If you want to know how much food the world wastes, the internet is your friend.

Our oceans are littered with plastics. Indeed, we are regularly exposed to images and stories of whales and sea turtles choking to death on plastic trash. Ocean plastic is clearly a problem but what is the solution?

Solving environmental problems usually just means cleaning up the mess people have made. But scientists are increasingly interested in creating something valuable from pollution.

With the rise in popularity of health and fitness has come a flood of fad diets and self-proclaimed “super-foods”. The merits of spirulina, quinoa and kale have been exhaustively covered, but the foodstuffs of tomorrow need to offer more than health benefits; they must help tackle global issues from poverty to climate change.

 When we pick up a piece of fruit, bar of chocolate or package of flour, we don’t often think of the massive amounts of agricultural waste — the stems, leaves, seed pods and more — that never make it off the farm.

Food waste is a huge problem globally — almost one-third of all food produced in South Africa alone (totalling ten million tons of edible food) is wasted every year, statistics by the WWF reveal.

“Waste not, want not.” This old saying rings so true today, as global leaders and local communities alike increasingly call for a fix for the so-called “throwaway culture.” But beyond individuals and households, waste also represents a broader challenge that affects human health and livelihoods, the environment, and prosperity.

The COVID pandemic has shown the fragility of our global food supply chains, with many supermarkets and restaurants in almost every country having experienced food shortages.

Like the ancient Ouroboros symbol, where the serpent eats itself from the tail, forming a circle that is meant to signify an eternal cyclical renewal, there are innovative South Africans finding ways to close the loop.

The United States wastes roughly 35% of its total food supply each year.

Mining is essential to modern lifestyles. Copper, iron and other mined products are vital to the products many people take for granted, like electronic devices. Being able to buy these goods quite easily may give a person a false sense of how difficult it is to extract the elements they’re made of.