Fashionable Food Scraps
Food for Thought: Food Scraps, yes the bits and pieces you chop from your veggies during prep, as well as the leftovers you throw away each meal, account for over 2.5 billion tons of food each year sent to land fills. The US, more than any other country in the world, accounts for 60 million tons - 120 billion pounds - every year.
But its not just me and you and our carrot ends, food is lost all throughout the growing, distributing and consuming process. Food is lost on farms, during processing, during distribution, during storage, in retail stores, in food service operations, in our kitchens, for a wide variety of reasons.
So, what is the problem here. Doesn’t “organic matter” just disappear in the landfill? Well as it turns out, not exactly.
Trucking those scraps to the landfill comes with a high cost, financially and chemically. Once in the landfill the abundance of food scraps generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
So if we just separated these scraps at the source, just like we’ve become accustom to separating our recyclables, we’re solving multiple things at once. We’re removing the tons of scraps from the system which is incentive enough for me, but we also have an opportunity to turn those food scraps into a valuable nutrient rich compost that can be used for home gardening and which sells for $20-$50 a cubic yard.
I have now become a food scrap fanatic. I have tested many household kitchen methods including products such as Lomi, Reencle, Bokashi, and large yard methods such as a pallet built composters, a compost pit, and a tumbler, I’m also now exploring community scale solutions such as BioTechAmericas, which allows large college and business campuses, restaurants or towns to make amazing compost from their collective scraps.
Don’t forget that property storing your food allows for less waste. Here are some valuable items in storing you food properly and giving it a longer life…produce storage bags that can also be used to forgo those plastic bags in the produce section and these beautiful Bees Wrap products that replace single use plastic zip locks.