While reading about the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park, I learned that wolves spend a lot of time moving around, but they have a brutal life.
For each meal, they risk physical harm and death.
Which makes me really grateful for the modern food system that lets us eat without the risk of organ damage. But perhaps we have gone too far in our search for convenience. Food delivery is taking away choice and consequences from the way we eat – and it’s hurting us, as we saw in a previous column; And it’s hurting the planet, as we’ll see in this.
Let’s start with wasted food.
mountain of fried rice
In 2019, researchers in Wuhan, China weighed leftovers (including scraps from trash cans) from more than 800 food-delivery orders. They found that the average order had about 200 grams of food and 85 grams of packaging left over.
After surveying nearly 900 consumers, researchers found that minimum spending limits and “spend more, save more” discounts led people to order more than they could eat.
Another study using data from China’s delivery platform Meituan confirmed the role of minimum-spending limits and offers, but found a lower figure of 57.5 grams of wasted food per order.
I recently visited China, reached the minimum spending limit when ordering food, and half of my fried rice went to waste. Given the increase in single-person orders, the minimum-spend limit poses a serious sustainability challenge.
In the context of India, those data suggest that online food delivery can generate 100,000 to 300,000 tonnes of food waste per year – about the amount of 40 to 120 fully loaded freight trains. This food waste rots in landfills, releasing methane. When it is burnt in roadside dustbins it pollutes the air. Because such waste does not harm the individual directly – in fact, swallowing all the food would cause greater harm to the individual – each private order increases the public harm.
Meat and potatoes?
Moving on to food choice, a Chinese study found that delivery orders contained more meat and fewer vegetables than meals eaten in restaurants, contributing to a 53% greater carbon footprint.
One reason for this is that the price on the menu only tells a partial truth. When water and carbon are free or very cheap, it makes a high-impact recipe appear cheaper than it really should be, and blunts the power of markets to innovate to reduce costs (including switching to alternatives that use less water and less carbon).
Rajasthani cuisine is a wonderful celebration of what can emerge when the landscape limits the availability of water. Stopping this novelty ruins our intestines and palate.
Still more food is wasted in restaurants and in the kind of warehouses that make sure you get bananas within minutes. Let’s take used cooking oil (UCO). The oil changes due to repeated heating. It darkens, thickens, goes rancid, and develops trans fats and other breakdown products that make it unsafe to eat. There are regulations for used cooking oil in India, but the regulations are only as strong as the economics beneath them.
Formal collectors who turn used oil into biodiesel or sustainable aviation fuel are easily outbid by informal scrap dealers, who turn the same oil back into street food. Ultimately, much of it is flushed down the drain (which is waste, and literally creates problems through the plumbing).
Only a small fraction of the 2.5 to 3 million tonnes of UCO generated per year in India is reused as fuel. This can and should be improved.
stuck in a box
Now about the packaging. The Wuhan study found that each delivery order generated an average of 85 grams of packaging waste. A smaller but more cited study put the number at 64 grams. Either way, India’s numbers are big: online food delivery alone can generate more than 1 lakh tonnes of packaging waste per year.
That many don’t care is supported by interviews with senior industry sources, waste management experts and start-ups, based on the results of a survey of more than 2,000 people conducted by the Sundaram Climate Institute.
What if instead we made the clean alternative suit their self-interest?
Harmful chemicals leach out of plastic and into food, especially when the food is hot and oily. Liquids released from hot takeaway containers have been shown to damage the hearts and intestines of rats, heavy plastic use is linked to higher rates of heart failure, and microwaving plastic containers can release millions of microscopic particles within minutes.
Some linings and some types of plastic boxes contain (and release) endocrine disruptors such as phthalates and bisphenol A. Black plastic, often made from recycled electronic waste, can leach flame retardants and heavy metals into dinner trays. I’m looking at my delivery boxes in a new light.
People can’t afford to pay more to save the planet. They may pay more to avoid feeding their child hot curry from a dubious can.
eat food, don’t hurry
Then there is transportation. Swiggy and Zomato riders cover millions of kilometers per year, and emit hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 – if they run at all on petrol.
Going electric changes the math: Each rider saves millions of rupees over the lifetime of the bike, and his emissions are halved when he’s on the bike, even powered by India’s coal-heavy grid. It’s no surprise that both companies are committed to fully electrifying their fleets in the next five years.
Now, here’s the twist. Swiggy offers an EcoSaver option of slow, green delivery at a discount: Wait a while and the rider will pick up multiple orders to make the most of his miles. The uptake is low.
The EV approach works because the rider benefits; Customer will not wait more than 10 minutes for Planet Help. The lesson is clear: sustainability scales when it’s easy, and works when the person bearing the cost also gets a direct reward.
Electric mobility works because riders may have to pay more upfront, but there are savings on fuel and maintenance. It fails when the burden falls on someone else: the restaurant that has to spend more time packing, or the hungry customer getting the dopamine rush screaming “more!” Is asked to scroll along, and thinks about the planet.
Virtue is a weak lever at dinner time.
magic, scaled
We can fix this, but there are three hurdles to overcome.
For one thing, the green option is very popular. A durable box can cost almost twice as much as its plastic rival. Neither restaurants with razor-thin margins, nor customers with enough on their plates, are willing to swallow that difference.
However, consider that every innovation seems really expensive at first. LED bulbs were wildly expensive 20 years ago, policies like the UJALA scheme, procurement and manufacturing scale up have pushed prices down. Packaging also needs the same treatment.
Some action is already taking place. Zomato claims it is funding the recycling and processing of plastic packaging used in its deliveries, and it has a filter to highlight low-plastic deliveries (though you have to search to find it, which defeats the purpose). Both platforms run marketplaces to highlight sustainable options for sellers.
In my recent deliveries, I received food packaged in black plastic and food in compostable boxes. Meanwhile, in China, I met an innovator who was creating paper as an alternative to Keurig pods and even burning paper pans. It seemed like magic. Well, Magic Scaled is just manufacturing. Solutions exist. They now need help on a large scale.
The second constraint is of time. No amount of price signals, labels or lectures reach the mid-scroll and hungry customer. So, stop asking them to make noble choices. Swiggy already has an “Eat Right” filter for protein; Point to the same machinery on carbon.
Rearrange the menu so that the low-impact dish loads first, and let the algorithm accomplish what no precept can. A British study found that tweaking menus according to carbon cost cuts emissions more effectively than taxes or labels.
The third (and most important) obstacle is that costs and benefits are currently borne by two different parties. Collect food waste. Sellers who convert it into biogas, fertilizer and fodder already exist, but the eater has to bear the effort of separating it, and pays someone to collect it, while the profits go largely to the world and the seller. Because costs and rewards lie with individual groups, nothing increases.
The solution is to put them together. Can a platform that matches hunger and food play the role of matchmaker so well here? After all, study after study has suggested that algorithms are a driver of over-ordering, which is a driver of waste. Add a filter for sustainability – with third-party verification, and financial, algorithmic and market support (some of which already exist, but need to be strategically mainstreamed)? In the tough world of restaurant listings on these apps, consistency can become a real differentiator.
Wasted food, packaging and transportation – the basics of convenience – together amount to as much carbon as 80,000 Indian households emit in a year. And that’s not even counting what reused oil is doing to our arteries or what hot black plastic trays are doing to our bodies.
True, online delivery is just a small part of India’s larger food-waste and emissions problem. But it’s about leverage. When a few big platforms sit between millions of restaurants and consumers, they have real power (and responsibility?) to encourage innovation.
The wolf risks death for dinner. We have created a world where dinner arrives within minutes. Which is a surprise. Trash, plastic and gasoline are just bad design. The challenge is to get them out. Are we ready for this?
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watersheds. She can be reached at tradeoffs@climateaction.net. Views expressed are personal)
