How Bring Me Home can offset harmful greenhouse emissions

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Bring Me Home

4 min readNov 27, 2018

“Each time you save a meal with Bring Me Home, it can save the environment from carbon emissions enough to power a house for almost two hours.”

New and inventive ways of reducing emissions must be thought of in the next ten years.

With the world’s population increasing steadily, greenhouse gas emissions are also rising and are at unsustainable levels. The UN recently released a report that stresses the importance of reducing our carbon footprint, with the world needing to be carbon neutral by 2047 to limit warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius. A major contributor to this problem is the emissions produced by food that has gone to waste. If food waste was a country, it would be the third highest greenhouse gas polluter after the U.S. and China according to Sustainable Table. Along with more large-scale interventions, grassroots innovation initiatives such as Bring Me Home can also improve this situation.

Reducing food waste is one possible way of offsetting harmful emissions.

In 2016 Australia had one of the highest OECD CO2 emissions per capita at 15.37 tonnes according to World Bank. Watch My Waste states that in Australia, over 8.2 million tonnes of food are wasted every year, causing higher emissions than the iron ore and steel industries combined. Emissions from food waste are calculated by combining emissions from carbon dioxide and methane as the food decomposes. Carbon dioxide has the potential to warm the atmosphere in a long-term and irreversible trend. Methane is often overlooked but is extremely dangerous because it is 72 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period as explained by One Green Planet. This means high volumes of methane can warm the planet at a much higher rate. Approximately half the food waste is in the commercial and industrial sectors. This is often due to food going unsold at outlets — which is where Bring Me Home can help.

So, how can Bring Me Home contribute to solving this? Bring Me Home provides a solution that can reduce harmful emissions by reducing food waste. Through our mobile app, you can buy surplus food from cafes and restaurants, which would otherwise be discarded and contribute to these greenhouse gas emissions. Each time you save a meal (avg. 500g) with Bring Me Home, it can save the environment from carbon emissions (1kg) large enough to power an average household for 2 hours. The Watch My Waste calculator calculates 1kg of food waste produces just under 2kg of emissions, equivalent to a power station providing electricity to an average household for 4 hours. For the 800+ meals saved through the Bring Me Home app in the last 7 weeks, it could offset enough emissions to power a household for over a month. Basically, every meal saved helps, and for that we are grateful.

So far, through Bring Me Home enough emissions have been offset to power a house for over a month.

Bring Me Home’s energy efficient technology aims to create a wider impact on reducing emission. Our goal is to have 1,000 food outlets and 300,000 paying customers by mid 2021. In 3 years time, we expect that each vendor will save approximately 50 meals (~25kg) per month. In monthly terms, this means that in total we could save 25 tonnes of food and void 47.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions. That’s equivalent to powering 140 households, or taking off 411 cars off the road for a month.

Some operations also use water, electricity, and land-based transport to process and eliminate food waste, using electricity whilst releasing emission in the process. Our business operations of reducing retail surplus food waste could also indirectly reduce water footprint (approx. 1000 litres/meal based on WaterWeEat) and emissions from these processes as well.