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Rebound effects may undermine the benefits of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as animal feed in China

Nature Food volume 6, pages 881–891 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as animal feed could reduce livestock-related emissions, but rebound effects, where lower feed costs lead to livestock expansion, may diminish these benefits. Here, using an integrated environmental–economic model, we assess the impacts of this upcycling in China’s monogastric livestock production. We find that upcycling increases monogastric livestock production by 23–36% and raises total acidification emissions in China by 2.5–4.0%, while domestically total greenhouse gas emissions decrease by 0.5–1.4% through less waste sent to landfill and incinerators and a contraction in non-food production. This upcycling enhances food security and has substantial knock-on effects beyond the agricultural sectors, through influencing sectoral employment, gross domestic product and household welfare. Although emission taxes could absorb the rebound effects on emissions, they may also negatively impact food security and shift emissions abroad, depending on tax levels.

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Fig. 1: Representation of the economy in China in the AGE framework with food waste and food processing by-products.
Fig. 2: Impacts of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as feed in China’s monogastric livestock sector on domestic production and net export of total crop, livestock, and fertilizer.
Fig. 3: Impacts of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as feed in China’s monogastric livestock sector on domestic total agricultural land use and feed demand.
Fig. 4: Impacts of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as feed in China’s monogastric livestock sector on economy-wide emissions in China and China’s MTP.
Fig. 5: Impacts of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as feed in monogastric livestock sector on food security indicators in China and China’s main food and feed trading partners (MTP).

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Data availability

The data and parameters that support the economic model in this study are available from the GTAP version 10 database (https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/databases/v10/). The other data that support splitting agricultural (six crop types and two livestock categories) and non-agricultural (compound feed, food processing by-products, processed food, fertilizers, food waste treatment and non-food) sectors from the original database GTAP 10 are publicly available at FAOSTAT (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data) and the UN Comtrade Database (https://comtrade.un.org/data). All other data supporting the findings of this study, such as the production of crops, livestock and fertilizers, the utilization of food waste and food processing by-products, prices of food waste recycling and collection services, and emissions, are available within the article and its Supplementary Information files or are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The GAMS code for reproducing the results of this study is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank conference participants at the 29th Annual Conference of European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE), the III Economy for The Common Good International Conference (ECGIC), and the 4th Dutch Environmental and Resource Economics (DEARE) Day workshop for helpful comments and discussions. We thank Q. Fang for sharing data on food waste and food processing by-products in China, which is essential to this study. We acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [no. 32272814] (Y.H.), the High-level Team Project of China Agricultural University (Y.H.), and the Agriculture Green Development Program sponsored by China Scholarship Council [no. 201913043] (W.L.). Artificial Intelligence (in our case, ChatGPT) has been used to polish the English writing of paragraphs in this paper. After using this tool/service, we reviewed and edited the content as needed and took full responsibility for the content of the publication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Economics and Natural Resources Group, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Weitong Long, Xueqin Zhu & Hans-Peter Weikard

  2. College of Resources and Environmental Science, National Academy of Agriculture Green Development, Key Laboratory of Plant–Soil Interactions, Ministry of Education, State Key Laboratory of Nutrient Use and Management, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Weitong Long, Oene Oenema & Yong Hou

  3. Wageningen Environmental Research, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Oene Oenema

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  1. Weitong Long
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Contributions

W.L., X.Z., H.-P.W., and Y.H. designed the research. W.L. and X.Z. developed the model. W.L. ran the model and performed the analysis. W.L. collected and analysed data. W.L. wrote the paper with contributions from X.Z., H.-P.W., O.O., and Y.H. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Xueqin Zhu or Yong Hou.

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Nature Food thanks Yanxian Li and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Methods, Results, Discussion, Figs. 1–22, Tables 1–20, References and Appendix tables 1–10.

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Long, W., Zhu, X., Weikard, HP. et al. Rebound effects may undermine the benefits of upcycling food waste and food processing by-products as animal feed in China. Nat Food 6, 881–891 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01219-7

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