Less waste through technology: When farmer’s market orders are made in advance online, growers only pick what they know will go to use.Â
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The EPA food waste calculator–out sometime in September, I think–will let businesses calculate how diverting food from their waste stream will save them dough. (Hat tip to Lean Path.)
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Even celebrity chefs are getting into the act in the UK, pitching in with recipes to help Britons avoid waste. Cool graphic, too.
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The good news: Many prisons in Tennessee are composting their food scraps, and often using the finished product to help grow their veggies.
The bad news: the state Solid Waste Disposal Control Board shot down oroposed landfill bans on yard waste by 2017 (which has been on the books for a decade here in ole North Carolina) and food waste by 2020. Hey, at least the topic is being discussed, thanks mostly to Bring Urban Recycling to Nashville Today (BURNT).
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Finally, here are some dumpster diving scare tactics, courtesy of Florida grocers. Publix spokeswoman Kim Jaeger on her store’s efficiency:
“In other words, you won’t find much in our Dumpsters.”
That’s a good one.
Comments
5 responses to “Friday Buffet”
LOVE the graphic!
Isn’t that pretty sweet?! Thanks to Recycle for London for letting me use the graphic–it really brightens up this Friday’s Buffet.
I just had to laugh at the graphic you posted! Great info Jonathan. The quality of the information you present in your posts is wonderful and I’ll definitly be adding you to our blogroll. Check us out at http://urbangardensolutions.wordpress.com. Thanks again!
I work in Food Recovery in St. Paul, Minnesota. This year we began collecting food from a large farmer’s market in downtown Minneapolis and so far (after only 6 collections) we’ve received #48,000. It is amazing produce that the food shelves LOVE because it is so fresh. Just makes me think about all of the food that doesn’t come to us on our once/week collection…
There are literally billions of pounds of food waste are created by the residence halls of any kind of institution in this country. University residence halls, assisted living and hospitals, jails and prisons, and the many other “all you can consume in one sitting†style buffets offer the kind of options that are prepared in volume to anticipate consumption based on population or target audience. This means that they are trying to find out how much do they have to spend on food per the meal period, day, week, etc. The amount of food wasted only comes into the equation when factoring in the costs of hauling the trash away. Some, and it is a rare few, have started pilot composting programs to reduce the amount of produce scraps put in the landfills, however this does not catch the other 75% of the food waste which consists of fried foods, bread products, soups and gravies, meats, and other animal based products that will produce harmful bacteria in compost. So much waste happens behind the scenes that consumer waste is just considered part of the production. I guarantee that we can feed every hungry person in america with the amount of food that is thrown out each year. It’s not that the food banks do not pick up as much food as they can use, it’s that there is too much wasted food. Local food banks simply cannot handle the amounts of certain types of food that are not consumed during meal periods. Most of the food that is unusable has also been sitting out on the hot line for 4-5 hours after being prepared, so that renders it useless.