Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane) The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it ca…
Food is thrown away because grocery stores want to sell uniform looking produce with no blemishes, and consumers came to expect that. That is the largest reason they get sent to the landfill, with growers have been sending it there before they get shipped. There is a lot of waste going on here because: - Consumers turn their noses on perfectly edible food that looks ugly. (There are volunteer organizations that inter…
This fundamentally misunderstands what the carbon cycle is. The amount of carbon in the carbon cycle has dramatically increased since the Industrial Revolution, and the quantity of carbon locked into landfills is not significant compared to the absorption of carbon by rock weathering. The carbon cycle per se is certainly not under threat from present human activities, although the Earth will slowly absorb carbon dioxide over the next billion years until it becomes uninhabitable, according to current projections.
Furthermore, methane, an inert gas with low solubility, is not trapped in landfills. The capture scheme I described would eventually convert it to carbon dioxide and possibly store that carbon dioxide, but regardless, it's a very small amount of carbon compared to other emissions sources.
>and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification
None of these problems are seriously related to food waste management. You might as well insist that methane emissions are not as important as nuclear war.