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 […]

Last week, Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) released a study called Consumption: Reducing, Reusing and Recycling. Because I’m slow at math, I’m just now pondering its import.
My first instinct is to compare Britons’ food waste to ours. The ESRC study reports that the “Every year British consumers each waste £424 on food they do not eat.” […]

           OK, What am I holding? (click photo to enlarge)
                 
 
Here’s a hint: It was a food item. 
 
Give up?  Click here for the answer.  Plus, you can view more pictures here.  
 

A bunch of San Francisco “troublemakers who make good things happen in culture and commerce” are drawing much-needed attention to food waste. Language in Common recently launched a fascinating web campaign urging people to leave their unwanted doggie bags atop trash cans for hungry folks to eat.
Essentially, they’ve taken an observed behavior and made it a verb: Replate. Hmm…
Five things I like about […]

Food-to-energy schemes are fairly common around the globe. In the U.S., however, there are few anaerobic digesters that break down food waste and harness the gas released to power a generator. 
The latest story to cross my desk is a company called Biotech, based in the South Indian state of Kerala. The company has made digesters for 10 […]

I’ve been reading some of the fine print on the Waste Strategy for England 2007 and there’s more than meets the eye. In addition to incentives for businesses to compost, the waste plan includes annual increases of the per tonne landfill tax so that it doubles by 2011. We’re seeing both the carrot and the stick.
As this article in […]

Britain’s Environment Secretary David Miliband published a waste plan for England last week. I’m just now getting around to writing about the strategy because I’ve been stunned by how much sense it makes.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) plan calls for a 45 percent reduction in waste produced and for 50 percent of all household […]