The financial costs of energy in stores cannot be compared with the environmental impact. Every year, the average grocery business emits 1,900 tons of carbon dioxide from the electricity and natural gas needed for operations, equivalent to the emissions of 360 cars. A casual walk down the aisle of a grocery store shows that it's not easy to determine the environmental impacts of a given food. The food industry plays an important role in environmental issues such as deforestation, land use change, water waste and excessive fertilizer runoff.
And that's not to mention the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, shipping, and food processing and storage. Carbon emissions are a good indicator of many of these environmental problems, so let's focus specifically on the climate impact of food. A massive new study has estimated the environmental impact of 57,000 items from grocery stores. Researchers are among the first to evaluate the impact of multi-ingredient products, and their work has the potential to pave the way for widespread use of eco-labels on food.
Check out this list to see nine ways in which different grocery stores around the world are embracing the change and working hard to eliminate (or at least lessen) its impact. So, as you can imagine, a lot of pressure has been put on grocery stores to change the way they act, and thankfully, many grocery stores have made adjustments to ensure that they are doing everything they can to eliminate their impact on the environment. While food waste is a huge problem when it comes to grocery stores (by some estimates, grocery stores alone contribute to 10 percent of all food waste in states), the retail food industry is also responsible for a large amount of packaging waste.
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