A Key to True Sustainability: Making the Most of Leftovers Through Efficient Consumption
By Mark Jenner, PhD, Owner Biomass Rules
Economic theory promotes division of labor and specialization. As an economist, I stand by this, but specialization empowers a lot of smart people with hammers to only see solutions that look like a nail. The headlines claim we waste a third of our food, cows and their methane leakage ruin the ozone layer, and even renewable fuels from crops grown from ambient carbon dioxide emit more carbon dioxide equivalents than fossil fuels.
To clearly see economic reality requires a larger toolbox. Each month the world delivers more output with fewer inputs than the previous month. A small group of interdisciplinary system visionaries are able to look beyond the obvious and see this larger reality.
Global economic success is a big deal
Earlier this month, USDA’s Economic Research Service posted a graphic showing six decades of increasingly efficient global agricultural production. Finally! As a professionally trained, manure visionary, it takes more than a specific economic tool, like a hammer, to pull undervalued waste and leftover organics back into the economy. We must all work with a larger economic toolbox. But successful execution of leftover utilization yields more efficient consumption of goods and services.
Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is a comparison of an index of outputs divided by an index of inputs. USDA, ERS, has been doing that for domestic agriculture for decades. Domestically, since 1948, U.S. agricultural productivity has tripled compared to the input and resource base available back in 1948. This isn’t that farms got larger, or faster. It isn’t that tractors, computers, and improved genetics lowered costs. It is yes, and all of it.
Globally, we keep producing more every year with fewer resources. We can graph an increasing life expectancy and increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of each nation, for 200 years. This is due to a global increase requiring utilization of multiple output measures. But the secret to economic success is producing more with less.
The US Leads the World in consumption, but it’s really efficient consumption
We do keep finding new technologies to make our lives more efficient. Cell phones, more efficient vehicles, better pharmaceuticals. These add value and reduce wastes and costs. It is easiest to look at either the benefits, or the costs. What often gets missed is that it takes an entire system to fully utilize limited resources for the net benefit (gains-losses).
Food waste used to be leftover scraps from butchering meat that eventually became lunchmeat and hotdogs. Meat and bone meal is valued as an ingredient in livestock feed at $400 a ton. Not a bad price for food waste. Sixty years ago, whey from dairies was an added cost of waste management in cheese production. Through new technologies whey protein is now converted to food ingredients and health drinks.
Biogas and methane are both greenhouse gases (GHG) of concern and vital natural gas fuel. In 2024, 50 years after the Clean Air and Clean Water acts were authorized in the 1970s, Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) brings a higher premium than traditional fossil fuel natural gas. This new waste-to-fuel product has been so successful, it is currently being added to the biofuels production regulations in the Renewable Fuels Standards (RFS).
Economic indicators are guides, not perfect information
It is common for the global UN or FAO to report average production liabilities and social costs across the entire globe. When these global averages are used as ammo for a battle against domestic U.S. production, the challenge is usually inappropriate. The U.S. rate of consumer product waste is much lower than the rate of consumer waste generated by most other humans on this planet. The ERS global comparison of Total Factor Productivity looks at the average of all the nations over six decades and concludes that the inputs around the globe are below the index of 1.0, and the productivity is above the 1.0 index. Averaged over all the nations and six decades, the increasing efficiency is profound.
We use the GDP as a measure of economic output. It is a great performance measure. But it is not perfect. The GDP counts final goods and services. It does not count resale and reuse. Most of my career solutions to deliver new ways to add value to wastes and bring them into the economy does not get counted in the GDP. Waste is historically counted as final goods and services, but waste is an economic liability. Undermanaged waste is a cost.
Recycled paper has been around long enough to get counted in the GDP. The US government created a category for non-milled paper. The official name for recycled paper in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is converted paper. The 2017 Economic Census reports that 60 percent of paper sales, or $109 billion dollars, are from converted paper. Back in the 1970s, before becoming a formidable industry, this quantity of paper was simply trash.
To clearly provide a realistic view of the future requires looking objectively at environmental, economic, and social wealth creation simultaneously. The US EPA reported in April that 2022 U.S. Greenhouse Gas emissions were 1) below 1990 levels for the first time since 1990. And 2) because of population growth, GDP, and energy use continue to grow, but U.S. emissions on a per capita basis continue to decline.
The data and the message provided by USDA ERS that global factor productivity is increasing means that not only in the U.S., but around the world, consumers continue to produce wastes that are increasingly reused in the global economy. Well done, everybody!
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Mark Jenner, a friend of Stratovation Group, is a biomass economist and owner of Biomass Rules. His vision for biomass economic opportunity is unparalleled. Jenner is passionate about pulling underutilized organics INTO the economy rather than isolating them as wastes. Biomass Rules, LLC combines principles of agronomy, engineering, livestock production, policy, and economics to conduct feasibility studies and biomass inventories. You can contact him at: [email protected]. Visit the website at: https://biomassrules.com/
