Have you ever thought about how your bacon, almond milk, or fish ends up on your table? In our globalized economy, fresh fruit can be shipped from one hemisphere to another to stock grocery store shelves regardless of the season, and many of us enjoy nearly endless choices of cereals, vegetables, meats, and snacks. But a striking number of young children don’t realize that processed foods like chicken nuggets and cheese don’t come from plants. How does a hot dog come to be? Where does our food come from?
Photographer George Steinmetz offers a remarkable look at landscapes, initiatives, and customs that shape how the world eats. His new book, Feed the Planet, chronicles a decade spent documenting food production in more than three dozen countries on six continents, including 24 U.S. states.
Soybean harvest, Fazenda Piratini, Bahia, Brazil
More than 40 percent of our planet’s surface has been molded and tended to produce crops and livestock. From idiosyncratic 16th-century farm plots in rural Poland to Texas cattle feed lots to a large-scale shrimp processing operation in India, food production is rarely observed on this scale. “He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them,” says a statement for the book.
Studies have shown that large-scale agriculture and factory farming send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an amount constituting nearly one-third of all human-caused emissions. The ongoing climate crisis can be traced in large part to fertilizers that release nitrous oxide; deforestation caused by farm expansion that adds more carbon dioxide into the air; and emissions from manure management, burning, fuel use, and more.
From a striking aerial vantage point, Steinmetz captures the beauty, ingenuity, and stark reality of factories, aquaculture, family farms, food pantries, and sprawling agricultural operations. He elucidates how staples like wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish reach both domestic and international tables, tapping into “one of humanity’s deepest needs, greatest pleasures, and most pressing challenges.”
Purchase a signed copy on the photographer’s website, or grab one on Bookshop.
Mauritania was a country of pastoral nomads when it gained independence from France in 1960, but it has since become a nation of fishermen as well, with hundreds of pirogues lining the beach of the capital of Nouakchott. The official annual national landings are around 900,000 tons, but researchers who include illegal or unreported hauls put the catch at more than twice that. With many fish stocks moving north and farther offshore as sea temperatures rise, the competition for fish turned violent in 2023 in neighboring Senegal, where fishermen from the town of Kayar burned drift nets illegally set by fishermen from Mboro in the Kayar Marine Protected Area. In response, the Mboro fishermen attacked Kayar boats with gasoline bombs, killing one boy and wounding twenty others. Government intervention prevented an outright civil war between fishing groups, but tensions are endemic to communities that have grown dependent on declining natural resources. Some 600,000 Senegalese are now employed in fisheries. Fish are a primary source of protein for both Mauritania and Senegal. Working one shrimp at a time, women workers at Avanti Frozen Foods in Yerravaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, can de-shell and de-vein up to 44 tons of farmed shrimp per day from the company’s 1,600 acres of shrimp ponds. Avanti is one of the largest shrimp exporters in India, which dominates the global shrimp export market. About 75 percent of its frozen shrimp is exported to the U.S., with Costco being one of its major customers. Shrimp is the most valuable traded marine product in the world, with an estimated market value of nearly $47 billion in 2022.Modern cowboys conduct wellness checks on horseback at the Wrangler Feedyard in Tulia, Texas, home to around fifty thousand head. Wrangler is one of ten feedlots in Texas and Kansas owned by Amarillo-based Cactus Feeders that collectively can provide feed and care for a half million cattle. At the Wrangler facility, cattle arrive at around 750 pounds, then spend five to six months eating some 20 pounds of dry feed and fodder each day until they reach slaughter weight. Cactus sends more than a million head to slaughter each year, typically to the Tyson beef processing plants in Amarillo, Texas, and Holcomb, Kansas. According to the Texas Farm Bureau, there are more cattle on feedlots within 150 miles of Amarillo than any other area in the world.Just as almond milk has displaced cartons of dairy milk in the grocery store, an old Aermotor windmill that once pumped water for cattle now looms over rows of almond trees and beehives that replaced them near Oakdale, California. The rising popularity of nut milks and almonds for snacking both in the U.S. and overseas has led California growers to triple their acreage in almonds since 1995. Almond orchards now cover 2,500 square miles in the state, growing 80 percent of the global supply and worth more than $5 billion in annual sales. Like cattle, almond trees need copious amounts of water—about 1.1 gallons per nut—as well as hardworking honeybees to pollinate the crop, both of which are in increasingly short supply.A few of the 2,000 workers at the CP Group’s chicken processing plant in Jiangsu, China, prepare broilers for the domestic market, including fast food chains like McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King. On a typical day they process 200,000 birds and double that number prior to Chinese holidays.Men and women of all races, classes, and religions enjoy a free hot meal at the Sri Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar in Punjab State, India. The gurdwara is the holiest site of the Sikhs, as well as the world’s largest langar, or community kitchen, which provides a free, hot vegetarian meal to 100,000 people, 24/7, all year. The meals consist of roti, or Indian flatbread, rice, a curried vegetable dish, and dal, or lentil soup, which is cooked in giant wood-fired cauldrons in four-ton batches paid for by donations and cooked and ladled out mostly by volunteers. Such langars are a part of every Sikh temple and serve an estimated seven million free meals around the world as an act of charity to all visitors each day.
In June, I had the privilege of attending the 2025 E-Waste World, Battery Recycling, Metal Recycling, and ITAD & Circular Electronics Conference & Expo events in Frankfurt, Germany.
Speaking in the ITAD & Circular Electronics track on a panel with global Circular Economy leaders from Foxway Group, ERI and HP, we explored the evolving role of IT asset disposition (ITAD) and opportunities in the circular electronics economy.
The event’s focus on advancing circular economy goals and reducing environmental impact delivered a series of insights and learnings. From this assembly of international expertise across 75+ countries, here are some points from the presentations that stood out for me:
1. Environmental impact of the digital economy
Digitalisation has a heavy material footprint in the production phase, and lifecycle thinking needs to guide every product decision. Consider that 81% of the energy a laptop uses in its lifetime is consumed during manufacture (1 tonne in manufacture is equal to 10,000 tonnes of CO2) and laptops are typically refreshed or replaced by companies every 3–4 years.
From 2018 to 2023, the average number of devices and connections per capita in the world increased by 50% (2.4 to 3.6). In North America (8.2 to 13.4) and Western Europe (5.6 to 9.4), this almost doubled. In 1960, only 10 periodic table elements were used to make phones. In 1990, 27 elements were used and now over 60 elements are used to build the smartphones that we have become so reliant on.
A key challenge is that low-carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same minerals. Material resource extraction could increase 60% between 2020 and 2060, while demand for lithium, cobalt and graphite is expected to rise by 500% until 2050.
High growth in ICT demand and Internet requires more attention to the environmental footprint of the digital economy. Energy consumption of data centres is expected to more than double by 2026. The electronics industry accounts for over 4% of global GHG — and digitalisation-related waste is growing, with skewed impacts on developing countries.
E-waste is rising five times faster than recycling — 1 tonne of e-waste has a carbon footprint of 2 tonnes. Today’s solution? ‘Bury it or burn it.’ In terms of spent emissions, waste and the costs associated with end-of-life liabilities, PCBAs (printed circuit board assembly) cost us enormously — they generally achieve 3–5% recyclability (75% of CO2 in PCBAs is from components).
2. Regulating circularity in electronics
There is good momentum across jurisdictions in right-to-repair, design and labelling regulations; recycling targets; and voluntary frameworks on circularity and eco-design.
The EU is at the forefront. EU legislation is lifting the ICT aftermarket, providing new opportunities for IT asset disposition (ITAD) businesses. To get a sense, the global market for electronics recycling is estimated to grow from $37 billion to $108 billion (2022–2030). The value of refurbished electronics is estimated to increase from $85.9 billion to $262.2 billion (2022–2032). Strikingly, 40% of companies do not have a formal ITAD strategy in place.
Significantly, the EU is rethinking its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) management targets, aligned with upcoming circularity and WEEE legislation, as part of efforts to foster the circular economy. A more robust and realistic circularity-driven approach to setting collection targets would better reflect various factors including long lifespans of electronic products and market fluctuations.
Australia and New Zealand lag the EU’s comprehensive e-waste mandated frameworks. The lack of a systematic approach results in environmental degradation and missed positioning opportunities for businesses in the circular economy. While Australia’s Senate inquiry into waste reduction and recycling recommended legislating a full circular economy framework — including for imported and local product design, financial incentives and regulatory enforcement, New Zealand remains the only OECD country without a national scheme to manage e-waste.
3. Extending product lifecycles
Along with data security and digital tools, reuse was a key theme in the ITAD & Circular Electronics track of the conference. The sustainable tech company that I lead, Greenbox, recognises that reuse is the simplest circular strategy. Devices that are still functional undergo refurbishment and are reintroduced into the market, reducing new production need and conserving valuable resources.
Conference presenters highlighted how repair over replacement is being legislated as a right in jurisdictions around the world. Resources are saved, costs are lowered, product life is extended, and people and organisations are empowered to support a greener future. It was pointed out that just 43% of countries have recycling policies, 17% of global waste is formally recycled, and less than 1% of global e-waste is formally repaired and reused.
Right to repair is a rising wave in the circular economy, and legislation is one way that civil society is pushing back on programmed obsolescence. Its global momentum continues at different speeds for different product categories — from the recent EU mandates to multiple US state bills (and some laws) through to repair and reuse steps in India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Commission has done a scoping study to identify product groups under the Ecodesign framework that would be most relevant for implementing an EU-wide product reparability scoring system.
Attending this event with the entire electronic waste recycling supply chain — from peers and partners to suppliers and customers — underscored the importance of sharing best practices to address the environmental challenges that increased hardware proliferation and complex related issues are having on the world.
Ross Thompson is Group CEO of sustainability, data management and technology asset lifecycle management market leader Greenbox. With facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Greenbox Group provides customers all over the world a carbon-neutral supply chain for IT equipment to reduce their carbon footprint by actively managing their environmental, social and governance obligations.
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