US grocers focus more on donating and recycling food waste than on preventing it, reports the Centre for Biological Diversity. The report scored 10 US grocery chains and the UK supermarket Tesco on food waste reduction commitments, policies and actions.

Large, powerful companies control much of the US food supply chain, with detrimental effects on consumer choice, food safety and food system resilience, according to a recent paper by researchers from NGO Food & Water Watch. The paper discusses the current “nearly unprecedented wave of food megamergers”, impacts on consumers of grocery consolidation and different types of mergers throughout the food supply chain.

The Oxford Long-Term Ecology Lab has published a map of studies published between 1990 and October 2017 that report evidence on the effects of adopting one or more sustainability standards. You can filter the map by several criteria including country, name of standard, commodity covered and research method. Topics covered include agriculture, fishing, forestry and textiles.

Scientists have unintentionally created a variant of a bacterial enzyme that is 20% better than the original at breaking down polyethylene terephthalate, commonly used to make plastic bottles. The researchers were investigating the properties of a bacterium that has naturally evolved to digest plastic.

UK charity WRAP has launched the UK Plastics Pact, a voluntary scheme which brings together businesses responsible for 80% of the plastic packaging on products sold in UK supermarkets. The pact aims to make 100% of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025, among other goals.

The World Resources Institute has launched Resource Watch, an online tool for accessing and visualising data about resource use and sustainability issues around the world.

A report from the WWF examines the environmental impacts, including carbon footprint, associated with four classic British dishes, and identifies twenty risks that climate change poses to the production of these dishes.

A new report, The Avoidable Crisis, finds that large-scale deforestation, fires and human rights abuses are linked to soy plantations and the global meat industry.

This paper examines some of the environmental trade-offs associated with using multilayered biodegradable packaging made of thermoplastic starch and polyhydroxyalkanoate.