About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.

Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn’t carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all “processed,” and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We’re not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.

To learn more about IFT’s work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  (0:09)

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

We’re going to talk about food. Food is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, and the climate is now responsible for a growing share of what happens to our food. Food systems face dramatic challenges. Droughts are reshaping olive country in the Mediterranean. Warming oceans are increasing the frequency of shellfish pathogen outbreaks. Hurricanes are taking out manufacturing facilities. Sea level rise may flood key ports where food flows, and fluctuating precipitation is driving mycotoxin contamination in crops. And that’s only a partial list.

The food system must feed 8 billion people while the conditions it was designed for are unwinding underneath it. Meanwhile, the public conversation about food and climate gets stuck at the two ends of the chain: agriculture on one side, consumer choice on the other. But our guest today wants us to pay attention to what happens in between—the processing, packaging, distribution, and storage that turn a fall harvest into something you can eat in February. That middle segment is where a quarter century of food science meets the climate problem, and where most of the practical levers actually live.

Brendan Niemira is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a Chicago-based scientific association that has served as the voice of the global food science community since 1939. Its 200,000-member network spans academia, government, and industry. He stepped into this role on December 1, 2025, after more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where he led a team of more than 30 scientists, engineers, and students developing tools to kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish.

Brendan’s specialty is non-thermal food safety systems that use cold plasma, high-intensity monochromatic light, irradiation, and pulsed light treatments to disinfect food without cooking it. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds patents on the technology, and the 2024 citation rankings place him in the top 0.01% of food scientists worldwide.

Brendan joins IFT at a moment when food science is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, climate pressure on supply chains, food safety, and resource efficiency is intensifying—the subject of IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap for circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, food waste valorization, and emerging technologies like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation—that is, growing food in vats.

On the other side, the public and political conversation about food is fixated on ultra-processed food, and the MAHA Commission—the Make America Healthy Again Commission—frames processing itself as the central problem rather than part of the solution. IFT has been one of the loudest scientific voices arguing for definitions grounded in nutritional quality rather than processing intensity. That’s a position that’s both scientifically defensible and complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes much of the food industry.

So we’re going to talk with Brendan about what the climate case for a redesign of the food system is, what IFT’s recent white paper does and doesn’t quantify, and where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture actually stand in 2026. We’ll also look into why food safety remains under-researched within climate science, and how IFT is navigating the MAHA debate. To learn more about IFT’s work, visit ift.org; the white paper we’ll be discussing is available there as well.

The climate fight runs through the food we eat, but most of the action is happening in the part of the supply chain that nobody sees. So let’s find out what Brendan Niemira sees right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Brendan. How are you doing today?

Brendan Niemira  (4:46)

I’m doing great, Mitch. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe  (4:49)

I’m well. It’s a beautiful morning here in Southern Oregon, and I’m excited about this conversation. You spent 25 years at the USDA. What does the food system look like from this new vantage point at IFT? How’s it different from the perspective at the lab bench?

Brendan Niemira  (4:59)

Well, first let me say that I really enjoyed being a scientist for the USDA. There were a lot of great scientists working at the USDA, and I was absolutely proud to be one of them. Even with the recent losses, there are great scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts in different areas of the federal research continuum. The research done in those labs remains a crucial part of the overall science landscape for the US.

My work as a food microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service was focused on food safety and advanced food processing technologies—again, to improve food safety and extend shelf life. Now, as the Chief Science and Technology Officer for IFT, I get to engage with all of the technical areas of food science: microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, sustainability, food laws, and regulations. I also get to engage in the larger space around advocacy and science communication. I get to work with colleagues across the whole food system—all the way from primary producers like farmers and ranchers, to processors, product developers, all the way to nutritionists and retailers. So I get a much bigger-picture view.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (5:56)

When you think of it from that perspective—from the industry side—what do you think the key issues we need to consider as a nation are in our food system as it stands today?

Brendan Niemira  (6:08)

Food has to be safe, healthy, and wholesome, but it also has to be available, it has to be sustainable, and it has to be the kind of food that people will want to eat. It doesn’t matter if you produce something that’s super healthy and even super affordable; if it doesn’t meet the cultural needs of what people want to eat, if it doesn’t meet their expectations for how it looks, how it tastes, how it performs in their lifestyle, then it’s going to stay on the shelves, and all that science that you did to produce this product is not going to be any good, because it’s not going to provide any nutritional benefit to people.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (6:43)

IFT draws a sharp line between food processing—what you do to the ingredients—and food formulation, which is the ingredient list itself. Why does that distinction matter, and why has the public conversation lost that distinction?

Brendan Niemira  (6:56)

Well, we draw that distinction because if you take either one of those aspects alone—just the ingredient list, or just the ingredient processing—neither one is going to give you a complete indication of the healthfulness or the nutrient value of the food. If you use either one just as a simple shorthand—you say, well, there’s a certain thing on the list of ingredients, or a certain thing was done to that stuff—you miss the mark. You’re going to have to take both of them into account to look at the total healthfulness of the food.

Part of the issue with the public conversation is that, frankly, it’s a little bit more straightforward to give short, simple messages about which foods are healthy and which foods are not. Look for this ingredient, or look for that processing step, and it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The fact that it’s simple is true, even if those short, simple messages don’t give a complete or, frankly, a fully accurate picture. Food is more complicated than that, and complicated stories are harder to tell.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (7:53)

Our dialogue is, let’s just say, relatively simplistic right now. Are we diverging from the real issues we need to be exploring as a nation when we talk about the MAHA concerns?

Brendan Niemira  (8:05)

Science communication tries to make complex issues of science and nutrition, nutritional availability—even getting to things like cultural tolerance, cultural acceptability, economics, and all that sort of stuff—it tries to make these very complex issues understandable. Not everybody is a nutritionist; not everybody is an economist. People just want to be able to get food that they want to feed their family. They want it to be safe, they want it to be healthy, they want to be able to afford it, they want to be able to provide for their family, and they want to be able to enjoy it.

Food is about more than just nutrition. Food is about culture, food is about satisfaction, food is about joy. Those are things that simple stories can speak to, but the science behind this can be very complicated. So it’s the job of us here at IFT, and the job, really, of all science communicators, to take these complicated issues and present accurate, factual, complicated science information in a way that people can understand, and that they can use to make decisions on.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (9:08)

Having written about technology and sustainability and a variety of things over the years, I find that one of the challenges is that experts resort to their jargon, partly because it’s shorthand—it makes it easier to say something to somebody else—but it relies on an understanding of that jargon. Are we at an inflection point? I hate to put it this way, but is Bobby Kennedy simplifying this conversation in an important way?

Brendan Niemira  (9:36)

This is why science communication is a distinct discipline. You can be a terrific microbiologist or chemist or toxicologist or nutritionist or economist, but if you’re not able to communicate to people outside of your discipline, then you run the risk of miscommunication, where you’re trying to say something but you’re just not communicating accurately. And unfortunately, you also set up a situation where people can take what you say in your good-faith effort to explain it properly, take a word here or a sentence or a phrase, and things get misunderstood or taken out of context. When people draw conclusions from material that is misinterpreted, then base decisions on that, or policies based on that, you can get to a point where the science is over here, the communication is in the middle, it gets a little bit muddled, and then policies arising from that are based on something not directly related to what the science is actually telling you.

That’s why we try to support good science communication and try to give people tools to communicate the science. At IFT we bring a lot of different scientists together in different disciplines, and we try to give them the tools to make sure that people are understanding their science and connecting on it appropriately.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (10:56)

I think that’s a really important point: that we need to create full access to the conversation, so people who want to dig in further can go further and learn more, in order to deepen their understanding of the decisions they face, either as a consumer or as a policymaker. I’ll just give a quick shout-out to ift.org. We have lots and lots of information—some of which is intended for scientists, technicians, food scientists, and food technologists, and is very jargon-heavy—but we have a lot of information that is intended for the general public to consume, and that is intended for decision-makers in industry, academia, and government.

A moment ago, you talked about the food system needing to be sustainable. A recent meta-analysis found that processing, packaging, transport, and retail steps in the food process account for just a modest share of the overall greenhouse gas footprint of our food system—farm production and distribution account for most of the rest. If most of food’s climate damage is upstream, how big a sustainability lever can processing innovation actually be? Can we really lower the overall impact of our food?

Brendan Niemira  (12:03)

Well, you’re absolutely right, a lot of the impact is on primary production, and that’s why people are also working on reducing the carbon footprint, water usage, and overall sustainability impact at the primary production stage: farms, ranches, fisheries. If you go talk to groups like the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Meat Science Association—all those folks—they are working hard. They’re doing all of that science to develop and implement ways to improve sustainability in terms of carbon footprint, water-use efficiency, land-use programs, wildlife setbacks, insect refugia, and a host of other approaches.

Now, IFT does food. We do food processing, food science, food technology. So we are in the center part of that continuum, but we are actively working with those other scientific organizations to support the work that falls under those sectors, the overall food system, and to improve what we can do in processing, packaging, transport, retail, and so on.

Mitch, I would say this is one of those cases where we can’t allow ourselves to be tripped up by the false thinking that if we can’t do everything, then we shouldn’t do anything. Our Sustainable Food Systems interest group is an active and vibrant part of all the food science that we support. There’s a lot of communication between what they are doing and what other efforts are underway in other societies and other parts of it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:26)

Absolutely—we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress. We have to take important steps.

Brendan Niemira  (13:31)

Here at IFT, we’re doing what we can, and we are supporting the other people that are working in their areas as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:37)

When I read the white paper that I mentioned in the introduction, there was not a lot of quantified environmental data, but it seems to me that what you’re saying is that that’s an area we really need to dig into now. How do we do that?

Brendan Niemira  (13:50)

It’s by talking to people who are on the ground doing that work. I would not sit back here as somebody who focuses on food production and food science and go talk to a soil scientist and tell them what to do, or what they should be doing, or what I think is most important in their area. When we’re all focused on the same overall goal of improving sustainability and reducing the impact of how we grow, how we harvest, how we process, how we ship, and how we consume our foods, then we need to listen to each other. There are people who have expertise in lots of different areas.

Our food is complicated. People think, well, there’s an apple on the shelf, or there’s some hamburger in the cooler. Food is complicated—it really truly is. And all of the different people that are contributing in all the different ways, all up and down across the food system, the food continuum—we need to draw on their expertise and get together to solve problems that will work across the entire system. If one person working on just one part of it rolls out a solution and says, ‘Yep, I’ve done my thing, and all the rest of you should change to do what I want,’ then that may not be a usable solution, because it breaks other parts of the system. There has to be a holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:04)

As you say that, I realize how hard it is just to get food from my garden at the beginning of the season onto a plate at the end of the year.

Brendan Niemira  (15:12)

Yeah, and that’s encompassing. There are different people who grow different products, different commodities, different regions. You grow different kinds of tomatoes in different parts of the country, and there are different ways of growing food. Even on a very, very small scale, it gets to be very complicated. You have to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different kinds of infrastructure, a lot of different kinds of expertise and equipment, and so on. Plus, you have to comply with different regulations, different laws controlling different sorts of commodities in different parts of the country at different times of the year. All of this knowledge has to come together and be brought to bear on the problem.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:50)

Again, it’s a huge storytelling problem, but we have to look at this as a system rather than a bunch of separate parts that don’t necessarily interact with everything else.

Brendan Niemira  (15:58)

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all one. That’s why we talk about the food system and the food continuum, because going right from primary production through all the various stages of getting food to you, and then on the back side, taking food waste—say, away from restaurants at their point of sale, point of service, point of consumption—some of those aspects of where the food goes, and what kind of advantages we can gain from paying attention to where those nutrients are ending up.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (16:26)

One of the other—and probably the most shocking—parts of the white paper that I read was how our dietary recommendations are being undercut by climate change. For instance, the Mediterranean diet is recommended; it consists of olives, olive oil, tree nuts. But those come from regions that are warming 20% faster than the rest of the globe. How should we think about US dietary guidelines in terms of how climate stress is going to change the availability of food over the course of the next decades?

Brendan Niemira  (16:58)

I think it starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to grow, deliver, and consume food. If you’re saying, well, I’m going to lean into one kind of a diet or another—whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or other specialty diets, either recommended by your doctor, by a nutritionist, or recommended by your own cultural or societal predilections—where does that food come from? Is it grown locally? Is it shipped far away? Does it come from other parts of the country? Does it come from other countries?

And then you have to understand: this is what food costs—not just the money, but in terms of the carbon you’re using to produce the food, the water, the land use. Once you have that accurate information and you have an accurate understanding of what goes into producing the food, then you can start to make some other decisions about the health and nutritional benefits of the food that you’re consuming, or one aspect of it, and then you can make other decisions about the other sustainability parts of how you’re getting your food and how you’re eating it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (18:07)

You mentioned the cuts we’ve seen in federal research recently. As a microbiologist, where do you think federal climate-health research should be focused at this point?

Brendan Niemira  (18:17)

My specific work with food microbiology was in food safety, and so I was always very concerned with understanding the risks for human pathogens on foods. Despite the best efforts of food producers, you still do have instances where you have E. coli, salmonella, or listeria on one commodity or another. The way that you respond to that—there’s a sort of three-legged stool of responding to a food safety problem from a microbiology and food safety standpoint.

You can prevent these harmful organisms from being on your food commodity in the first place—that’s called exclusion. That’s where you do water quality monitoring, you do land-use history analysis, you do exclusion activities to make sure that the bad bacteria or viruses or parasites don’t get on the food in the first place.

Then you have containment, which is a monitoring system. That’s where you do continuous testing of foods being produced at the point of production, point of packaging, when they’re in shipping. Sometimes you pull samples, you hold them back a little bit, you test to make sure there are no pathogens on them, and then if you find any, that’s when you do the recalls and the trace-back analysis. Our Global Food Traceability Center at IFT is working very hard to develop protocols so that if we have a problem, we know where it came from, we can trace that back, we can isolate it, and we can contain it.

Then the third leg of the stool is eradication—that is to say, you apply techniques and technologies that will eradicate potential organisms. In one big way, we heat. If you’ve got ground beef, you can cook that ground beef, and you apply a thermal process that kills any potential E. coli or anything that might be on it. Now, heat is one technique, but you can’t apply that to lettuce. That doesn’t really work, which is why my research—and other people’s research—is working on other kinds of processing technologies that you can apply to more sensitive foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, berries, melons, other sorts of more sensitive products. Different kinds of novel sanitizers in the organic space, non-thermal processing technologies, other sorts of interventions that will kill the organism so they can’t cause any harm. So you’ve got exclusion, containment, and eradication, and all these different efforts working together. Those are the kinds of research that you’re going to do to have a good food safety impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (20:56)

Well, because exclusion is getting harder—because of the rising temperatures globally encouraging the growth of more pathogens, or at least the propagation of more pathogens—it sounds like that’s raising the bar for containment and recall.

Brendan Niemira  (21:09)

Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where one of those things is not an option, or you’re not able to do it as well as you were before, then you lean into the other two. If effective technologies for eradication don’t exist, well, that’s where you need to put some research dollars in to create them.

I’ll give you an example. Years and years ago, we had lots and lots of outbreaks on sprouts. Sprouts were the cause of continuous outbreaks again and again, and research was put into place to find: how can we eliminate E. coli and salmonella on sprouts so they can be as safe, healthy, and wholesome as they can possibly be? But just because we were working on eradication steps does not mean we were ignoring the other two. There were things like seed certification processes to make sure the seed coming into these sprouting facilities is as healthy as it can be. There were containment efforts—let’s do better trace-back analysis, let’s do better testing, so that we know what’s on there, so we can act when we find it.

So it’s not a case of, ‘Well, we’re just going to work on one and ignore the other two.’ You’ve got to have an understanding of what the problem is. You can address all the different aspects of science at once. I would say this is one of the issues that happens when you start to see cuts in science: then you have to start making some hard decisions—well, we’re going to dial back on one and we’re going to keep our remaining resources and put them into one of the others. Maybe you’re leaving yourself in a situation where two years from now or five years from now, you might say to yourself, ‘Darn, I really wish we’d been working on that.’

Mitch Ratcliffe  (22:45)

Do you think that the private sector can step into the gap that has opened? Or are we really at a point where we need to seriously reconsider our federal funding for food science research?

Brendan Niemira  (22:55)

Private funding—corporate funding—has always been a huge part of food science research. Companies fund their own research, and then there’s funding through grants and consortia funding larger works. Industry funds provide grants for academic researchers, and academic research is a huge part of this. Government research is a huge part of this. And in a time when you’re looking at research funding that is cut or under threat, one of the unwanted outcomes is that there’s research that’s not being done.

Some of our advocacy priorities at IFT include seeing that we want food science research—including food microbiology, food safety, food toxicology, whether it’s chemical toxicology, chemical safety issues, or biological safety issues. We want to see that funding. We’d like to see it increase, honestly, but at least we’d like to see it not cut. Because you can’t have good data without good science, and you can’t make good decisions without good data. So, if you want to be able to make good decisions and develop good policies, you need good data, and for that, you need good science.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (24:10)

We certainly have had a foundation of solid data in the United States for the past 50 years. I think we’ve got a great sense of the problems that we need to talk about. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to come right back and talk more with Brendan.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to the conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a 200,000-member network focused on food production and safety.

Brendan, let’s talk about bugs. The paper discusses a Costa Rican study where they’re taking a variety of food waste to farm edible insects. What’s the realistic potential for adoption of food made of insect protein in the United States, and is there a path even to regulatory approval for that in this day and age?

Brendan Niemira  (25:07)

Okay, here’s the thing. I actually just wrote a book chapter on edible insects and digging into all the ins and outs of this, so I happen to have a lot of this fresh in my mind. There are only a very small number of animals that we can take things that humans can’t eat—like cellulose—and convert. Humans can’t eat grass; humans can’t digest grass or the cellulosic material. Historically, the way that we have made cellulose into something that we can eat is to feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Right now we do that with cows and other ruminants.

But you can do that with crickets. Crickets have some advantages over cows: they use a lot less space, they have a shorter generation time, so you can be more responsive to market changes, they use less water, they use less energy, and so on. But then at the end of the day, you have this insect protein, and what’s the realistic prospect for that?

I would say that, because of the cultural nature of Western society, Western society does not have a cultural heritage of entomophagy—eating bugs. That’s the Greek word for it. There are other parts of the world that do have a cultural heritage of this, and so they have lower cultural barriers to having insect proteins as part of the diet, either as just edible insects—as a commodity, where you look down and say, hey, here’s a cinnamon-crunch-flavored cricket. These are products that are on the market.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (26:44)

I’ve tried these. They’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re also not something that most people would pop in their mouth at a movie theater.

Brendan Niemira  (26:50)

Well, certainly not in the US, and not in most Western societies that derive their cultural heritage from Europe. So if you’re not going to have these things that are identifiable as an insect, could you have insect protein powder as part of an insect supplement? I think these things are still in the market. I’ve tried it. I’ve got insect powder, and—you know, put my money where my mouth is—I’ve made brownies and cookies with cricket powder. They taste like brownies and cookies. It was okay.

As a large-scale process, I think you have to start with the cultural issue and the consumer issue, because if you’re going to make a product that—let’s generalize—very few people want to buy, it’s a very, very niche product. Then you are going to have that process remain a niche process, and so the overall impact on large issues of sustainability, or carbon usage, or moving away from conventional animal sources or plant sources of protein, is going to be kind of limited.

Where you might see much more of a penetration, however, is in taking these insect protein sources and using them as feeds for aquaculture. Right now, fish are not really able to digest soybean meal very well, so you can’t raise fish the same way that you raise cows and chickens. They’re trying to work to breed new kinds of trout, let’s say, that are better able to use soybean meals so you can get some of those economies of scale. But if you can lean into insect protein production, you essentially use the insect farms almost as a kind of bioreactor to turn cellulose—indigestible cellulose—into a digestible form of protein that can then be processed through aquaculture or chicken farms, conventional animal agriculture, that then would go into the human food supply.

I think it is still kind of a long way away, at least in the United States, from a time when insect proteins are going to be a significant or a major part of our daily diet. The FDA rules on insect proteins and edible insects, right now, are that they have to be safe and wholesome. They have to be tested for human pathogens, and so on. These insects have to be in a production facility that is dedicated to that production—they cannot be wild caught. So you can’t just go out into your local meadow and swing a net and start collecting crickets. They have to—

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:30)

They might be contaminated with pesticides.

Brendan Niemira  (29:33)

Pesticides, who knows—there might be other pathogens on them, there might be fungi on them, there might be potentially heavy metal contamination. So these have to be grown in a dedicated production facility. The FDA is certainly on the ball in terms of having an understanding of the potential risks for some of these things, and they have put rules in place to make sure that if insects are produced as human food, they adhere to safety rules and regulations.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:58)

The metaphor of the insect as a bioreactor with legs makes a lot of sense to me. But precision fermentation using bioreactors is another one of the paper’s big bets, and I’ve personally been involved in trying to raise some funding to create dairy proteins using acetate fermentation, which would reduce the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, so dairy’s environmental impact could be drastically reduced. Can you explain how precision fermentation works for our listeners?

Brendan Niemira  (30:30)

Sure, absolutely. Precision fermentation is a really fascinating area of research right now. The work that we’re doing with whole genome sequencing and proteomics and metabolomics has just led to opening a whole new chapter in what we’re doing with fermentation.

What is precision fermentation, versus conventional fermentation? People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, relying on yeast and bacteria to process raw ingredients and turn them into edible foods—everything from beer to bread to kimchi. Those microorganisms only ate certain things, and from a metabolic standpoint, they only produced certain things. They were useful because they were able to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into digestible sugars for humans. They’re able to take food which was not edible or provided very little nutritive value, into things that do provide nutritive value for us when we consume them.

But because it was gathering wild strains—and even after you get into the Louis Pasteur days of breeding new strains of yeast to make better beer—it was still kind of old-school breeding to get better fermentation cultures. Now, thanks to modern food science, we can really dig into the cellular, molecular microbial ecology. I mentioned whole genome sequencing, microbial community metabolomics, and so on. We can specify what metabolite or nutrient we want to produce, and we can design a multi-species microbial ecology that will produce it, and we can do that based on specific inputs.

Bacteria in the wild almost never live alone. You never have one species of bacteria; you have multiple species of bacteria all working together in conjunction with other kinds of fungi, and so on, to produce lots of different kinds of metabolites. Now we have a much greater understanding of that multi-species microbial economy.

The way I like to think of it is, if you imagine Little House on the Prairie, and you’ve got families—settlers—going out into this wide-open space, and you’ve got 50 families in some state, they establish a town, and that town behaves in a certain way. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if you introduce one person that comes in and opens up a church, and now the behavior of the town changes. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if one person comes into town and opens up a casino. If you have a church and a casino, even though they represent only very minor components of the overall population, they create this incredibly complex interaction—metabolomics, consumption, behavior. You get complex inputs, complex outputs.

Up till the last 10 years, a lot of this stuff has just been so complicated, such a black box. We have a good understanding now—a much clearer understanding. So we can take side-stream products from food processing, we can take waste-stream products from food waste, and we can lean into precision fermentation, design communities of microbes, give them the feedstocks that we want, and we can get valuable nutrients out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (33:48)

What can we make?

Brendan Niemira  (33:50)

Well, if you want to make lactic acid, you want to make certain kinds of vitamins, you want to make certain kinds of proteins, you want to do conversions of things. There are a lot of things that are useful in the food industry. You can make surfactants, you can make flocculants. Flocculants are stuff that, if you’ve got a bunch of solids suspended in material, you add a flocculant, and it causes everything to clump together and drop out, so you get clean water out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (34:19)

So, to put a finer point on it, we can make both food materials and materials that help us process a variety of things, including our waste.

Brendan Niemira  (34:29)

Correct. Absolutely. Flocculants are used very extensively in wastewater production, where you’ve got a lot of suspended organic matter, or you’ve got a lot of other suspended material. You add in some flocculants, all that stuff clumps up, and it drops out, and that really simplifies the process of filtration and cleaning the water, so you can get clean water back into the environment.

From a food standpoint—stepping away from the wastewater stuff—let’s say that you’re producing beer, you’re producing wine, you’re producing yogurt, you’re producing some other kind of liquid product. You might add one of these ingredients to cause oil droplets to remain suspended, or to cause sediments to drop out, or to give you better colors, or to give you different kinds of nutrients, or different kinds of vitamin production. All of these things can be the result of precision fermentation, because we have that understanding of what the microbes are doing, what they’re eating, and what they’re producing.

There’s a lot of research that’s going into this right now to work out those molecular details, those metabolomics details, and the position is to scale it up and then put it through its paces. Let’s get that cost engineering analysis. Let’s scale it up; see what’s it going to cost, where the weak points are, where we need to improve. So that you can then feed into developing a business case around it, selling your product, and working on consumer acceptance to get stuff out in the real world.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (35:51)

Going back to simplification: what we’re talking about is that we have been farming as a species now for 25,000 years with macro-level cattle and products. Where we are moving now is micro-scale relationships with nature that allow us to produce our food and other forms of materials and supplies.

Brendan Niemira  (36:14)

Right. So in conventional agriculture, let’s be generous—there are 50 species of animals that we use in animal agriculture, and these animals are used to take things that we can’t eat and turn them into things that we can eat or things that we want to eat. You’ve got cows, you’ve got chickens, you’ve got hogs, you’ve got goats, sheep, and so on. But it’s a relatively short list.

If you’re going from conventional vertebrate animals to insects, there are thousands and thousands of species of insects, only a small handful of which have really been looked at for optimization. Each one is capable of metabolizing different sorts of things, they live in different kinds of communities. And when you then go to the microbial world, you’ve got millions of kinds of organisms that you can use, and if you look at the different kinds of microbial community combinations, the numbers scale incredibly—like trillions of different kinds of combinations of microbial communities that you can create and cultivate and use in these bioreactor kind of environments, each of which eats different things and produces different things.

The goal is always to produce food and nutrients and food processing materials that are safe, healthy, wholesome, available, and sustainable. When you start to lift your eyes up to the skies and see all the possibilities out there, it really becomes—I don’t want to say magical, because I’m a scientist—but it becomes amazing to think about all the things that we could do if we were able to lean into the kind of science that would allow us to take advantage of all these different things.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:02)

It is magical in the sense that Arthur C. Clarke meant it: any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic until it becomes normalized.

Brendan Niemira  (38:11)

Just imagine that you had some kind of a tank and you put in garbage and you get out gumdrops. Wow, that’s magic. Well, okay, obviously we’re oversimplifying, because there are all the various steps involved in that. But at IFT, what we’re trying to do is bring together all of the different food scientists and food technologists who have the knowledge that will allow us to do some of those things—to increase the food supply, make it safer, make it more wholesome, make it more available, and do it in a way that people can access and that they can have knowledge and confidence in using.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:50)

Another topic in the paper was cultivated meats, and this is something that we’ve had folks on the show talking about several times. In 2013, a burger grown in the lab cost about $300,000, and it’s under $40 today. We’re talking about meat that is coming out of a lab, not something processed to appear like meat. Where’s that technology realistically today? Because that number is 10 years old.

Brendan Niemira  (39:16)

It’s getting better. I don’t recall exactly what the latest numbers on that are—whether it’s gone down to $20 or $15 or where it is—but this is one of the big areas of technology that people are looking at. Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted this back in 1955, but actually, I believe it was Winston Churchill who predicted this. I’m trying to remember the quote, but he said something like, someday we’re going to be able to raise chicken legs without having to raise a whole chicken.

Are we there yet? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s been a lot of work that’s been done on this. Cellular agriculture, now, to create meat cells, whether they’re from pork or beef or chicken or fish, to grow these out so that they look, taste, perform, and smell like—I’m not saying like the real thing, because they are the real thing, and this is ultimately what it is, but like conventional, traditional things that everybody is used to.

Part of the work that’s gone into it has been to show that, yeah, you can do this—you can produce these, and they look like a burger, tastes like a burger. But can you do it in a way that’s going to allow you to make that available to people, so that it’s not just a very, very billionaire niche novelty product? That’s part of the challenge, but I think that’s part of the challenge with any kind of food technology innovation.

Mitch, you start in the lab, and you begin with saying, well, is this even possible? And once you’ve demonstrated that it’s possible, then you start to develop that out, and you say, well, how do we lean into some of the engineering stuff to make it realistic, and realism falls in—what people will be willing to buy, from a cultural acceptability standpoint, from their expectation of what food is, how much it’s going to cost, how available it’s going to be, and what are the inputs necessary to create it? That’ll dictate a lot of the overall feel and the overall landscape in which these new products are going to operate.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (41:36)

It’s a data problem to a very great degree, and one of the areas the paper goes into in depth is how AI-driven supply chain modeling and various forms of traceability can perform as climate adaptation tools. Where are those technologies actually deployed today at commercial scale that you might be aware of? And do you have any evidence that they’re actually reducing emissions, reducing the overall impact of our food system on the planet?

Brendan Niemira  (42:00)

A lot of the AI tools—I can tell you what the AI tools are doing now, and probably by the time this show airs, they might have changed.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:09)

Obsolescence is an hourly thing today.

Brendan Niemira  (42:12)

AI tools are moving so fast. But AI is one of those areas where, if you want to know how much something costs, or how much water you’re using to produce it, or how much of an impact you’re having—being able to go into the data and ask sophisticated questions of complicated datasets is one of the things that AI is very, very good at. It does it quickly, so you can get to: what are the trends, what are the key points, what are the key pain points, where do we need to lean in and do more research and do better, so that we can get a better outcome on the back side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:48)

So we’re just beginning in that process, along with the leaps that we’re taking in various forms of fermentation and cellular agriculture. Can you paint a picture of where you think the food system should be in 10 years in order for us to start to transition through the climate era?

Brendan Niemira  (43:06)

The food system should be more holistic. That, I think, is one of the things that will make a big difference in terms of our overall ability to respond to issues of sustainability. It encompasses everything that falls under that. Right now there are disparate areas of science and disparate areas of scientific inquiry that are a little bit isolated.

I like to make the joke: if you’ve got an apple on the tree and you’ve got a bacteria on that apple, it’s a plant pathology problem. But as soon as the apple falls from the tree—well, now it’s a food microbiology problem. You need to get the plant pathologist and the food microbiologist talking to each other so they have an understanding of the continuum. I think if we’re going to respond to these large, complicated problems, then we need to have a greater connection between different areas and different scientific disciplines, so that we can adopt and create that holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (44:04)

Well, IFT is doing a lot of work to articulate that. You mentioned ift.org earlier. How do people follow your work? What do you recommend they do to keep track and keep at the cutting edge, so they understand these things as they evolve?

Brendan Niemira  (44:19)

Well, you can join IFT. That’s an easy one. If you go to ift.org, there’s membership information right there. We’re a great group of folks, very active and very involved in all kinds of different areas of food science and food technology. We make a big effort to publicize what we’re trying to do, the science that’s done, the research that we connect. When we have all the different areas—people working within the field of food science come to the meeting and they connect with us—academia, industry, and government members of IFT—when we connect them all together, we publish, like the white papers we’re talking about right now. We do press releases, we do commentary on different things, we engage in media responses, all kinds of stuff. Some of this is kind of hot-button issue of the day, and other times we comment on larger scientific issues—big landscape issues that are going to affect us now and tomorrow, and over the next 20 years.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:24)

Well, Brendan, thanks. This has been an eye-opening conversation, really interesting.

Brendan Niemira  (45:27)

Well, Mitch, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I really appreciate your having me on the show.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:34)

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, the Chicago-based scientific society that has connected food scientists across academia, government, and industry since 1939. You can learn more about IFT’s work and read that new white paper we discussed, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, at ift.org.

Most of the climate fight in food is happening in the middle of the supply chain, where the public has almost no visibility, and the policy debate keeps looking somewhere else. Brendan described a three-legged stool for food safety—exclusion, containment, and eradication—noting that as the planet warms, exclusion gets harder. That’s because pathogens can travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to. That single observation reframes food safety as climate adaptation work. And it lands at exactly the moment when federal research capacity at agencies like the USDA Agricultural Research Service is being thinned out. Roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, and the people best positioned to redesign safety and efficiency at the processing, packaging, and distribution layers of our food system are being asked to do more with less.

The first idea worth elevating from our conversation is the distinction that IFT keeps insisting on between food processing and food formulation. In other words, the question of what we should do to the ingredients, instead of what’s included in the ingredient list, is critical to the sustainability and health outcomes of what we eat. Brendan is right that the thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach we see in federal decisions these days may drive engagement, but it confuses policy.

The MAHA Commission’s framing treats processing intensity as the problem, and that collapses a category that includes both deep-fried snack cakes and shelf-stable beans, both ultra-formulated soda and pasteurized milk, into grossly simplified yes-no, us-versus-them choices. That’s not what we need right now.

The climate consequences matter. Many of the technologies that extend shelf life, cut food waste, and reduce cold-chain energy demand involve processing. If we regulate processing, treating it as a proxy for harm, we hobble some of the most useful tools we have for cutting the system’s environmental footprint and improving its safety. IFT’s response—to define nutritional quality by what the food does in the body, not by how it was made—is scientifically defensible. It is also, as Brendan acknowledged in his own way, complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes the companies whose products would be reclassified under any new rule.

The second idea I want to dig into for a moment is microbial agriculture as a structural shift in what farming means. Farming in 50 years will be as unrecognizable to us as today’s agricultural system would be to a farmer plucked from 1890, when 43% of Americans worked on farms. Humans had domesticated perhaps 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, and Brendan’s point is that precision fermentation, built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics, opens up access to trillions of possible microbial community combinations. Precision fermentation can take side streams and waste streams from existing food processing and convert them into all sorts of things—dairy proteins, food ingredients, even in water treatment systems.

That’s a circular bioeconomy story, and one that all of you who’ve been listening for years are aware of. It aligns with the case made by my recent guest, Jasper Steinhausen, that sustainability should be a profitability lever, not just a cost center. We have the opportunity to invent entire new industries here, folks.

The third idea is one that we return to most often, and that’s holism—thinking in systems. The climate problem doesn’t respect the disciplinary boundaries that scientists observe every day. The IFT white paper’s call for AI-enabled supply chain modeling sits right at the center of this argument. That’s not because AI is magic, but because the food system data we rely on is fragmented across many actors who don’t currently talk to each other, and pulling that data into a coherent picture is the kind of work that modern LLMs are actually good at.

The critical issue here is that federal research cuts don’t just slow individual programs—they erode the connective tissue between disciplines, and the connective tissue is where climate adaptation has to happen. Innovation is the product of diverse solutions being combined in new ways, and the most unexpected connections often yield the greatest impact. So we need more cross-disciplinary discussion, not less.

The food system is being asked to feed 8 billion people under conditions that it wasn’t designed for, with less federal science capacity, a public conversation that mistakes processing for poison, and a set of emerging technologies that are scientifically ready but culturally challenging—as our discussion about insect protein showed.

So here’s the headline to remember from my conversation with Brendan Niemira: IFT is making the case that food science is climate science, and we’re going to be watching how that argument lands as the MAHA debate continues, and as the 2026 dietary guidelines evolve. Hopefully they won’t mutate too much.

If this episode gave you something to chew on, please share it with someone in your world to make new connections possible. And would you consider leaving a review of Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or any of the other purveyors of podcast goodness where you can listen to the show? You folks are the amplifiers that help spread more ideas to create less waste. And our archive of more than 550 episodes is there anytime you want to dig deeper.

Thanks, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: IFT’s Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science appeared first on Earth911.

Each year, the U.S. discards 38 to 40 percent of its food, a stubbornly high figure. Yet, other countries like the Czech Republic, Israel, and Denmark show promising solutions that American cities are beginning to adopt.

The global challenge is similarly daunting. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about one-third of all food produced for people worldwide is lost or wasted each year. This is not just a moral issue, since so many people go hungry, but also a big climate problem. Project Drawdown lists cutting food waste as one of the top three ways to fight climate change. Some countries have been working on this for years and offer lessons for others.

Czech Republic: Rooted in Preservation Culture

Home-grown produce from backyard vegetable gardens supplements family meals throughout the Czech Republic. Residents tend fruit trees, greenhouses, and chicken coops. Many rent municipal allotment plots to use as supplemental gardens. Home composting is common and deeply normalized.

Czechs don’t just eat what their gardens yield—they savor the adventure! During mushroom and wild garlic season, families head outdoors to forage together. Extra produce finds a second life as jams or pickles, or gets frozen and fermented into tangy cabbage. Got leftover fruit? Send it to a local distillery for a splash of homemade liquor. Even stale bread avoids the bin, reborn as crispy breadcrumbs straight from your kitchen.

Apps like Nesnězeno let Czech restaurants, bakeries, cafés, and grocery stores sell extra food as discounted ‘rescue bags,’ priced 50 to 70% below retail — for pickup before closing. This connects surplus food with local buyers looking for a good deal. By the end of 2024, Nesnězeno had 1,487 partner businesses, a 132% increase from the year before, and had expanded across all Czech regions. Prague led with 239,000 rescued packages (41% of the total), followed by South Moravian and Pilsen, according to MediaGuru.

The app has been downloaded by more than 3 million users and has saved over 3 million packages of unsold meals overall.

The Czech Republic’s recycling rate for municipal waste went up from 32% in 2017 to 44% in 2021, just below the EU average. However, separating and collecting food waste is still inconsistent. A new national program for collecting kitchen animal-based waste, starting in 2026, aims to fix this.

 

Israel: Food Rescue as National Resilience

Food and water security in Israel are inseparable from politics. Leket Israel, the country’s largest food bank, pursues a mission of “food rescue” that serves Israelis regardless of background, coordinating with farms, packing houses, hotels, and catering operations to redirect surplus food to 200 nonprofits serving those in need.

Bustling outdoor food markets are traditional fixtures in Israeli cities, bringing consumers closer to the source of their food. In such busy places, edible food regularly ends up on the ground. Volunteers with Leket collect leftovers to distribute to people in need.

Leket released its 10th annual Food Waste and Rescue Report in late 2025. The report showed that Israel threw away 2.6 million tons of food, or 39% of what it produced, similar to the U.S. This wasted food was worth about $7 billion, or 1.3% of the country’s GDP. Still, there has been progress: food waste per person dropped 13.3% over the last ten years, from 300 kg to 260 kg per year. This improvement is thanks to more public awareness, serving food on individual plates in cafeterias, and more online food orders. But population growth and higher food prices have kept the total amount of wasted food high.

Leket and its partners now rescue about 45,000 tons of food each year, 2.25 times more than a decade ago. Still, this is only 5% of the food that could be saved in Israel. The Food Donation Encouragement Law, first passed in 2018, was updated in 2024 to give more legal protection to donors and require large public institutions to donate food.

In September 2025, Israel released its first national plan to cut food loss and waste, written by the Ministries of Environmental Protection and Agriculture. This was a big step toward better policy coordination. Israeli AgTech companies are also known worldwide for using technology to reduce food waste. For example, Sufresca makes edible coatings to keep produce fresh longer, and Taranis uses drones and AI to spot crop problems early.

Denmark: Culture as Infrastructure

In Denmark, people often leave free food in boxes on the sidewalk. Signs in front of homes might offer free apples or potatoes, or eggs for sale using the honor system. There are also Facebook groups in every major Danish city for dumpster diving, where people collect edible food that supermarkets throw away after the best-by date.

Supermarkets in Denmark lower prices on food that is close to its best-by date, especially baked goods, which are marked down every evening after 7 or 8 p.m. Food producers and supermarket chains work with groups like Too Good To Go and WeFood, Denmark’s first surplus food supermarket, to sell rescued food at big discounts. Chains like REMA 1000, Coop, and LIDL have also stopped offering bulk-buy discounts that encouraged people to buy more than they needed.

Too Good To Go started in Copenhagen in 2015 and has grown quickly. In 2023, the app saved 121.7 million meals worldwide, up 46% from 2022, and helped prevent about 362,000 tons of CO2 emissions. The app now works in over 17 countries and has more than 85 million users.

The WeFood surplus grocery network, which began as a single location in Copenhagen in 2016, has grown to six stores across Denmark. And a voluntary national commitment, “Denmark Against Food Waste,” united more than 25 food producers and retailers behind a shared goal of halving food waste by 2030. An independent third party measures and publishes annual progress.

What the U.S. Has Borrowed

Some of the ideas first used in these three countries are now catching on in the United States. However, there are still big challenges slowing progress.

Too Good To Go started in the U.S. in late 2020 and has been growing ever since. By mid-2025, the app was available in almost half of U.S. states, including cities such as Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. The number of meals saved grew by 67% each year. In 2024, Circle K convenience stores joined the app nationwide. Too Good To Go now also works with big chains like Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee, and Just Salad.

Since 2020, most progress on food waste in the U.S. has happened at the state level. In 2024, 29 states introduced 100 distinct food waste bills, and 18 passed. California’s SB 1383, which started in 2022, brought organics collection to 94% of communities and rescued 217,000 tons of surplus food in 2023. Washington state also passed a major law in 2022, requiring businesses that generate large amounts of organic waste to compost or arrange for collection.

Federal legislation has moved slowly. As of 2024, 13 pending federal food waste bills were before Congress, including the bipartisan Food Date Labeling Act of 2023, which would standardize confusing “best by” and “sell by” date labeling  — but none had passed. The lack of national date-label standards is a key driver of household waste, as consumers discard food that is still safe to eat.

In 2015, the U.S. promised to cut food waste in half by 2030. But a 2025 study in Nature Food found that the amount of food wasted per person in 2022, at 328.5 pounds, was about the same as in 2016. The study said that no state is on track to meet the federal goal with current policies. It also pointed out that the U.S. focuses too much on recycling food waste instead of preventing or rescuing it. In contrast, Denmark and the Czech Republic work to keep food from becoming waste in the first place, while U.S. policy mostly deals with food after it’s already lost.

What You Can Do

• Download Too Good To Go or a similar app to save extra food from restaurants and grocery stores in your area.
• Volunteer at a local food bank to help get rescued food to people who need it. You’ll also learn more about food inequality in your community.
• Check out local CSAs and farmers’ markets to help cut down on food lost in big supply chains.
• Composting at home is a simple way to recycle food scraps. If you live in an apartment, see if your city has a compost drop-off program.
• Ask your supermarket to start marking down food that is close to its best-by date. This is common in Denmark but not in the U.S.
• Reach out to your congressional representatives and ask them to support the Food Date Labeling Act. Standardized date labels could make a big difference at the national level.
• Use the Earth911 recycling search tool to find recycling and food drop-off options near you.

Editor’s Note: Originally written by Chloe Skye on March 10, 2020, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post 3 Countries’ Food Waste Strategies: What Can They Teach Us? appeared first on Earth911.

Oyen Digital recently announced the U35 Bolt+ USB4 (80Gbps) portable SSD that makes some pretty lofty promises. Designed for speed and built to withstand the elements, Oyen says it delivers up to 6,000 MB/s transfer speeds. That would be the fastest PetaPixel has ever seen.

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Fair Trade aims to create a more ethical and sustainable way of trading that puts people and the environment first. It offers a conscious alternative to global markets, where profits often come at the cost of farmers, fishers, and factory workers at the start of the supply chain.

When you pick up a bag of coffee or a chocolate bar with a Fair Trade label, you’re being asked to pay a little more on the premise that the extra money reaches the people who grew it. But does it?

To understand why Fair Trade premiums matter, it helps to know the position smallholder farmers occupy in the global food system. Smallholder farmers produce 46% of the world’s food on just one-third of the world’s agricultural land, yet they remain among the most vulnerable populations, with many experiencing food insecurity. Over 90% of global cocoa is grown by smallholders, small-scale farmers produce 73% of the world’s coffee, and 75% of its cotton. These are the people who literally work the soil and process raw goods at the beginning of supply chains for the products most American consumers buy every week.

When you think about paying more for a Fair Trade product, remember that these numbers reflect real decisions made by real people. In a Fair Trade USA survey of 3,857 smallholder farmers, fishers, and other workers, 68% said Fair Trade made a positive difference in their lives, and 71% were happy with how the money was used.

Fair Trade’s Origins

Fair Trade, as Americans know it today, started in the 1990s. Paul Rice worked with Nicaraguan coffee farmers to develop cooperatives. When he returned to the U.S., he founded the organization TransFair, now known as Fair Trade USA, encouraging large companies that sold commodity goods like cocoa, bananas, and tea to get certified. Rice stepped down as CEO in 2024 after 26 years, and Felipe Arango now leads the organization.

Getting fair-trade certified takes time and involves a detailed process. Independent auditors regularly check that farms and factories meet standards for workers’ rights, fair labor, and responsible land use. Certified products cost a bit more, and that extra money goes straight to farmer cooperatives or worker groups, who decide together how to use it.

The Fair Trade system has grown to include 1,896 certified producer organizations, representing more than 1.9 million farmers and workers, earned $241.6 million in Fairtrade Premium in 2023. That money doesn’t flow to corporate headquarters; it goes directly to cooperatives, which decide collectively how to invest it.

Fair Trade USA also has a big impact. Its program supports 1.6 million certified producers in more than 50 countries. So far, farmers, workers, and fishers have received over $1 billion in Community Development Funds. In May 2025, Fair Trade USA and its partners announced they had raised $100 million in these funds just for factory workers and their communities around the world.

What the Research Shows

The evidence on whether Fair Trade actually improves farmers’ lives is genuinely mixed, and it’s worth being honest about that complexity.

On the positive side, a study of cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire found that Fairtrade certification increases aggregate household consumption expenditures by about 9% on average. That may not sound dramatic, but for families living close to subsistence, a 9% increase in what they can buy is meaningful.

On the more critical side, research on Fair Trade coffee in Costa Rica found that only about 12% of Fair Trade-eligible coffee was actually sold at Fair Trade prices during the study period. When price-benefit-to-certification payments increased by 1 cent, the average payment to Fair Trade-certified mills was less than a penny. The gap between what’s certified and what’s actually sold under Fair Trade terms is a persistent structural problem.

A 2025 study of Fairtrade certification for four crops in Ghana found big gaps in how it was carried out. Problems included not enough training, rare inspections, and farmers not knowing about price premiums. Just having certification on paper doesn’t always mean real benefits for farmers.

The Community Development Difference

Fair Trade often has the biggest impact through community projects funded by these premiums. Since workers and cooperatives decide together how to spend the money, Fair Trade helps build teamwork and support networks.

Fair Trade USA’s 2023 annual report gives examples like farmworkers in Mexico getting dental and eye care for the first time, garment workers in Vietnam providing hepatitis vaccines, and small coffee farmers in Ethiopia setting up scholarships for their children. These are projects chosen by the communities themselves, not imposed from outside.

Which Label Should You Trust?

With so many sustainability and other certifications, it can be hard for consumers to identify Fair Trade options. Most Americans encounter two systems: Fairtrade International (also called Fairtrade America) and Fair Trade USA. They certify different products with different standards, and their relationship has been tense since Fair Trade USA split from the international group in 2011.

The Fair World Project, a nonprofit that reviews certification systems, recommends Fairtrade International as one of several strong third-party labels that help farmers. They suggest being more cautious with Fair Trade USA’s label because of concerns about its standards and loopholes. However, Fair Trade USA has made big updates to its standards in 2023 and 2024, especially for factories and farms.

Rainforest Alliance certification, which appears on many coffee and chocolate products, focuses more on environmental practices and uses different labor standards than Fair Trade labels.

Is Fair Trade Worth It?

Fair Trade is most effective in markets where cooperatives are strong, certification is affordable, and buyers agree to purchase all their goods at fair trade prices, not just a small portion.

One thing is clear: buying the cheapest products with no certification almost always means farmers and workers get paid the lowest possible price for their work. Research shows that Fair Trade cooperatives often improve farmer incomes, community ties, and environmental practices, even if not every worker benefits equally.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to learn about the different certification systems. Fair Trade labels aren’t a guarantee, but they’re better than nothing. For everyday items like coffee, chocolate, bananas, and tea, picking a certified product from a brand that buys most of its supply at fair trade prices is one of the most direct ways your shopping can support the people who grow these products.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally written by Gemma Alexander on March 22, 2019, and was substantially updated in March 2026.

The post What Is Fair Trade Worth? appeared first on Earth911.

Some of the best performers were companies that sell computer chips, memory and other products fueling the AI boom.

Transform an old file cabinet into clever, space-saving garden tool storage that keeps your outdoor essentials tidy and easily accessible! A creative DIY project that is affordable and useful by combining recycling with functionality for every gardening enthusiast. As a Fusion and Amazon Influencer, this post contains affiliate links in which I earn a small […]

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Glyph has announced the Atom EX80, a new USB4 NVMe portable SSD built with creatives in mind. Alongside the SSD, upstate New York-based Glyph also unveiled new high-performance 80Gbps USB-C cables for end-to-end high-performance workflows.

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Generation Z are nearly five times more likely than their parents or grandparents to prepare their digital legacy and have a plan for their photos after they die, according to new research.

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Corrugated cardboard makes its way from warehouse to mill in about two weeks. In contrast, plastic packaging can take centuries to break down, and even the most optimistic estimates say only 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic is actually recycled. This difference highlights both the promise and the challenges of creating a circular packaging economy.

Back in April 2020, when this article first appeared, the recycling industry was still struggling after China banned imported recyclables in 2018. Around that time, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, marking the first closed-loop corrugated packaging system. Five years later, the circular packaging sector has become a $245 billion global market and is expected to nearly double by 2034.

However, growth does not always mean true circularity. The gap between what companies promise and what recycling systems actually deliver is under more scrutiny than ever.

How the Recycling Loop Works and Where It Breaks

Many people picture recycling as a simple process: items go from the curbside bin to a materials recovery facility (MRF) and then become new products. In reality, the process is more complicated. Mixed curbside collections have about a 25 percent contamination rate in baled recyclables from MRFs, so more sorting is needed before they can be turned into new materials. In the past, this extra sorting was often done cheaply in other countries.

After China stopped buying U.S. recyclables in 2018, the U.S. was left with about a third of its collected materials and no place to send them. This led to a crisis: many communities lost their recycling programs, and it became obvious that the U.S. needed more domestic processing and cleaner materials from better recycling programs.

Paper and corrugated cardboard are still the big success stories in circular packaging. In 2024, the U.S. recycled over 33 million tons of cardboard, or about 90,000 tons each day, reaching a recovery rate between 69 and 74 percent, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. The share of recycled paper used at U.S. mills has grown from 36.6 percent in 2005 to 44.4 percent in 2024.

Aluminum also does well, with the average beverage can containing about 73 percent recycled material.

Plastic is still a major challenge. Only about 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic packaging is recovered and made into new packaging or products.

A Growing Market With Caveats

Europe is leading the way in recycling growth, thanks to strict regulations. North America is catching up through corporate ESG commitments, extended producer responsibility programs, and state-level policies.

Paper-based packaging leads in circular packaging revenue, making up about 40 percent of the global market in 2024. This is due to advances in fiber recovery technology and the fact that consumers are used to recycling cardboard. Reusable and refillable packaging is growing quickly, but it is still a small part of the market. As a result, the food and beverage sector makes up nearly 47 percent of circular packaging demand, and packaging companies are teaming up with recyclers to meet this need.

Industry consolidation signals how seriously investors have bet on this sector. In July 2024, Smurfit Kappa completed its acquisition of WestRock to form Smurfit WestRock, one of the world’s largest paper-based packaging companies, with $32 billion in combined revenue and 100,000 employees across 40 countries. Separately, International Paper announced an agreement to acquire DS Smith in a deal valuing DS Smith at approximately $9.9 billion. These deals suggest that fiber-based, recyclable packaging is a durable growth market.

The DS Smith Model, Five Years Later

In March 2020, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, right next to an existing paper mill and corrugated packaging facility. These three sites could make, use, collect, and recycle corrugated boxes in about two weeks, creating a true closed loop. DS Smith got clean materials from distribution centers, packaging facilities, and retailers instead of mixed curbside collections, which helped keep contamination low.

Since then, this model has grown significantly. DS Smith, now part of International Paper, and other companies have shown that fiber-based packaging circular systems can work on a large scale. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2024 Global Commitment Progress Report, which covers over 1,000 organizations representing 20 percent of global plastic packaging production, noted that companies like Amcor have “doubled the share of recycled content in their plastic packaging, making as much progress in four years as in the four decades before,” according to EMF leader Rob Opsomer.

Where Optimism Meets Reality

But the numbers are more complex than market growth projections suggest. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) found that the 2025 targets set by its member companies in 2018—to cut virgin plastic use by 18 percent, reach 26 percent recycled content, and achieve 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging—are now mostly out of reach without major changes. Together, these companies have avoided using 9.6 million tons of virgin plastic since 2018, but that is less than 3 percent of annual plastic production. At the same time, the overall market increased plastic packaging use by 8 percent.

Scaling up reusable packaging has been especially hard. Even though 64 percent of EMF Commitment participants have started pilot programs, reuse models make up only 1.3 percent of packaging, according to the Foundation’s 2024 analysis. The main obstacles are structural: the U.S. lacks a shared reverse logistics system, does not offer enough consumer incentives, and has no binding policies to make reuse practical.

Greenwashing has made the credibility problem worse. In October 2024, the legal advocacy group ClientEarth released a report saying that vague plastic recycling claims, like “100-percent recyclable” and circular loop images, mislead consumers about the real environmental impact of products and violate UK and EU consumer protection laws.

“The thing that blew my mind,” said Myles Cohen, founder of consulting firm Circular Ventures, at the September 2024 Packaging Recycling Summit, “is that in the company’s defense, they argued, ‘Hey, our statements were just classic puffery.’” Cohen called greenwashing “a pet peeve that damages not just individual companies but the packaging and recycling industries as a whole.”

Consumer trust is clearly declining. According to 2024 data, 32 percent of Americans now doubt that curbside recycling works, up from 14 percent four years ago. A related trend called “greenhushing” has also appeared, where brands stop talking about their sustainability progress to avoid criticism.

What Actually Works

Not all circular packaging strategies are equally effective. The evidence shows a clear ranking of materials:

• Fiber-based packaging, like corrugated cardboard and paperboard, has proven circularity supported by real infrastructure. The DS Smith model is successful because it uses clean materials and relies on commercial, not residential, collection systems.
• Aluminum is the most valuable recyclable material. Recycling just one can saves as much energy as half a gallon of gas. Beverage cans contain 73 percent recycled content, and steel cans are recycled at an 80 percent rate, so metal packaging truly supports a circular system.
• Reusable packaging is most effective in closed-loop commercial settings, such as logistics, food service, and institutional supply chains. It does not work as well in consumer retail or quick-service restaurants, where returning packaging is expensive and unreliable.
• Compostable packaging is only a limited solution. More industry analysts are skeptical because most communities do not have home composting, industrial composting facilities often reject packaging, and composting creates greenhouse gases instead of recovering materials.
• Plastic recycling needs a very specific approach. PET bottles and HDPE containers are recycled more successfully than most other plastics. Flexible plastics like films, pouches, and sachets are still mostly unrecyclable on a large scale and often end up polluting the environment.

The EPA estimates that updating U.S. recycling infrastructure will cost between $36.5 and $43.4 billion, mainly for better packaging recovery, more composting capacity, and improved plastics processing. This investment has been slow to happen because there are no binding policy requirements.

The E.U. Regulatory Push and the U.S. Gap

Europe has moved decisively. The E.U.’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) requires 70 percent of all packaging waste to be recycled by 2030, with plastics recycling rates targeted to double to 55 percent. Member states must cut packaging waste per capita by 15 percent by 2040 versus 2018 baselines. The European Commission is also requiring products claiming to be biobased, biodegradable, or compostable to meet minimum, verifiable standards to combat greenwashing.

In the U.S., California is leading the way with extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws and the new Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act, both aimed at reducing greenwashing in sustainability claims. However, there is little action at the federal level.

At the November 2024 Busan negotiations for a UN Global Plastics Treaty, countries failed to reach a binding agreement. This has left a major policy gap and prevents a coordinated global effort.

What You Can Do

If you want to make a positive difference, it helps to be both a conscious shopper and an active citizen. Here are some steps you can take in your daily life:

• Choose fiber and aluminum products. Corrugated boxes, paperboard, and aluminum cans have real end-of-use recycling systems. Recycling these materials truly closes the loop.
• Don’t just trust the label. “Recyclable” does not always mean it can be recycled where you live. Check if your local program accepts the material, and use Earth911’s recycling search to see what is accepted in your area.
• Focus on reducing packaging, not just recycling. Buying products with less packaging, choosing concentrates, or picking refillable options has a bigger environmental impact than recycling alone.
• Support EPR policies. Extended producer responsibility moves recycling costs from cities and taxpayers to the companies that create packaging. This is a structural solution that market growth alone cannot achieve.
• Ask companies for details. If you see vague claims like “eco-friendly” or “100-percent recyclable,” ask questions: Where is it recyclable? What infrastructure is used? What percentage of the material is actually recycled? Demand clear, verifiable answers.

If you value the environment, keep a variation on Smokey Bear’s familiar advice in mind: Only you can prevent the economy from burning down the planet. Your response needs to combine thoughtful choices when shopping with active communication with friends, family, the businesses you frequent, and the representatives you elect.

Editor’s Note: This article, originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 14, 2020, was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post Where Is The Circular Packaging Economy In 2026? appeared first on Earth911.

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

40 pounds of paper towels per American per year. The United States is the world’s most committed buyer of single-use towels, by a margin no other country approaches. Americans alone consume nearly half of all paper towels produced globally, and Europeans use roughly 50 percent fewer than we do.

Paper towels, facial tissues, toilet paper, and napkins together make up a quietly enormous share of American household disposable spending and a startlingly large share of global forest pulp demand. The U.S. uses about 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year, and producing them consumes roughly 110 million trees and 130 billion gallons of water.

The financial cost lands quietly on households, in $5 four-packs and $20 jumbo packs that add up to hundreds of dollars annually. The environmental cost lands somewhere else entirely: the boreal forest of Canada.

What 13 Billion Pounds Looks Like at Home

The average American household spends meaningfully more than the headline average suggests. Statista’s 2022 data put per-consumer-unit spending on cleansing and toilet tissue, paper towels, and napkins at $114.41. Paper towel users spend closer to $200 per year on disposable towels alone, with many families spending $400 or more. Toilet paper adds another $182 per year on average per household, with that figure rising during and after the pandemic.

Add facial tissues, napkins, and the kitchen-roll runs that don’t show up in pantry inventory, and a typical American family is spending $400 to $700 a year on products designed to be used once and thrown away. Over an adult lifetime, the math compounds: roughly $10,500 on paper towels and $9,500 on tissues per person. Think about that in relation to your monthly salary the next time you shop.

The volume side is just as striking. Americans throw out roughly 3,000 tons of paper towels every single day. Used paper towels can’t be recycled because they’re contaminated with food, grease, cleaning chemicals, or simply too short-fibered after one use, so essentially all of that volume goes to landfill or incineration. EPA’s most recent breakdown shows tissue paper and towels accounting for 3.8 million tons of municipal solid waste, or about 1.3 percent of total MSW generation. While that is a small percentage of total trash, it is a large percentage of single-use, single-purpose throwaway products.

The Boreal Forest Connection

Most of the trees used to make American at-home tissue products come from the Canadian boreal forest, one of the largest intact forest ecosystems on Earth and a globally significant carbon sink. Clear-cut logging for tissue manufacturing now consumes more than one million acres of boreal forest each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

These forests store roughly twice as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests. Each clear-cut releases that carbon and degrades habitat for boreal caribou, billions of migratory birds, and Indigenous communities whose traditional territories overlap with logging concessions.

The NRDC has tracked the paper products supply chain for six years through its Issue with Tissue scorecard, and the 2024 edition shows real movement at the top of the rankings — and continued failure at the bottom.

Source: NRDC, The Issue with Tissue, 6th edition (2024). Grades reflect fiber sourcing and recycled content.

Brand owner	Notable products	2024 grade	Notes
Procter & Gamble	Charmin, Bounty, Puffs	F Sixth year	Continues to source virgin pulp from boreal forests.
Procter & Gamble	Charmin Ultra Bamboo	B	First non-F grade for any P&G tissue product.
Kimberly-Clark	Kleenex, Cottonelle, Scott	D	New deforestation and forest-degradation commitments in 2024.
Georgia-Pacific	ARIA	A+	Relaunched as 100% recycled content; top of the scorecard.

P&G’s continued reliance on virgin pulp for its flagship at-home brands matters because Charmin, Bounty, and Puffs together command a substantial share of the U.S. retail market. The grade isn’t an abstraction; it tracks the proportion of each brand’s fiber that comes from intact, climate-critical forests rather than recycled content or alternative sources like wheat straw.

Why “Tree-Free” Doesn’t Always Mean “Impact-Free”

Bamboo tissue has become the most visible alternative to virgin pulp in U.S. retail, and it is meaningfully better than virgin forest fiber on most environmental metrics. It is not, however, the most sustainable option available — recycled content is.

NRDC’s hierarchy puts 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper at the top: it requires no new fiber, diverts paper from landfills, uses about 15 gallons of water per roll, and has the lowest carbon footprint. Bamboo uses about 25 gallons of water per roll, requires more processing, and carries a real risk of being grown on land that was previously primary forest, a problem the FSC certification system is meant to address, but which still requires consumers to read labels carefully.

Recycled-content paper towels are widely available, including from Seventh Generation, Marcal, and Trader Joe’s, and they perform competitively with virgin towels for most household uses. The case for switching is straightforward: same function, lower cost over time when bought in bulk, and dramatically lower environmental impact.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are unusually high-leverage at the household level, because per-capita consumption in the U.S. is so far above the baseline of comparable countries.

Replace the highest-volume product first:

• Switch out paper towels for washable cloth towels, microfiber rags, or bar mops for an estimated 80 percent of household uses. Keep a small roll of recycled-content paper towels for genuinely unpleasant tasks ( like wiping up after raw meat, pet accidents, or automotive work.
• Choose 100 percent post-consumer recycled toilet paper brands when available (Seventh Generation, Marcal, Who Gives A Crap recycled line, ARIA). If recycled isn’t available, FSC-certified bamboo is a strong second choice.
• Replace paper napkins with cloth. A set of 12 cotton napkins costs roughly the equivalent of two months of paper napkin spending and lasts for years.

The math on switching is more favorable than the sticker price suggests. Who Gives A Crap’s recycled toilet paper subscription runs roughly $1.03 to $1.29 per double-length roll, comparable to or below mainstream supermarket pricing per sheet. The premium framing of “eco-friendly” tissue products often reflects packaging and marketing more than per-use cost.

Push retailers and manufacturers:

• The NRDC tissue scorecard is updated annually and is the single best public reference for which brands deserve which share of the market.
• Retailer pressure has worked: the 2024 scorecard shows movement at Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific in direct response to consumer and shareholder advocacy.
• For the cardboard tubes and outer packaging, Earth911’s recycling search tool confirms local acceptance; most curbside programs take them, but not all.

Don’t flush, rinse

A modest bidet attachment costs $30 to $80, installs without a plumber on most U.S. toilets, and reduces toilet paper consumption by an estimated 75% or more in households that use it consistently. The water cost of a bidet is roughly an eighth of a gallon per use, vastly less than the embedded water in the toilet paper it replaces.

Paper-product consumption is one of the few household waste categories where a typical American family can cut its environmental and financial footprint by half or more with relatively small behavior changes. The leverage is unusually direct.

The post Paper Towels, Tissues, and Napkins: America’s 13 Billion-Pound Waste Habit appeared first on Earth911.

Crowds gather at sites across Belfast after Sudanese man charged with attempted murder

• Full report: Man seriously injured in Belfast stabbing Starmer describes as ‘sickening’

Badenoch said, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it was right that people wanted to ensure this did not happen again.

It led to the Macpherson report, she said.

[It] wanted to put right what went wrong with policing in the 1990s.

However, in attempting to do so, it also enshrined a principle which I believe is wrong that a racist incident is racist if it is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person.

Equality law, properly designed, should protect us all in the same way. It should be a shield, not a sword.

It should protect people from discrimination. It should protect people from being treated differently because of their race, sex, religion, sexuality, disability or age.

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© Photograph: PA

© Photograph: PA

© Photograph: PA