The issue of food waste is a hot topic these days. Everyone from the Food Network to the Environmental Protection Agency is talking about it and trying to get people thinking about the fact that throwing away food really is a waste. Here at IATP, where we strive to ensure fair and sustainable systems, we can’t overlook the ways in which throwing away food is neither fair nor sustainable for people or the planet.
I recently had a chance to attend the 26th Annual BioCycle West Coast Conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference brings together experts and leaders on compost, anaerobic digestion, bioplastics, biogas and organic waste management to discuss science, regulation, innovation and a whole gamut of related issues. Focused not only on identifying the problems, the BioCycle gathering strives to challenge conventional thinking about how we use resources, and offer solutions which make our communities more sustainable, while providing economic opportunities for business.
One of the most widely shared opinions among attendees is that we must make the idea of “organic waste” an oxymoron. Dennis McLerran, US EPA Region 10, reminded us in his keynote that approximately 40 percent of the food we produce in the United States ends up wasted, and that only 3 percent is recovered for compost. While we obviously need to address front-end ways to prevent waste in the first place, we cannot keep thinking of food, or any organic materials for that matter, as waste. As one speaker put it, we’ve got to adopt a “waste-to-worth” attitude.
Part of this means thinking more in the frameworks of life cycles, or materials management, rather than continuing with the traditional waste disposal mindset. Our current system is essentially linear; food is produced, processed, transported, sold, consumed and discarded. In a different system—one that values what is left after feeding people—food is seen as feed for animals or a feedstock for energy production or compost. To be sure, commercial composting isn’t free, but it produces a product which can be sold and used to grow more food, whereas food buried in a landfill costs money to maintain, requires ever increasing amounts of land and results in increased greenhouse gas emissions. The economics and ecology of composting food add up, trashing it does not.
This past week was the International Compost Awareness Week, which seeks to increase understanding about composting through media and education. While I appreciate these types of initiatives, I wonder what it will take for Americans to really embrace the fact that, like recycling plastic, glass and paper, we can’t continue throwing away food. As a society, we justify the use of non-renewable synthetic fertilizers to boost production by saying we have an obligation to “feed the world,” yet hundreds of us will go home tonight and find moldy leftovers and rotten veggies in our fridges, and most of us will pitch them in the trash. Whether we eat the food we buy or throw it away, all of it takes land, energy and inputs to produce, so the best thing we can do is reduce waste as much as possible. At the very least, we need to keep it out of the landfills. Our soil is ultimately one of the most important resources on the planet in terms of maintaining human life, and when we throw away food, we throw away fertility. By taking care in both the purchasing and recycling of our food, we become better stewards of our resources, the land and our farmers.
