We're doing every Tuesday on the show all this year.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, landfills are the third largest cause

of methane emissions in the United States.

greenhouse gas. And much of what ends up in landfills is food waste. As much as 10% of all

global greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to food waste according to a new book.

So what does targeting food waste really look like if we're going to make a difference for the

climate in this area? If individuals and policymakers were to get serious about it,

joining us to outline the costs to the environment of waste we discard as well as efforts

to address it is Oliver Franklin Wallace. He's the author of a new book called Wasteland,

the secret world of waste, and the urgent search for a cleaner future. He's also the

features editor for the British GQ magazine. Oliver, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Hi, thanks for having me. And you write, if it were a country, food waste would be the third

highest emitter of greenhouse gases on earth, behind only China and the United States.

Wow. Can you take us into the science of that a little bit to start out?

Or I mean, as you say, the numbers on on food waste alone are absolutely staggering. So

the UN estimates that about a third of all food grown worldwide is wasted. I just not eaten.

When you think about when you translate that to farmland, that's enough hectares of land in the

world that are grown that are used to grow food that's never eaten. That farmland would cover the

entire subcontinent v India. And it's about one in five litres of freshwater extracted worldwide

are used to grow food that's never eaten. So as a climate challenge, it's a huge one, but also it's

a huge challenge because we have about two billion people in the world who don't get enough to

eat every year, 130 million or so, who are, you know, starving. So it seems to me to be this really

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