Sustainable food cold chain key to fighting waste and climate change

In a rapidly warming world the need to keep some things cold is growing more difficult and increasingly urgent.

Public health officials estimate that millions of vaccine doses are wasted each year, largely because in many parts of the world there is no way to keep them cold.

And a United Nations report presented this week to the U.N. climate summit in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, estimates that nearly a third of all the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, a lot of it because of spoilage.

Much of this waste, which results in billions of dollars of lost income, is in large part because farmers in the developing world lack the technology to quickly cool their harvested crops and keep them fresh for the market.

The means of accomplishing this is the so-called cold chain, a complex and expensive temperature-controlled food distribution system that ensures perishable produce is quickly cooled shortly after harvest and kept at optimum temperature from its source to its destination, or “from farm to fork.”

“The cold chain plays a key role in reducing food loss and waste post-harvest and in extending the shelf life of products such as fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat and fish,” say the authors of the report by the Food and Agriculture Organization and U.N. Environment Program.

It is a complex system that for developing economies – especially in rural areas where people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and refrigeration is scarce – is both expensive to construct and difficult to maintain.

Even in developing nations where cold chain infrastructure is growing, the challenges are staggering: access to reliable and affordable energy to run the equipment, finding trained maintenance workers to keep the refrigeration working, and training local people to manage a complex business.

The unfortunate result is often inefficient use of energy and resources, disappointing returns on investment and financial overruns. Food safety and the reputation and reliability of local producers come into play when cold chain experiences a break.

Environmental concerns

The food cold chain has serious implications for climate and the environment. Greenhouse gas emissions from food loss and waste due to lack of refrigeration totaled an estimated 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017.

The food cold chain overall, the U.N. report says, is responsible for about 4% of global carbon emissions. This includes emissions from cold chain technologies, such as energy production and refrigerant leaks, and from food loss and waste due to lack of refrigeration.

As governments struggle to mitigate global warming, emissions from the food cold chain itself are expected to rise significantly with developing nations gaining access to refrigeration technologies.

Developing a workable food cold chain creates, as the U.N. says, “a wicked problem” that goes far beyond installing solar-powered equipment or using more environmentally friendly refrigerants. The issues vary not only by country, but also by local economic, environmental, political, social and cultural circumstances.

But access to affordable refrigeration can result in tremendous economic gains for fishers, farmers and their families that have the means to get their produce fresh to the shelves and freezer cases of distant grocery stores and supermarkets.

Preserving medicines

As the largest single vaccine buyer in the world, UNICEF maintains an international network of cold rooms, freezers and transportable cold boxes to keep vaccines at controlled temperatures all the way from the factory to the point of vaccination to mitigate waste and spoilage.

In the last links of the cold chain, life-saving drugs that began their journey on jetliners are often packed in coolers and carried by bicycle, motorcycle, donkey or on foot to reach health clinics in remote villages.

To maintain their potency, most common vaccines need to be kept at 2.2 to 7.2 degrees Celsius.

Since health clinics in much of the developing world do not have access to reliable electric power, UNICEF is developing solar-powered refrigeration as an alternative to gasoline or kerosene fueled generators.