So says JD Lindeberg, president of the Ann Arbor-based sustainability consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems. Founded in 1986 by Jim Frey and Kerry Sandford, respectively former employees of the Ecology Center and Recycle Ann Arbor, RRS has worked for clients ranging from the U-M to Coca-Cola. Most recently, it contributed to the “Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste.”
Released in March at Stanford University, the Roadmap was spearheaded by Rethinking Food Waste Through Economics and Data (ReFED), a collaborative whose diverse advisory council includes representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, the city of Seattle, Walmart, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Lindeberg says reducing food waste has risen to prominence recently at a national policy level as a response to global warming: when food waste breaks down in a landfill, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
For environmental activists, Lindeberg says, food waste has become the natural next challenge to tackle as the number and quality of national recycling programs have “topped out.” The Roadmap lays out twenty-seven specific recommendations that, if fully implemented, could cut national food waste in half by 2030. The USDA and EPA set that target for the U.S. last fall, as did the European Parliament for the EU in 2012.
For starters, the Roadmap team had to determine how much food waste the U.S. produces. Lindeberg says one of RRS’s key contributions was researching and calculating that figure by reconciling current USDA data, which incorporates food wasted before it ever leaves the farm, with much older EPA data based more on how much food winds up in landfills. “It’s kind of boring and accountant-ish, but it was important because collectively everybody from the grocery industry to the waste management industry to the farmers that were a part of this all had to agree on what the landscape was,” Lindeberg says. The final figure arrived at in the report is a whopping sixty-three million tons of food wasted annually: 10.1 million tons on farms and 52.4 million tons that end up in landfills.
The report breaks its recommendations into three groups: preventing food waste from happening in the first place; recovering food that might be wasted through donations and other redistribution efforts; and recycling wasted food for compost or other uses. Lindeberg says RRS’s research was directed mostly at recovery and recycling, where the firm’s expertise primarily lies. By its calculations, recycling efforts–primarily composting and anaerobic digestion, which breaks waste down into biogas–could potentially divert 9.5 million tons of waste annually. That’s far more than the 2.6 million tons the report estimates can be saved through prevention, or the 1.1 million tons through proposed recovery solutions.
Lindeberg says the city of Ann Arbor set a good example by recently adding food scraps to its yard waste composting infrastructure. But he says that’s just “a good place to start.” National studies vary, but they generally suggest that food waste and yard waste each make up about 10 to 15 percent of the waste stream. If Ann Arbor succeeds in capturing more food scraps, Lindeberg suggests, it will eventually need to expand its composting facility or build an anaerobic digestion plant.
The report makes some novel waste reduction recommendations for the grocery and restaurant industries, such as discounting imperfect-looking produce and using smaller plates in all-you-can-eat restaurants. Lindeberg says the report’s prevention solutions are the most likely to be quickly implemented, as many could provide substantial savings to businesses. He expects the recycling efforts to take longer, because communities will need to invest in collecting and composting food waste, and then find markets for the resulting compost.
“Everybody says, ‘Well, this is food waste. We should be recovering it all and feeding the hungry,'” Lindeberg says. “Well, I don’t know anybody who wants to eat a banana peel. That’s a food waste component, and so are onion skins, and so are meat bones.
“And while, yes, we do have a lot of edible material in our food waste, as we get better and better at this there’s going to be less and less edible material.”
