Thursday I wrote about colleges cutting the use of trays. In addition to limiting food waste, it curtails water usage, as there are no trays to wash.
Another way to save water is to not waste food in general. Saving Water: From Field to Fork, a new report by the Stockholm Water Management Institute (SIWI), Chalmers […]

Exciting News! In September, Los Angeles will begin a trial run of household food scrap collection.
The city will give 2-gallon kitchen pails to residents in three areas of the city. It will encourage folks in about 5,000 households to dump their kitchen food scraps into these pails and, ultimately, their yard waste bin that’s already […]

An op-ed by Cooper Lloyd in The Washington Post’s new Green section pushed for city-wide curbside composting. If it adopted this kind of progressive plan,
Washington could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, free up space in its landfills and even generate fertilizer to keep the city’s parks and public spaces beautiful.
In countering one potential barrier to […]

Last week, I wrote about a food waste weighing week at Virginia Tech created and implemented by Andy Sarjahani, a soon-to-be registered dietitian.
Sarjahani (that’s him pictured below) and other student volunteers weighed the waste from each meal during a week with trays and a week without. After comparing the numbers, they found that removing the […]

27 percent. 96 billion pounds.
Those are the numbers most often associated with food waste. What frustrates me is that they’re 13 years old. Those statistics come from this 1997 study, which uses 1995 figures. Hence, the data is ready for its Bar Mitzvah!
There are a few other limitations of the study, which I’ve been railing […]

The British semi-governmental, not-for-profit Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released its long-anticipated food waste study today. The whole of Britain–the media and blogging parts, at least–is going wild.
Here’s The Food We Waste, all 237 pages of it. A good first step would be reading the executive summary.
It’ll take me a bit to digest this […]

I was at a sustainable energy conference yesterday and someone threw out this statistic: From 1974 to 2003, the average refrigerator volume increased from 17.5 to 22.5 cubic feet. (Sorry, I don’t have a link right now.)
On the plus side, refrigerators’ energy efficiency has increased by 74 percent. The average 1974 ‘fridge used 1825 kwh/year, […]

Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a staggering figure the other day: 4.4 million whole apples are being thrown away every day in Britain.
That’s 12 double decker buses full. These apples are termed “avoidable losses,” meaning perfectly good fruit that could have been consumed.
You know the old saying: An apple a day…gets thrown away. Or something like […]

I’ve often heaped praise on T.G.I. Friday’s for offering smaller sized meals in the “Right Portion, Right Prize” menu. Here’s where I prove I’m not on the T.G.I. payroll.
I recently came across a list of organic waste produced by all restaurants in Southeastern Massachusetts (no link, because it’s not online). Given the geographic specificity, this […]

A friend sent me this useful waste diversion presentation created by the Biodegradable Products Institute. The Power Point doc, which takes a bit to load, has some eye-opening statistics about how much food is in our trash.
In slide six, we see that food scraps make up the largest portion of the waste stream. It’s the […]