Data Journalism Team theythem

STORY!

We all know food waste is a problem. Everyone of us has wasted food from time to time.

We were not prepared for how bad of a problem it really is.

Canada, despite being frozen over for half the year, is one of the greatest food producers of the planet. However, we also waste an immense amount of food.

How much food? Turns out, an enormous third of all the food produced. A third of all the food produced by Canada gets thrown out. That is an enormous waste. Not only does the wasted food take up space in landfills, but they also produce their own emission, mostly in the form of methane, which is 26x worse than co2.

This brings about many questions that require further research. It is well known that agriculture and animal raising, mainly cattle, creates an immense amount of carbon emissions. One third of all those emissions are basically for nothing because the food that was produced gets wasted anyway. That means, hypothetically, if we were to cut down on our food production by a third, and ate everything that we produced, we would have a lot less emissions.

In this losing battle against a 2 degree increase in temperature, every little bit counts. This is an idea that should be developed further and looked upon.

Inspiration

When I used to work at Maxi, we had a lot of food waste. Several times, an egg would be cracked in a box of a dozen eggs, and I was forced to throw the whole box out because the store was no longer able to sell it. The other 11 eggs were perfectly fine. I asked my manager once if I could bring the carton home since it's thrown in the trash anyway, and she said, "No. It's company policy to throw it away."

We pondered, how much more widespread is this phenomenon in Canada, and how much does it contribute to our emissions because we know that food waste produces a lot of methane, which is terrible for the environment.

We decided to look into it.

What it does

Our data journalism looks at emissions in Canada from the years 2009 to 2019, how much food Canada produces, how much of it gets wasted, and how much that waste contributes to our overall emissions.

How we built it

We built it using datasets from Statistics Canada and Climate Watch, sharing a file on Google Colab and using the Python libraries matplotlib, pandas, and seaborn.

Challenges we ran into

There were not a lot of explicit dataset available for what we were looking for. We had to infer a lot of our data.

The tutorial on pandas given by Sameer was extremely helpful, but we still ran into a lot of trouble as this was our first time using it.

Also, making the graphs look pretty.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to finish this project in time on absolutely no sleep at all.

What we learned

Pandas, seaborn, matplotlib

What's next for Data Journalism Team theythem

We will use our knowledge learnt from this endeavor (teamworking and organizing files and data) on many future projects we will have. The worse is yet to come in university and in real life jobs, and we are grateful we have a first hand experience with agony.