The Environmental Impact and Formation of Meals from the Pilot Year of a Las Vegas Convention Food Rescue Program

Samantha To, Courtney Coughenour and Jennifer Pharr
Additional contact information
Samantha To: Coconino County Public Health Services District, Flagstaff, AZ 86001, USA
Courtney Coughenour: School of Public Health, University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Public Health, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA
Jennifer Pharr: School of Public Health, University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Public Health, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 10, 1-10

Abstract: Annually, millions of tonnes of leftover edible foods are sent to landfill. Not only does this harm the environment by increasing the release of greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change, but it poses a question of ethics given that nearly 16 million households are food insecure in the US, and hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The purpose of this study was to document the amount of food diverted from landfill in the pilot year of a convention food rescue program and to determine the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions avoided by the diversion of such food. In the pilot year of the convention food rescue program 24,703 kg of food were diverted. It is estimated that 108 metric tonnes of GHG emmisions were avoided as a result, while 45,383 meals for food insecure individuals were produced. These findings have significant implications for public and environmental health, as GHG emissions have a destructive effect on the earth’s atmosphere and rescued food can be redistributed to food insecure individuals.

Keywords: food rescue; convention center; greenhouse gas emissions; food security; landfill diversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1718/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1718/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:10:p:1718-:d:231577

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().