by MAURA KELLER
The U.S. is the global leader in food waste, discarding nearly 40 million tons of food every year according to the EPA.
That’s 8 billion pounds of food, more than $160 billion or roughly 220 pounds of food waste per person within the country.
While these numbers are staggering, inroads are being made within food waste recycling programs across the U.S. As Arnold Bowers, business solutions director at ENGIE Impact explained, there are several emerging technologies in the marketplace today that are impacting how we engage with and tackle food waste, and anaerobic digestion is one tactic that has proven to be successful in certain settings,
“ENGIE Impact provides comprehensive consulting to both waste haulers and property owners to first audit waste streams in their current state and then deliver solutions that provide options like digesters to reduce both landfill tonnage and their overall carbon footprint,” Bowers said. In 2018, ENGIE Impact recommended “on-site” aerobic digesters for certain property management clients in New York City who operated large venues with food court-style restaurants.
“One of our waste audit clients with more than two million square feet of retail food generation installed an aerobic digester, which reduced its amount of waste being sent to landfills by 50 percent,” Bowers said.
Dan Meccariello, operations manager, Generate, said in the U.S. we are losing approximately 40 percent of our food to landfills, and the loss of restaurant demand made some of that food waste even worse. Generate is one of the largest owners of anaerobic digesters in North America and the company upcycles millions of tons of food waste annually into biogas that powers communities, and biomass that can be reused as natural fertilizer.
Anaerobic digesters utilize organic processes in which naturally occurring micro-organisms break down plant and animal materials, or biomass, inside a sealed tank or digester. This releases methane-rich biogas which is harnessed to produce renewable heat and electricity. Once waste has been processed, the remaining organic material is used as a natural fertilizer and organic soil amendment for thousands of acres of farmland each year.
As Meccariello explained, this unique electric generation process helps reduce fossil fuel dependency while diverting waste that would otherwise contribute to climate change in landfills. Digesters provide a sustainable and productive alternative for food waste that would otherwise be sent to landfills and contribute to climate change.
“Where many forms of renewable energy, like wind and solar, provide an intermittent source of power, anaerobic digesters provide consistent, baseload renewable energy capable of powering thousands of local homes and businesses,” Meccariello said.
Generate is seeing a lot of growth in organic waste recycling generally because consumers are demanding that companies and stores where they shop make more sustainable choices with their waste. “Cities and communities are also increasingly passing regulation to demand food waste recycling, as many communities in Europe and Canada have already done,” Meccariello said.
For example, cities are moving towards embracing food waste recycling to better their communities and the environment through policies aimed at reducing food waste. For example, the New York State Senate recently passed the New York Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law. As of January 1, 2022, large generators of food scraps, like grocery stores, caterers and restaurants, must donate excess edible food and recycle all remaining food scraps if they are within 25 miles of an organics recycler (composting facility, anaerobic digester, etc.).
In addition to municipality initiatives, other companies are making inroads in handling food waste recycling in creative ways. Stefan Kalb, co-founder and chief executive officer of Shelf Engine and his team are on a mission to transform the food supply chain by helping grocery stores reduce waste through AI-driven predictive technology.
“We know firsthand just how underrepresented the true volume of food waste is in the grocery industry, so our number one priority is helping retailers better assess and track their food waste and spoilage rates,” Kalb said. In other words, Shelf Engine specializes in decreasing losses and stopping waste higher up the supply chain, which is key to reducing waste at the retail and consumer level. That said, spoilage and loss are still inevitable at the individual store level at least to some degree.
“So, in the event food is lost and goes unsold, we work with Feeding America and other organizations like Divert to minimize downstream impact, protect the environment and ensure good food gets to those who need it most,” Kalb says. “Divert, for example, uses innovative tracking technology and custom-designed solutions to bring accountability to retail recycling operations, from organics and problem material recycling to food rescue and other charitable donations.”
Kalb agreed that in general, municipalities and local governments are taking actionable, progressive steps towards reducing food waste. For example, Shelf Engine’s hometown of Seattle prohibited food waste from the garbage in 2015, requiring all commercial businesses that generate food waste to subscribe to food and yard waste service, compost their food waste on-site, or self-haul their food waste for processing.
“To help facilitate this, there’s a number of free recycling and composting resources available to Seattle business owners, including the Green Business Program provided by Seattle Public Utilities that offers recycling and conservation assistance. Many municipalities across the country are following suit,” Kalb said.
Jonathan Deutsch, Ph.D., professor, Department of Food and Hospitality Management, Drexel University and president of Upcycled Food Foundation said that some municipalities have added collection for post-consumer compost and return the finished compost to the community for gardening and landscaping.
“I would love to see this take off, both for its ecological value and also its educational benefit to let everyone know that food waste doesn’t need to be a dead end,” Deutsch said. “Also, there is now an Upcycled Food Association, a trade association of food manufacturers who make food products from food that would otherwise have been wasted. This will divert waste but also raise consumer awareness of how much nutrition, flavor, and environmental inputs are in so much of the food currently entering the waste stream.”
COVID’s Impact on Food Waste
Experts agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on disruptive shortcomings of our society. “With our lives being disrupted in such drastic ways over the last eight months, we have stepped back and asked ourselves what could we do better when life returns to normal,” Bowers said. “The focus on recycling food has increased during 2020.”
ENGIE Impact has several clients across diverse businesses like hospitality, QSR, property management and manufacturing that engage us regularly to support their goals of understanding and reducing food waste via ENGIE Impact’s waste audits and “Zero Waste to Landfill” certification programs.
Municipalities are engaging in campaigns to educate their residents on how reducing food waste can achieve several goals. As Bowers explained, these goals include supporting food banks and soup kitchens that feed the undernourished, reducing food waste to keep the city clean and free of animal vectors that can carry disease, as well as the overall pursuit of environmental and social responsibility. The levels by which cities or municipalities engage in these campaigns varies across the U.S.
Evaluating the Unknown
Technology and the tools that come with it will aid in the reduction and better usefulness of food waste in the next five years. Bowers said that as tools are developed and deployed to track and re-route unused or discarded food, we will better be able to capture it for human consumption, which should be our ultimate goal.
“Once that goal is met, we can divert the food to other causes, like animal feed and energy production,” Bowers said.
Bowers sees these innovations taking place at the retail and distribution levels, coming in the form of tracking devices that can divert food from becoming waste in the first place, as well as waste bin monitoring solutions that provide insight into exactly how much food actually makes it to the dumpsters.
“Additionally, converting to an anaerobic digestion of food waste will help deter the generation of methane gas in landfills. Lastly, the evolution of the circular economy will allow for front end tracking and diversion of food from where there is abundance to where there is scarcity or shortages, which is the ultimate win in the battle to reduce food waste in the U.S. and the world as a whole,” Bowers said.
Meccariello stressed that food waste recycling is the future as consumers want products that are made in a more sustainable fashion and more companies and cities are working toward zero-waste initiatives.
“This is similar to how recycling ultimately caught on and became commonplace,” Meccariello said. “We’re excited about efforts by companies to use more compostable packaging, which would increase our options for processing food waste that is in packaging. We’ve invested in de-packaging technology to process more organic waste, but it is helpful for more food manufacturers to use packaging that is designed to be compostable.”
Kalb predicted consumers will shift from simply caring about sustainability to actually demanding it. Plus, they’ll continue to show increased interest in seeing the specific impact their decisions making in terms of feeding families and diverting waste.
“On the company side, with new technology will come improved food waste recycling tracking and traceability, meaning retailers will be able to better report on their impacts, especially on a more granular level,” Kalb said. “The combination of growing consumer interest and company transparency means recycling programs will continue to flourish and become more widely accessible as demand rises.”
Published in the January 2021 Edition