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From January and February, residents in the first areas to receive the service will start to see deliveries of food waste caddies and a guidance leaflet arriving at their homes. The leaflet explains why the service is being introduced, how it works, and what can go into the caddies and when the first collections will start.

The new collections form part of the Government’s national Simpler Recycling changes, which aim to make recycling services more consistent across the country. Lincolnshire County Council is working with district councils to introduce the service in phases, meaning not all areas will start at the same time. Because of this phased approach, residents are encouraged to check their local district or borough council news channels for confirmed start dates in their area.

Cllr Danny Brookes, Chair of Lincolnshire Waste Partnership and Executive Member of Environment at Lincolnshire County Council, said: “Introducing food waste collections will help make recycling simpler and more consistent for households across Lincolnshire. Residents will receive clear guidance and everything they need to take part, and we encourage everyone to check their local council updates so they know when the service will begin in their area.”

How the food waste service works

Once the service begins in your area, residents will be able to put unavoidable food waste into their kitchen caddy using the liners supplied. The filled liners are then placed into the outdoor food waste caddy ready for collection day, instead of food waste going in the general rubbish.

Food waste collected through this service will be taken to a local anaerobic digestion facility, where it will be transformed into nutrient-rich fertiliser for farms and renewable energy to power homes and businesses.

What can go in your food waste caddy?

Your food waste caddy can be used for most types of food waste, including:

• Fruit and vegetable peelings
• Plate scrapings and leftovers
• Meat and fish (including bones)
• Dairy products
• Bread, rice, pasta and cereals
• Tea bags and coffee grounds

Full guidance will be included in your welcome pack and is also available online.

When will my area start?

Caddy and pack deliveries will begin from January and February 2026 in the areas rolling out first, with collections starting shortly afterwards. Other parts of Lincolnshire will follow later as the rollout continues.

Residents should regularly check updates from their local district or borough council, including council websites, newsletters and social media channels, where confirmed go-live dates and collection details will be shared. When your area is ready to roll out, look out for your caddy delivery and take a few minutes to read the information provided, so you are ready to take part when collections begin.

For the latest updates, general information and links to local councils, visit www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/foodwaste.

Electric vehicles might be promoted as the key technological solution for low-carbon transport today, but they weren’t always the obvious option. Back in the early 2000s, it was biofuels.¹ Rather than extracting and burning oil, we could grow crops like cereals and sugarcane, and turn them into viable fuels.

While we might expect biofuels to be a solution of the past due to the cost-competitiveness and rise of electric cars, the world produces more biofuels than ever. And this rise is expected to continue.

In this article, we give a sense of perspective on how much land is used to produce biofuels, and what the potential of that land could be if we used it for other forms of energy. We’ll focus on what would happen if we used that land for solar panels, and then how many electric vehicles could be powered as a result.

We’ll mostly focus on road transport, as that is where 99% of biofuels are currently used. The world generates small amounts of “biojet fuel” — used in aviation — but this accounts for only 1% of the total.² While aviation biofuels will increase in the coming years, in the near-to-medium-term, they’ll still be small compared to fuel for cars and trucks. By 2028, the IEA projects that aviation might consume around 2% of global biofuels.

To be clear: we’re not proposing that we should replace all biofuel land with solar panels. There are many ways we could utilise this land, whether for food production, some biofuel production, or rewilding. Maybe some combination of all of the above. But to make informed decisions about how to use our land effectively, we need to get a perspective on the potential of each option. That’s what we aim to do here for solar power and electrified transport.

For this analysis, we draw on a range of sources and, at times, produce our own estimates. We’ve written a full methodological document that explains our assumptions and guides you through each calculation.

Before we get into the calculations, it’s worth a quick overview of where biofuels are produced today, and what their impacts are.

Some might imagine that biofuels have lost their relevance. But historical policies supporting them are still in place. As shown in the chart below, the world produces more biofuels than ever, and this trend is expected to continue. Global production is focused in a relatively small number of markets, with the United States, Brazil, and the European Union dominating. Since there are no signs of policies changing in these regions, we would not expect the rise of biofuels to end.

Most of the world’s biofuels come from sugarcane (mostly grown in Brazil), cereal crops such as corn (mostly grown in the United States and the European Union), and oil crops such as soybean and palm oil (which are grown in the US, Brazil, and Indonesia).

In the map below, you can get a view of where the world’s biofuels are grown.

Collectively, these biofuels produce around 4% of the world’s energy demand for transport. While that does push some oil from the energy mix, the climate benefits of biofuels are not always as clear as people might assume.

Once we consider the climate impact of growing the food and manufacturing the fuel, the carbon savings relative to petrol can be small for some crops.³ But more importantly, when the opportunity costs of the land used to grow those crops are taken into account, they might be worse for the climate.⁴ That’s because agricultural land use is not “free”. If we chose not to use it for agriculture, then it could be rewilded and reforested, which would sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

From a climate perspective, freeing up that cropland from biofuels would be one alternative. However, another option is to utilise it for another form of energy, which could offer a much greater climate benefit.

This should be easy to estimate. If you know how much land in the United States (or any other country) is used for corn, and what fraction of corn is for biofuels, you can calculate the amount of land used for biofuels.

What makes things complicated is that biofuels often produce co-products that are allocated to other uses, such as animal feed. Not all of the corn or soybeans turn into liquid that can be put in a car; some residues can then be fed to pigs and chickens. How you adjust this land used for biofuels and their co-products can lead to quite different results.

A recent analysis from researchers at Cerulogy estimated that biofuels are grown on 61 million hectares of land.⁵ But when they split this allocation between land for biofuels and land for animal feed, the land use for biofuels alone was 32 million hectares. The other 29 million hectares would be allocated for land use for animal feed.

There are much higher published figures. The Union for the Promotion of Oil and Protein Plants estimates that as much as 112 million hectares are “used to supply feedstock for biofuels”.⁶ By this definition, there is no adjustment for dual use of that land or the land use of co-products. That’s one of the reasons why the figures are much higher. Even taking this into account, the numbers are still higher, and the honest answer is that we don’t know why.

For this article, we’re going to assume a net land use of 32 million hectares. This is conservative, and that is deliberate. As we’ll soon see, the amount of solar power we could generate, or the number of electric vehicles we could power on this land, is extremely large. And that’s with us being fairly ungenerous about the amount of land available. Larger land use figures could also be credible; in that case, the potential would be even higher.

How large is 32 million hectares? Imagine an area like the one in the box below: 640 kilometers across, and 500 kilometers high. For context, that’s about the size of Germany, Poland, the Philippines, Finland, or Italy.

Could we use those 32 million hectares of land differently to produce even more energy than we currently get from biofuels?

The answer is yes. If we put solar panels on that land, we could produce roughly 32,000 terawatt-hours of electricity each year.⁷ That’s 23 times more than the energy that is currently produced in the form of all liquid biofuels.⁸ You can see this comparison in the chart.

32,000 terawatt-hours is a big number. The world generated 31,000 TWh of electricity in 2024. So, these new solar panels would produce enough to meet the world’s current electricity demand.

Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways.

Run the numbers, and we find that you could power all of the world’s cars and trucks on this solar energy if transport were electrified.

Of course, these vehicles would need to be electrified in the first place. This is happening — electric car sales are rising, and electric trucks are now starting to get some attention — but it will take time for most vehicles on the road to be electric. For now, we’ll imagine that they are.

We estimate that the total electricity needed to power all cars and trucks is around 7,000 TWh per year, comprising 3,500 TWh for cars and a similar amount for trucks. We’ve added this comparison to the chart.

The reason these comparisons are even more stark than biofuels versus solar is that most of the energy consumed in a petrol car is wasted; either as heat (if you put your hand over the bonnet, you will often notice that it’s extremely warm after driving) or from friction when braking. An electric car is much more efficient without a combustion engine, and thanks to regenerative braking (which uses braking energy to recharge the battery). That means that driving one mile in an electric car uses just one-third of the energy of driving one mile in a combustion engine car.

Put these two efficiencies together, and we find that you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.

Our point here is not that we should cover all of our biofuel land in solar panels. There are reasons why the comparisons above are simpler than the real world, and why dedicating all of that land to solar power would not be ideal.¹¹

Land use comes at a cost: for the climate, ecosystems, and other species we share the planet with. That means we should think carefully about how to use it well. That might mean a mix of biofuels for aviation, and solar power for road transport and electricity grids. It might mean going all-in on solar. Or it could mean using some of it for solar power, and leaving the rest alone. Sometimes, the most thoughtful option is not using land at all and letting it return to nature.

Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado (2026) - “Putting solar panels on land used for biofuels would produce enough electricity for all cars and trucks to go electric” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260112-091056/biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehicles.html' [Online Resource] (archived on January 12, 2026).

@article{owid-biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehicles,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado},
    title = {Putting solar panels on land used for biofuels would produce enough electricity for all cars and trucks to go electric},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2026},
    note = {https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260112-091056/biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehicles.html}
}

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“Transformation” is a word we hear constantly in insurance. Insurers are tackling legacy systems, driving for efficiencies, modernising their businesses, and trying to unlock new capabilities across the value chain.

Drawing on global research and real-world experience, Matthew Smith, Global Lead, Strategy and Transformation, Insurance Partner at KPMG in the UK highlights the gap between cost-reduction targets and actual results, and outlines practical steps for success: