The latest in the growing number of efforts directed at reducing, repurposing and ultimately eliminating waste in all its forms.
Award-winning chefs from across the country, including ‘Top Chef’ head judge Tom Colicchio, gathered in Washington, D.C. on May 25 to advocate for food waste reduction in the American food system. In hopes of educating lawmakers on the severity of the issue, the group met with 22 Senate and House offices in tandem with a first-of-its-kind House Agriculture Full Committee hearing assessing food waste from farm to table.
France and the United Kingdom have been leaders in the fight against food waste: French retailer Intermarché’s “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign paved the way for “ugly” produce around the globe, including UK grocery giant Asda’s successful “Wonky Veg” campaign, for example.
The most in-depth examination of the grocery supply chain in the United Kingdom was released yesterday by the waste reduction experts at WRAP. The organization estimates that 1.9 million tonnes of food is wasted by UK grocery retailers and food manufacturers every year, and for the first time, broke down the overall avoidable food waste figures into manufacturing sub-sectors such as meat and dairy. According to the report, action to increase prevention of food waste could save businesses £300 million a year.
On Wednesday, May 18th, a one-day food festival will offer free meals to 5,000 people at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. The event is designed to educate the public on the problem of food waste, and to elevate the conversation around food and sustainability policy. Recent research estimates that the U.S. alone spends $218 billion a year growing, processing and transporting food that is never eaten, with up to 63 million tons of perfectly edible food ending up in American landfills each year, while roughly 49 million Americans live in food-insecure households.
South Korea has been using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and a ‘pay-as-you-waste’ system to help cut back on waste. In 2013, the country found that its waste had a particularly high liquid content – about 80 percent – which was leaching into soil and causing outbreaks of insects. Now, South Korea is using technology to both cut back on food waste and divert more of it for processing into animal feed and fertilizer.
The circular economy represents a fundamental shift in the way resources, energy and information flow through our economy. A key characteristic of this framework is that products and components remain at their highest levels of integrity and performance. So is recycling part of the picture?
Tomatoes are useful for a lot of things — mixing into salads, adding nutritional value to cheeseburgers, lobbing at struggling standup comics, and even making plastic for car parts. But a team of scientists at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology has come up with a powerful new application for the flushed fruit: electricity. At the recent 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the team presented their pilot project, which involves a bio-based fuel cell that uses tomato waste left over from harvests in Florida.
‘Fast fashion’ holds a prominent position in the apparel industry despite the many problems associated with it, from labor conditions to clothing waste. In the three years since the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the revolt against fast fashion has gathered steam.
Campaigns near and far have been educating people on the – well, wastefulness – of food waste. Bad for both our wallets and the environment, the amount of food that is purchased by consumers only to go uneaten and get thrown out is estimated at 16 percent in European Union countries and up to 25 percent in the United States. The average family in the United Kingdom discards £700-worth (over US$1,000) of food a year, while the average American family of four tosses $1,365 to $2,275 per year.
One of North America’s largest outdoor advertising companies is partnering with a non-profit on the world’s first-ever live-stream billboard campaign. Lamar Advertising Company is donating the use of hundreds of digital billboards across the United States at no cost to Recycle Across America (RAA) to promote its “Let’s recycle right!” campaign during a live-streamed photo shoot event on April 21, 2016 and throughout Earth Week.
Fetzer Vineyards, a leader in regenerative winegrowing, is revolutionizing the way U.S. wineries conserve water, announcing today that it will install the BioFiltro BIDA® System at its Mendocino winery. In doing so, Fetzer — a certified B Corp — will become the first American winery to use the closed-loop biological wastewater treatment system to process 100 percent of its winery wastewater.
The 2016 FIRST® LEGO® League Arabia Open, the largest regional robotics competition in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, took place this past weekend at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. More than 50 teams of children from eight Arab countries competed in this year’s 'TRASH TREK Challenge,' working to find solutions to the world’s waste problem.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is transforming both consumers’ shopping carts and companies’ supply chains by allowing intelligent barcodes to talk to a networked system that tracks products from Point A to Point Z. A technology once limited to tracking cattle, RFID tags are now tracking consumer products worldwide. Many manufacturers use the tags to monitor the location of each product they make from the time it's made until it's pulled off the shelf and tossed in a shopping cart.
The UK’s resource efficiency charity WRAP, on behalf of the UK Government and Devolved Administrations, today unveils a pioneering commitment that brings together organizations from across the food system for the first time to make food and drink production and consumption more sustainable for the future.
The statistics on food waste — a top-of-mind issue governments, businesses and NGOs across the globe — are staggering: Every year, U.S. consumers, businesses, and farms spend $218 billion growing, processing, transporting, and disposing food that is never eaten. As a result, up to 52 million tons of food is sent to landfills annually, plus an additional estimated 10 million tons get discarded or go unharvested on farms. Meanwhile, 1 in 7 Americans is food insecure without reliable access to sufficient affordable, nutritious food.
The UK is the epicenter of the circular economy movement, with both the public and private sectors making sweeping commitments and headway toward eliminating waste of all kinds throughout its economy.
MillerCoors, the second largest brewer in the US, announced on Wednesday that all of its major breweries have achieved landfill-free operations.The Fort Worth Brewery in Texas was the final of its eight sites to reach the milestone, after the facility engaged a 'Sustainability Employee Council' that focused on changing employee behaviors and making recycling easier and more accessible.
While waste reduction charity WRAP calls on stakeholders to do their part to help improve recycling consistency and efficiency in England, three companies in France have partnered on a circular economy initiative for small household appliances.
Unilever today announced a new industry-leading achievement of sending zero non-hazardous waste to landfill across more than 600 sites, in 70 countries, including factories, warehouses, distribution centers and offices. Having identified the different non-hazardous waste streams in its operations, Unilever has now found alternative routes for the waste from these sites.
Among the key challenges to the burgeoning recycling market are lack of infrastructure, innovation at scale and funding. But a variety of initiatives — in developed and developing areas alike — are attempting to secure these factors to help spur the development of circular economic infrastructure.In Argentina, a new generation of trash pickers is helping to refine recycling at the street level. Buenos Aires has invested in recycling through the city government’s Ciudad Verde (Green City) plan and now more than 5,000 litter pickers (known locally as cartoneros) collect a base salary for emptying the city’s bell-shaped recycling bins.