Resource efficiency passes the stomach

We waste too much food, was the core message of Dr. Tobias Viere, the Pforzheim University 's new professor of energy and material flow analysis in the Dept. of Economics since the current winter semester. In his inaugural lecture, Viere showed that a family of 4 in Germany squanders an average of 935 euros per year due to avoidable food waste, because food is not consumed but are thrown away because it spoils or you have shopped too much." If you would consistently save this money, you could almost finance the energy turnaround, because nationwide it adds up to over 19 billion euros annually," said Viere.

Inevitably connected to that is the problem of sustainable development , because the global food supply is one of the basic themes of sustainability, since the Brundtland Report in the 1980s. In the poor countries of the world food account for 60 to 80 percent of income. If then the prices on the world markets rise, as in the past years by crop failures or the growing demand for biofuels, for many people hopeless situations arise. The professor estimates that, today one billion people worldwide are malnourished. Food waste is therefore morally, economically and ecologically unacceptable. If one were to avoid food waste, also the CO2 emissions could be reduced considerably, because especially animal products contribute significantly to the carbon footprint.

Tobias Viere studied environmental sciences at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, and did his doctorate in business administration with Professor Schaltegger. He has many years of practical experience in the field of IT applications and, through research projects, he was also very active in the Asian region, where he advised companies how they can save energy in production and material and  how they can operate in an environmentally-friendly way. Exactly this experience, he conveys to the students of the study program resource efficiency management at the University of Pforzheim.