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UCSB has begun a student-led composting project. The best part is that students are the ones doing the sorting. While that means a lower food waste capture rate than when staff do the sorting, it ups the awareness quotient!

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Saving money by composting? A Montana food bank is doing just that by composting their own waste. Would that composting was always less expensive than using the landfill!

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Uh oh, some bad news from the UK: Grocers failed to meet their self-imposed food waste reduction goals. The British Retail Consortium announced the news in their progress report.

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Students at Missouri are apparently cool with trayless dining. Also–there’s a student paper called The Maneater?!

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A UK restaurant was caught dumping food waste into their neighbor’s dumpster. Oops.

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Unilever is hoping to help food service companies Wise up on Waste.

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Let me know if I missed anything else in the food waste world late last week–I was busy welcoming my second child into the world (while trying hard not to notice the abundant hospital food waste)!

Uli Westphal is a German photographer who also enjoys “non-standard fruits, roots and vegetables.” Except when he finds interesting examples, being a professional photographer, he does this:

What could be better than creating beautiful art out of nature’s oddities? Not much. That’s why I’m excited that Uli has agreed to exhibit some of the fabulous images from his Mutato Project in my site’s Gallery.

Enjoy your browsing, and remember–amazingly–the “mutatoes” pictured are all actual, bona fide food items.

More specifically, Parliament called on the European Commission to tackle waste through an ambitious goal of halving food waste by 2025. And setting the stakes for inaction–waste will increase by 40 percent if nothing is done.

The resolution specifically pushed for many waste-reducing measures, like less confusing date labeling on food packaging, a wider range of package sizes with perishables, and country-specific food-waste-prevention targets by 2014.

The resolution also urged further education on the issue: EU and national food waste awareness campaigns, declaring a European Year Against Waste in 2014 (pushed back from 2013), and school courses teaching better food storage, cooking and disposal.

Salvatore Caronna, the Member of European Parliament (MEP) assigned to investigate the issue, provides some perspective:

For the first time a European institution is raising the point and it is going to goad the other institutions to act as well. Now the ball is in the Commission’s court and the Commission is going to have to very swiftly come up with replies.

In the coming days and weeks, we shall see if the European Commission, a 27 member executive body, is up to the task. Let’s hope they can continue the momentum and strike a blow against food waste!

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* For the full text of the 2011/2175(INI), go here, download the Word doc and scroll to page 327! And here’s a way to trace the resolution’s evolution.

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Dana Gunders at the NRDC blog considers how we’re composting $175 per year unnecessarily.

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UK retailer Marks & Spencer will soon carry new ethylene-absorbing packaging that will keep fruit fresh for a few more days. Because every little bit helps…

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Not to be outdone, British baked goods company Warburtons is making a push to make its supply chain less wasteful.

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A UK professor has the dirt on the EU’s strict standards for veggies.

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For those of you on Netflix–you can now instantly watch Dive! the quintessential American dumpster diving doc.

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No need for a caucus to determine that composting school food waste in Iowa makes sense!

My second thought: I guess taking home leftovers isn’t big in Saudi Arabia. Also, showing the words “the greedy are punished” burning embers flicker on screen made me think the video was headed in another direction.

Any opinions?

More than 50 UK grocery retailers have signed on to The Courtauld Commitment Phase 2, which sets many waste reduction goals. Food is one of them. Interestingly, the food waste goal focuses on homes: reduce home food and drink waste by 4% from 2009 to 2012.

You might be wondering: What does that have to do with grocers? That’s the best part–UK supermarkets have taken some responsibility for their role in prompting home food waste. As a result, many grocers have launched campaigns to preach the food waste reduction gospel to their customers.

And so…there has been a 3% reduction in home food waste, according to WRAP. They are on schedule to meet the 2012 goal. Even more impressive, though, are the numbers in comparing 2006/7 with 2010. In that time, household food waste dropped 13% and “avoidable” waste decreased by 18%.

That represents a saving of millions in cash and CO2 equivalent tonnes. Once more–Huzzah!

First, it was heartening to experience so many intelligent people considering the topic of wasted food. Second, the level of research on the topic in Europe is impressive. And the commitment to reducing waste–as epitomized by the European Commission’s 50% reduction goal by 2020–is equally encouraging.

Now, it’s just a matter of making it happen. Hopefully, with initiatives like my co-panelist Andrea Segre’s Last Minute Market (you can translate the page well in Chrome) and the upcoming European campaign A Year Against Waste (2013), this will happen sooner rather than later.

Ciao!

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Don’t throw out that carcass! First, you can make a great soup with it. Then, if you’re in Rhode Island, you can compost it via EcoRI News.

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British Eco Chef Tom Hunt cooked at last week’s Feeding the 5K. In his neat blog, he discusses Ribollita, a traditional Tuscan leftover soup, and pens a culinary call-to-arms on using old bread in The Life of a Loaf.

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I’d heard about Concrete Jungle before, but this article reminded me of their awesome Atlanta tree-gleaning-ness.