Philanthropy Can Unlock New Capital Investing in Community-driven Solutions to Food Waste
Philanthropy has the potential to catalyze shifts in both consumer attitudes and producer behavior that could have a transformative impact on waste reduction at scale. In this post, Alicia Bonner explores how philanthropy can unlock capital by investing in community-driven solutions to food waste.
Earlier this year, I went shopping for salt. Scanning the shelves for that iconic red box, I was surprised to discover Diamond Crystal Salt had rebranded, clearly with the intention of decreasing their dye usage and increasing their product’s sustainability. Cargill, the makers of Diamond Crystal, have been on a mission to green their packaging supply chain, having announced in 2017 that they intended to achieve a 100% responsibly-sourced fiber-based packaging supply by 2025. General Mills, Cargill’s Minnesota-based competitor, intends to have 100% of its packaging be recyclable or reusable by 2030.
While it’s good news for the planet that two of the world’s biggest food producers have decided to make a dent in the 40% of consumer plastic waste that comes from packaging, 2030 is a long time to wait. Greening the food waste supply chain will require not only that food giants like Cargill and General Mills green their packaging, but also that municipal waste management solutions and consumer behavior rise to a new standard. Change requires a whole-systems approach.
The EU has a plan to make its packaging net neutral by 2050. What will it take for American producers to not only eliminate harmful dyes from their branding but also meet the same net neutral standard? Dramatically reducing American food and packaging waste problem is a complex project, but greater use of philanthropic capital investment could have a transformative impact on accelerating change in multiple ways.
Expediting packaging changes like those underway at Cargill and General Mills will reduce the upstream addition of waste into the supply chain. But upstream production changes take time and investment. Downstream differences in recycling capabilities from state to state and the absence of municipal composting means almost two thirds of America’s waste winds up in landfills. Presently just over a quarter of Americans have access to some kind of composting program while only 11% have access to programs that compost both packaging and food waste. Improving downstream waste processing options would have the dual benefit of making a wider variety of sustainable packaging options available to producers and diverting organic waste from landfills.
Philanthropists Addressing Post-Consumer Waste
Much philanthropic investment is already being directed at the post-consumer waste problem.
ReFED, an initiative founded by venture philanthropist Jesse Fink, has been aggressively investing in data-driven solutions to eliminate food waste while Prime Coalition is investing catalytic capital in a wide variety of commercially viable carbon capture solutions. Multimillion-dollar investments are remarkable, but unlikely to move the needle by themselves. ReFED estimates it will take $18 billion a year to reach 2030 food waste reduction targets, from a combination of government financing and tax incentives, philanthropic grants and investments, along with venture capital, private equity, and commercial financing. Mobilizing that amount of capital will require both increasing investor interest in this issue and unlocking new public capital.
A long-held tenet of the climate debate is that individual consumer behavior can’t make a dent in climate change, but collective consumer behavior drives economic outcomes. Supply will always meet demand, eventually. While new reporting requirements and progressive European climate regulations may accelerate changes like those already underway at Cargill and General Mills, consumer behavior will continue to justify production choices, unless consumers decide to change their preferences. Recent polls suggest that two-thirds of Americans are now concerned about climate change. But realizing there is a problem is not the same as being willing to adopt new behaviors to fix it. Companies will easily make choices that have the benefit of simultaneously greening and improving their bottom line, but customer appetites may have to change to fully shift the production habits of the market.
Shifting human behavior requires both bringing the desired change into consciousness and offering a convenient pathway to begin practicing the change. Jenny Rosenstrach, whose newsletter and cookbook, Dinner: a Love Story, made her famous, has now shifted her focus to helping her readers eat less meat. Her new cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians instructs readers on the burden meat consumption places on the environment and offers easy (and delicious!) recipes that make it easy to leave the steak off your plate.
The choice between meat eating and not is somewhat binary and non-meat protein alternatives abound. It’s more challenging, if not impossible, for a consumer to choose to only buy foods in recyclable packaging. At least once a week, I find myself staring down the back of a package with a bold line through the recycling logo designed to remind me it belongs in the garbage. Many packages lack recycling instructions altogether. So long as “When in doubt, throw it out” remains the prevailing waste management slogan, consumers are liable to place the gross majority of their waste in the trash.
While it’s tempting to think of consumers as individual decision-makers operating in information silos, in fact, community, when activated, can serve as the nexus of social organization and culture change. Instead of producing PSAs no one sees or reads, what if municipalities instead took a more human-centered approach to educating and engaging consumers about the realities and possibilities of food and packaging waste management?
The Power of Participation
Critics often accuse philanthropic funders of investing so much time and resource in studying a problem, they lose out on the chance to invest in an impactful solution. Too often, such studies and the decisions that ultimately result happen behind closed doors, without community partners having a seat at the table. Yet, investing in participatory methods in grantmaking and solution design can have a two-fold benefit: ensuring that a solution meets a community’s needs and increasing the community’s support for the result.
Philanthropy can have a transformative impact as both first-in and last-in capital: helping new market-based solutions gain traction pre-revenue and helping successful solutions reach scale. Yet, achieving scale is often dependent on user awareness. In the case of solutions that require behavior change, users can become actively engaged in understanding a solution’s value by being invited to co-design its implementation in their community. With philanthropic backing and incentives, municipalities could be encouraged to engage their residents in community dialogue and co-design groups. Bringing people together to talk about waste in their community and what to do about it could both educate consumers about how their waste is processed and galvanize support for new alternatives.
Mobilizing $2.4 billion a year in philanthropic investment to eliminate food waste may be challenging, especially when so many other climate interventions need catalyzing capital. But grants contingent on public or private investment could achieve the $18 billion target. Support from local residents paired with philanthropic incentives such as matching grants for green bonds could encourage municipalities or waste management companies to invest their tax dollars in new waste processing facilities that could help reach that annual investment target more quickly and sustainably.
New waste management solutions will require skilled management. As carbon-intensive industries like commercial cattle farming sunset to reduce emissions, the people who have made their living in those industries will need to find new vocations. Sustainable waste management offers a promising alternative. By investing in whole-systems approaches that activate communities towards common concern and co-designed solutions, philanthropy can unlock new sources of capital and accelerate a much needed change in consumer culture.
About the author:
Alicia Bonner is a communications and participatory design strategist with extensive experience, passionate about creating community-based solutions that foster sustainability and social change. She is the author of ‘Purpose Power: How Mission-Driven Leaders Engage for Change.’ She holds a Masters of Science in Applied Economics from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in Political Science and International Relations. She earned her ‘Leading the Sustainability Innovation’ Professional Certification powered by WholeWorks in 2019.
The banner photograph is courtesy of Nareeta Martin via Unsplash.
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