Showing posts with label food waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food waste. Show all posts
1 October 2018
14 July 2018
Quartzy: Beyond the straw ban—three easy ways to eat with the planet in mind
This one is a little counter-intuitive, but many frozen fish actually have a smaller carbon footprint than fresh fish. “It’s much better, and much cheaper actually, to go to the frozen section where you have vacuum-packed things like sockeye salmon,” Paul Greenberg, author of The Omega Principle, Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet, told Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Greenberg explained that fish that are processed and frozen on fishing boats, like much of the Alaskan salmon catch, can be held at temperature for long periods with very little additional energy input, especially in contrast to the expense of flying fresh seafood around the world. [...]
As Dana Gunders, author of Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, told Quartzy earlier this year, “No matter how organically or sustainably the food was grown, if you’re not eating it, it was all for naught.” Americans waste about a pound of food a day per person and people with the healthiest diets tend to waste the most—about half of all produce ends up in the trash, and food is the single biggest contributor to landfills. [...]
While we’re talking about banning straws—which while wasteful, are irreplaceable for some folks with limited mobility or sensory issues—let’s talk about disposable coffee cups. Americans use more than 100 million disposable hot coffee cups each day. That doesn’t even take iced lattes into account. Fancy reusable coffee cups, like the one from Yeti, may seem a bit much, but at around $30 each you’re much less likely to lose it than a cheaper model. Their BPA-free plastic lids actually get clean, are supposedly leak-proof, and don’t hold the grossly lingering flavor of stale coffee, so they can double as your seltzer cup once you’ve caffeinated. Yeti also makes a separate straw lid that is reusable and perfect for keeping your wine spritzer ice cold. Stay up-to-date with Quartzy on Facebook Follow us
27 October 2017
CityLab: How Much Food Do Cities Squander?
To sniff out specifics, the engineering company Tetra Tech (in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rockefeller Foundation) recruited more than 1,151 residents in Denver, New York, and Nashville. Of these, 631 supplied qualitative info in the form of kitchen diaries noting what they tossed and why. Researchers also inspected the contents of 277 residential trash bins, and 145 containers of commercial or industrial garbage. [...]
The researchers divided trashed food into three categories: stuff that is typically edible, questionably edible (including peels and cores), and inedible (such as pits, bones, and egg shells). They then tallied up findings from the bin digs and kitchen diaries to gauge how much is going to waste in each city. In Denver and New York, residents trashed the majority of the wasted food; in Nashville, the residential and restaurant sectors were neck and neck. [...]
The researchers flag that discrepancy, among other sticking points: At least in New York City, they found that participating in a compost program led to more overall waste, compared with families whose garbage all goes into a single stream. In other words: Compost-happy residents were disposing of more total scraps than residents who just threw the whole lot in the trash. To counter that trend, the report’s authors recommend reminding consumers that “preventing food waste is preferable to composting it.”
31 December 2016
CityLab: Enlisting Cities in the War on Food Waste
That gulf between data and public knowledge shrunk in 2016—and cities helped bridge it. Dinged, oddly shaped, or surplus food can battle the pernicious problem of urban hunger, dished out at pay-what-you-wish cafes, reduced-price supermarkets, or redistributed from restaurant kitchens via apps. This coming spring, a British town will start tapping in to a slurry of degrading scraps as a power source.
There were steps forward on the policy side, too. Back in June, the World Resources Institute backed the Food Loss and Waste Protocol, a multi-agency effort that rolled out a comprehensive framework for standardizing terms and accumulating data, helping researchers gauge what’s working and what isn’t. Earlier this month, the USDA issued new, streamlined date labeling guidelines for manufacturers, in an effort to curb major customer confusion about parsing those stamps. [...]
Also this year, NRDC launched our Save the Food campaign. The goal of that is to provide both inspiration and information to people to waste less food. It’s a national public service media campaign: We have TV and online video ads, as well as billboards and bus ads. Our goal is to seed a shift in the cultural paradigm of wasting food, and get people to feel compelled to not waste food in their own homes. We’ve had great pickup across different cities—the campaign has been on buses in Chicago and waste trucks in California. Someone just sent me a picture from a bus stop in Manhattan. We’re hearing about it from all over the country.
18 November 2016
The Guardian: Ugly fruits and vegetables: why you have to learn to love them
“When you look at our food system farm to fork, a stunning 52% of all produce in the US goes uneaten,” says JoAnne Berkenkamp, a senior advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Burgeoning awareness of this reality has led a growing number of eaters and businesses to take a second look at product that doesn’t meet prevailing industry standards for size, shape, color and other cosmetic attributes.” [...]
Imperfect Produce, which delivers to the Bay Area, started in August 2015 and says its produce costs up to 50% less than retail store prices since they’re fruits and vegetables that usually go to waste on farms. Ron Clark, the company’s co-founder and chief supply officer, estimates about 20% of produce overall doesn’t make it to the market because of cosmetic reasons. But the demand is there. Imperfect Produce began with 150 deliveries, he says, and now has over 10,000 customers. [...]
Beyond waste concerns, thanks to imperfect produce’s cheaper cost, some hope this trend will also help provide the more than 48 million Americans who struggle with hunger greater access to fresh food. This was part of the motivation behind the launch in May of Perfectly Imperfect by produce wholesaler Forest City Weingart. Perfectly Imperfect offers boxes of imperfect produce at discounted rates for pick up or delivery in and around Cleveland.
27 September 2016
CityLab: Welcome to the World's First 'Waste Supermarket'
It’s not just the concept behind Britain’s first “waste supermarket” that’s impressive, it’s also the project’s sheer scale. Run by food-waste-busting nonprofit the Real Junk Food Project, this pay-what-you-can store housed in a Leeds warehouse connects local shoppers with food donated by supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers that would otherwise end up in the trash. Set up this summer, the store is already channeling a remarkable volume of otherwise wasted resources to people who need them, according to co-founder Adam Smith. [...]
What the Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP) has dubbed an “anti-supermarket” is really just the tip of their vast iceberg of discarded provisions: The group has a created a network of 126 cafés across seven countries, all serving meals on a “Pay as You Feel” basis. The project fixes no prices to goods, but many patrons contribute, and both the project’s main website and sites run by individual cafes accept donations. TRJFP set up their first café in Leeds in 2013, serving meals made with food destined to be thrown away by stores or restaurants. The U.S. is next on their expansion plans, as the project has already opened a pop-up café in Buffalo, New York, and hopes to expand nationwide in 2017. [...]
The success of such efforts is cheering, but it also reflects the enormity of the food waste problem, which is estimated to devour about a third of the edible food produced each year globally. Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, threw away the equivalent of 119 million meals last year. And Smith is outspoken about the needless, grand-scale squandering of resources that is built into the business model of the grocery industry. “I’m sick to death of the media and supermarkets who say it’s all to do with consumers,” he told The Guardian. “It’s nothing to do with them. We didn’t want this saturation of supermarkets on our high street selling food 24 hours day, manipulating us into purchasing more.”
19 September 2016
The Huffington Post: The Millennials Driving a Food Waste Revolution
A recent survey from supermarket giant Sainsbury’s should make us bow our food weary heads in shame. Of the 5,000 adults asked, only 3% felt guilty about throwing food away. Even when it does cost us some £700 per household, per year. [...]
It is of little surprise then that a growing cohort of people is welcoming a backlash against food waste. This is mostly served to us by young, food-savvy, millennials. People who care about where their food comes from and how sustainability it’s produced. However, it’s a slow movement; working against the tide of waste we have already bloated landfills with all throughout the eighties and nineties. Now it’s time for a detox. [...]
Overall, a more lasting plan has to be to change our thinking and to back this with better political will, as in Italy and France. Italy has just introduced a bill where businesses that sell food have to donate anything unsold to charities. In France, similar initiatives might involve fines, yet Italy hopes to give businesses a tax break on rubbish collection. With a little effort all round, we could eliminate so much of the food we waste if only more of us would take responsibility for it.
6 August 2016
The Atlantic: The Colorado Company That's Tackling 36 Million Tons of Food Waste
The United States throws away 36 million tons of food each year, which amounts to 40 percent of the total food generated. However, this massive issue presents a big recycling opportunity. In this short film from the web series The Perennial Plate, we tour A1 Organics in Colorado, which uses a machine called biogas digester to turn that waste into renewable natural gas.
5 August 2016
The Huffington Post: Europe Does Something Amazing With Food That Has Nothing To Do With Eating
The Italian government passed sweeping legislation this week that aims to drastically reduce the amount of food wasted in the country. The new laws make it easier for farms and supermarkets to donate unsold food and reward businesses that cut waste. The measures also encourage Italians to take restaurant leftovers home in doggy bags (something Italians, apparently, are loath to do). [...]
The movement to cut food waste is growing across Europe. European Parliament members voted 600 to 48 in favor of introducing legislation that would stop grocery giants from using unfair trading practices that often lead to overproduction and food waste.
In France, the government has banned supermarkets from throwing away edible food. It imposed harsh penalties on businesses that fail to comply.
France and Italy still waste massive amounts of food, but their efforts to stop the problem put the U.S. to shame. Up to 40 percent of all food in the U.S. goes uneaten, even as one in seven American households lack regular access to good food. While the U.S. has adopted some legislation designed to reduce food waste ― like the Good Samaritan Act, which protects businesses that donate old food from legal liability ― these laws lack the scope and bite of the anti-waste measures in Italy and France.
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