It seems like every day I read that another town in the U.K. has started separating and composting its food waste. Yesterday, it was the Scottish town of Banff (in Aberdeenshire).
Here in the States, the good news trickles in less frequently. All the more reason to laud the launching of something like worm compost at North Carolina’s […]

Quote of the Week: “Ask yourself: are you really going to eat all of that food before it rots? All 28 cubic feet of it?”
              –”futurebird,” from her LiveJournal post on refrigerator size
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Here’s some good news from the “Good News Network.” Food waste (among other, even smellier things) can be used to power a fuel […]

A few blips from Nova Scotia crossed my desk last week. This article gave a behind-the-scenes look at fast food restaurants there. From reading it, I learned that the Canadian province has three distinct waste streams–trash, recyclables and organics.
Some restaurants may be scandalously combining the three, but at least it’s an exception to the rule. Way […]

Anaerobic digestion getting a boost in Britain. The recycling advocate WRAP has pushed for the widespread adoption of the process that converts food waste (and anything organic) into energy.
WRAP, or Waste & Resources Action Programme, has called for the installation of more digesters to process excess food. use of the process. It is now running trials […]

Every restaurant, not matter how careful, produces some food waste. Sometimes it originates in the kitchen due to overordering, overpreparing or the inevitable peels and scraps. Often, it comes from the dining room, where diners return half-eaten plates.
One way or another, restaurant dumpsters end up full of wet, heavy organic waste. Some of it was edible when discarded (as freegans well know), some […]

With Seattle’s mandatory food waste recycling a scant 20 months away, folks there have begun to contemplate how to store their food scraps in the kitchen before curbside dumping. In other words, what kind of container works best.
This problem isn’t unique to Seattle’s single family homes (the ones forced to compost in 2009). Home composters of […]

Seattle’s City Council passed an ordinance Monday requiring all single family homes to recycle their food scraps by 2009. I’m a bit late on this due to my vacation, but what kind of food waste blogger would I be if I didn’t pass along this news?
My friends at The Seattle Times have all the details covered. And here’s one […]

In an effort to get Seattle to recycle 60 percent of its trash by 2012, the mayor has proposed food waste collection. Seattle currently diverts 44 percent of its waste from landfills, and food recycling would help the city reach its goal. San Francisco and Portland, which both separate food waste, have a 69 and 59 percent diversion […]

The Indian food digestion company that we talked about recently just won Britain’s Ashden Award for food security. The company, BIOTECH, has installed more than 12,000 biogas digesters that transform food waste to electricity. Best of all, the majority of these contraptions are at individual homes (closing that proverbial loop). 
This technology, also called anaerobic digestion, is […]

Let’s look at another figure from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study. The ESRC study counts 17 million tonnes of British food waste annually. Fareshare, the national charity that redistributes excess food, says almost one-fourth of that is perfectly edible when it’s thrown away.
To subtract the ‘es’ from 17 million tonnes, we multiply a bit to arrive at […]