Retaaza works towards the health and sustainability of our planet in three main ways.

• Less food waste
• Reduced food miles
• More efficient farms

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We conduct research to measure our impact and are careful that we are not overstating our efforts. This work is ongoing, and our research and findings are ever-evolving.

Currently we are working with Georgia Tech and the Georgia Research Alliance to measure our impact across these areas. Our principal researcher and research partner is Dr. Valerie Thomas.  

Valerie is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. Dr. Thomas' research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. She has served as a member of the US EPA Science Advisory Board and as a member of the USDA/DOE Biomass R&D Technical Advisory Committee. Read more about her impressive career here.
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Less Food Waste
Unsold farm produce might have been ploughed under, composted, landfilled, donated to people, or used to feed animals. Composting and ploughing under both put nutrients back into the soil and may keep some of the carbon in the soil, though ploughing under still has some negative effects. Farmers sometimes donate what they can’t sell to feed people or to feed animals. We are working on capturing better data on what farmers do with their unsold product.

When food goes to landfills it decays and produces methane, a strong greenhouse gas.

How bad is this? Usually, in most models, landfill emissions are evaluated over 100 years. This tells us about the drivers of climate change over the next 100 years. Sometimes emissions are evaluated over 20 years. This tells us about the drivers of climate change that are happening now.

Both the 20-year and the 100-yr numbers are useful. “Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. Even though CO2 [carbon dioxide] has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term. About 30% of today’s global warming is driven by methane from human actions.” (Environmental Defense Fund)

In landfills, food decays and emits landfill gas (both methane and carbon dioxide) over several years, and the landfill gas has its biggest impacts soon after it is emitted. We take this into account and opt to report our impact using the 20-year time horizon given that we are looking at climate change and its effects now.
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Reduced Food Miles
We carefully track all of our routes to and from farms and customers. We compare our fuel use and emissions with typical food transportation from California, Arizona, and Mexico. Those far-away supply chains are efficient, and we take that into account. We evaluate our driving emissions and compare them to the typical driving emissions for fruits and vegetables produced farther away. Our research shows that trucking our locally-sourced fruits and vegetables uses less energy and has less emissions than trucking them from farther away.
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More Efficient Farms
Food production is one of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Feeding all the world’s people uses an enormous amount of land and that is expected to grow ever larger.

Rescuing and paying for unsold food from local farms helps these farmers to get paid for more of what they grow. Selling more of what is grown on local farms can reduce environmental impacts. By using more of what our farmers grow, we can reduce pressure on the agricultural system because we are eating more of what we are already growing locally.

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