian dollars) and cut food waste by 29% through practices like improving retail inventory management and tweaking production processes.

CEC has reached out to the general public through an awareness campaign, ShrinkFoodWaste, piloted in Montreal, Canada; Mérida, state of Yucatán, Mexico; and the Olympic Peninsula region in the U.S. Their target audience was youth; the goal was to let them know what they can do at home to ensure food is put to use rather than tossed.  As part of that, CEC developed a Food Matters Action kit with activities.

Each region is quite different, so the approaches had to account for the population, particularly in Mexico.

“Mérida, is a city with many indigenous communities. Some of the people don’t speak Spanish; they may speak Mayan. So, we had to adapt resources to their languages. And some of the people had no internet access so we also had to adapt to that issue,” Yáñez says.

CEC created posters and handouts for children in those communities. For people in cities it leveraged traditional media, doing radio and TV interviews and reaching out through social media.  

“Thanks to some of our partners we got educational materials—3,000 posters— into schools benefiting from a breakfast program of the state of Yucatán,” says Antonia Andúgar, project lead of the Green Growth unit of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

Yucatán also distributed 13,000 CEC activity booklets to its primary and secondary schools.

As their landscapes and demographics are different, so are their food waste figures, ranging from about 549 pounds per capita in Mexico to about 915 pounds per capita in the U.S. But that’s for the most part where the differences stop, in Andúgar’s eyes, and that’s intentional.

“As CEC, we are not three countries or three environments. They cooperate, sharing one single environment, so common action is the way to go,” she says.

They address environmental issues together; plan together; and work toward sustainability together with the idea being to advance more effective environmental action.

The CEC has set six overarching priorities:

Lately preventing marine litter is receiving a lot of attention, with the commission building on that work with campaigns to help empower cities, local, and regional governments to get involved, whether through broader public awareness campaigns or grass roots work like clean-up projects.

CEC is also focusing on recycling plastics and bioplastics, with plans to conduct pilots.

The overarching goal is to help facilitate uptake of circular economy practices.  To identify best practices and help inform policy that would advance circularity and sustainable materials management.