kirstyncraig_prose

 

The Project

Working in the food industry, I see so much food go to waste. Even though employees eat what they can, most food is dumped without a care regarding what or where it is going to end up. The reason that this is such a problem is because the food is being contained in sealed plastic bags which are to be sent to a landfill and rot amongst other actual items of garbage. The idea I propose is having composting facilities for processing these food scraps. Whether it be from food prepping, mess-ups in the kitchen, or leftover items from the customer’s plate; if it is food, it should go in a designated area, collected from these restaurants, and sent to a place where it can utilized properly. Doing this would eliminate so much of the waste that accumulates in landfills, and these composting facilities can use this food waste to enrich soil and help from an agricultural standpoint.

Research

A significant number of the food waste composting facilities in the United States are privately owned and operated. Out of 94 facilities that responded to a set of research questions, 63 are privately owned, 29 are municipal, and only one is operated by a nonprofit. Throughout my research, numerous trends stood out in terms of full-scale food waste composting infrastructure in recent years. The majority of responding facilities have either a solid waste facility permit or a source separated organics (SSO) composting permit allowing food waste. These categories of facilities typically are under more stringent air and water quality requirements than those with permit-by-rule, registration, or exemption categories and require a larger investment in infrastructure and labor. This is a positive trend, since facilities with solid waste or SSO permits allowed to accept food waste have more permanent infrastructure designed to manage food waste. Fifty-nine percent of the full-scale food waste composting facilities in the U.S. responding to the questionnaire compost less than 5,000 tons/year of food waste. Of the remaining facility responses, 22 percent are in the 5,000-9,999 tons/year range, 4 percent are in the 25,000-49,999 tons/year range, and 5 percent are in the 50,000-99,999 tpy range. Without tonnage range data from the nonresponding facilities that BioCycle confirmed accept food waste, it is difficult to have a more complete estimate of tons of food waste composted in the U.S. BioCycle’s 2018 survey of full-scale food waste composting facilities in the U.S. illustrates the challenge of tracking food waste composting in the U.S., especially in terms of tonnages of food waste received and composted. The difficulty in obtaining data can be partly due to states’ difficulty in tracking food waste composting activity. In some states, officials can report the permitted annual capacity that a facility is allowed to accept, but do not have data on how much food waste was actually composted.

Glass	3.2 million tons
Metals	16.2 million tons
Plastics	16.2 million tons
Wood	12.3 million tons
Food	13.2 million tons
Other	16.3 million tons
Trimmings	35.0 million tons
Paper and Paperboard	73.3 million tons

 

The Various Benefits of Composting Food Waste

Environment

• Water and soil conservation.
• Protects groundwater quality.
• Minimizes odors from agricultural areas.
• Avoids methane production and leachate formation in landfills by diverting organics from landfills into compost.
• Prevents erosion and turf loss on roadsides, hillsides, playing fields and golf courses.
• Drastically reduces the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
• Binds heavy metals and prevents them from migrating to water resources, being absorbed by plants, or being bioavailable to humans.
• Off-farm materials can be brought in and added to manure to make compost.
• Facilitates reforestation, wetlands restoration, and wildlife habitat revitalization efforts by amending contaminated, compacted and marginal soils.
• Off-farm materials can be brought in and added to manure to make compost.
• Composted manure weights about one-fourth as much as raw manure per ton.

Agriculture

• Long-term stable organic matter source.
• Buffers soil pH levels.
• Adds organic matter, humus and cation exchange capacity to regenerate poor soils.
• Suppresses certain plant diseases and parasites and kills weed seeds.
• Increases yield and size in some crops.
• Increases length and concentration of roots in some crops.
• Increases soil nutrient content and water holding capacity of sandy soils and water infiltration of clay soils.
• Reduces fertilizer requirements.
• Restores soil structure after natural soil microorganisms have been reduced by the use of chemical fertilizers; compost is a soil inoculant.
• Increases earthworm populations in soil.
• Provides slow, gradual release of nutrients, reducing loss from contaminated soils.
• Reduces water requirements and irrigation.
• Provides opportunity for extra income; high quality compost can be sold at a premium price in established markets.
• Moves manure to non-traditional markets that do not exist for raw manure.
• Brings higher prices for organically grown crops.
• Minimizes odors from agricultural areas.

Source: EPA: Compost - New Applications for an Age-Old Technology

 

Objective

The project is intended to slow the curve of the rapid rate that we as a society are producing waste. The amount of food that businesses and homes accumulate is astronomical and something eventually has to be done, even if they’re small steps. I believe that if this project was actually implemented, where restaurant food waste is required to be sent to facilities, and everyday people in their homes have the option to provide their food scraps like they do with recyclables, a change would be visible in no more than a year. This project is directed towards an environmentally conscious audience that wants to reduce waste and help improve the environment.

Strategy

The project should start on a small scale, working with one city for example, and expand from there. Working with Peyton, Colorado for instance, ballpark numbers, but there’s approximately 110 restaurants. If each restaurant had a designated, airtight area to store the food scraps that would otherwise be thrown away, and collected them over the course of a week, a compost facility truck could make his rounds (similar to that of a garbage truck or postal service) and collect this waste from each restaurant. A level of sorting should be done once the food is back at the facility and this can be done with either a couple of employees or a machine. The food can then be churned into the soil, providing nutrients to the dirt making the compost. Partners can be made with the facilities regarding who would be getting the soil to sell and it can turn a profit for both the composting facilities, but the soil companies too. Working out any kinks at the one facility, seeing what works and what doesn’t and moving forward from there. Acquiring an SSO permit is crucial before any collections are made however.

Execution/Evaluation

After approximately six months of working out initial kinks, making sure that the communication with the restaurants is squared away and everything is working properly at the facility itself, expanding to other cities can commence. The amount of facilities needed coincides with how many restaurants there are in the area. One facility can’t effectively deal with the amount of waste that would be coming in from the larger cities. Ergo, a ratio would need to be determined depending on how well populated that area is. Building permits for these facilities would take time, but as progressive interest in the idea would spark, more people could be on board now that the idea has been laid out in a concise manner.