Serving Freshness: How Coldhubs is Tackling Food Waste in Nigeria

After realizing the rate that which food gets thrown away at grocery stores due to approaching expiration dates, one man in Nigeria decided to do something about it. Oscar Ekponimo created a web-based app that lets grocery store retailers know if something is near expiration. Once notified, the retailers mark down the item; this allows non-governmental organizations to purchase and sell to people that are food insecure.

Bruce Friedrich, the Executive Director of The Good Food Institute in Washington, DC, thinks that we're wasting resources raising animals for food products. He thinks the answer is creating a product that doesn't replace meat, but rather competes with it.

A community organization in Indiana called Cultivate "rescues" food from local caterers, hospitals, casinos, and businesses to then be packaged into take-home meals for students at Woodland Elementary School that come from food-insecure homes. Cultivate is in its second year of existence, has three staff and 400 volunteers, and hopes to expand beyond their pilot program to reach all 21 schools in the district.

As building developers in Kenya design new structures that are more environmentally friendly and sustainable, they can look to the Garden City Mall in Nairobi as a successful example. This mixed-use development with shopping, residential, and office spaces uses solar energy, which helps cut energy costs by over 30 million shillings each year. The mall also was the first in the region to receive an international green building certification.

Solar energy is a clean, cheap, renewable, and land-efficient resource, making it a valuable technology to scale up in the face of climate concerns and clean energy. Diversifying the supply chain for creating and sourcing solar panels can help make solar energy more reliable when faced with geopolitical and human rights issues.

Solar-powered cold storage units help farmers in India to store their harvests during extreme heat instead of discarding their produce or trying to sell it quickly for cheap to avoid waste. The solar-powered option is significantly cheaper than typical electric cold storage, making it more accessible to small-scale farmers.

Over 300 SolarCorps fellows in the inaugural class of the United States Climate Corps, a workforce-training program, are engaging with communities and installing solar panels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Fellows work with different organizations across several states, such as the nonprofit GRID Alternatives, which is focused on bringing no-cost solar installations to underserved communities.

At a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Bell, California, Food Forward employees race to take in and redistribute 265,000 pounds of fresh produce every day. The organization receives excess fresh fruits and vegetables from wholesale businesses for free and delivers them to 300 nonprofits working to address food insecurity.

Amidst electricity shortages, Health System Consultant Limited came to a local hospital’s aid, outfitting the medical center with solar panels to ensure patients can still access healthcare services. Since the installation, patients at the General Hospital in Maru say diagnosis speed and the quality of care they receive have improved.

Pakistani households and small businesses independently embraced rooftop solar systems, making Pakistan the world's largest solar panel importer by 2024—a notable success demonstrating the potential of decentralized, economically driven clean energy transitions.