Food waste

• Eric Crampton writes – 

There are some areas where it’s hard to get a solution without government intervention. Carbon prices, for example. Not saying it’s impossible, it’s just hard.

There are also plenty of areas where policy is probably wrong and could use advice from a Chief Science Advisor. For example, setting an air quality standard for schools that balances cost of cleaner air against benefits from fewer teachers and kids out sick. Seems important. Naomi Wu’s put up interesting stuff on far-UV light. Does the science stack up? What would it cost to put those in schools, if government ordered at scale for every school in the country? Would doing so bend the cost curve and set an example for others to follow?

Govt dishes up $4.6m to help put the kibosh (or should that be ‘kaibosh’?) on food waste

Buzz from the Beehive  

Sums of government spending feature in three of four new ministerial statements posted on the government’s official website since Point of Order’s previous Buzz report.

One of the new spending announcements deals with waste.

No, not wasted spending.  The Government is sinking $4.6 million into projects aimed at reducing food waste.

Some of that money will be ladled to an organisation called NZ Food Waste Champions 12.3 for a project called Kai Commitment.

This is described as a voluntary national agreement in which major food businesses commit to reducing food waste. Businesses signed up so far are Countdown, Fonterra, Foodstuffs, Goodman Fielder, Nestle, Silver Fern Farms and Wilcox.

None of them are short of a dollar or two, we would have thought…