Turning India's food waste into farm feed

topic:	Sustainable Consumption
located:	India
editor:	Bindu Gopal Rao

India has a massive food waste problem, with much lost before reaching the plate. The United Nations Environment Programme food wastage index report indicates that over 68 million tonnes of food is wasted annually in Indian homes, which is roughly 50 kilograms per person.

Pre-consumable food waste in India comes from surplus byproducts from food manufacturing supply chains, quality rejections, packaging damages, storage issues, transit losses, and pre-cut meats. Organisations like Wastelink seek to intervene at those points to make a difference by creating a circular economy solution that upcycles food surplus to animal feed.

Saket Dave, Founder and CEO of Indian company Wastelink, explains, “We work on pre-consumer food waste generated during the production of food from farm to fork, and we source all the byproducts and excess products that are generated. We work on collecting retail food, farm and agricultural food waste (like imperfect agricultural produce), hospitality food waste, and meat and meat processing that includes rendering and growing animals for various uses. We estimate 115 million metric tons of waste in these four categories in a year.”

Collecting this waste and converting it to animal feed has a positive impact. This has replaced the need for other commodities to be grown, saving water. It has also prevented food from going into landfills or being incinerated, reducing greenhouse emissions and gases. Apart from water savings, the process generates employment for women involved in de-packing and indirectly helps boost farmer income as it helps animals produce better-quality produce.

Krishnan Kasturirangan, Cofounder and Managing Director of Wastelink says, “We have handled over 22,000 tonnes of waste, including 19,000 tonnes of actual food waste that is converted into animal feed and 3000 tonnes of packaging waste that has been recycled. We have developed our proprietary greenhouse gas (GHG) impact model and estimate that we have prevented over 77,000 tonnes of GHG throughout our operations.”

India passed The Food Waste (Reduction) Bill 2018 to reduce food waste. However, a massive loss of food grains still needs to be addressed. The solution, then, is to take a holistic approach where all key stakeholders come together to mitigate food waste.

Photo by Lenstravelier.

Call to Action

Help end starvation in India