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You Gonna Eat That?
Of Black Gold, Ort Reports and Compost Tea. (Your Leftovers Matter)
By, Alison Byrne - Contact: alisonbyrne@gmail.com
New York may be "the city that never sleeps" but it's equally the city that always eats—and its eyes are bigger than its stomach.
Food waste is a mounting problem in the Big Apple as one in five New Yorkers goes to bed hungry each night. At the same time, the city's 18,000 restaurants—uninformed, indifferent, or fearing liability—toss left-over food rather than donate it. And while fees for hauling garbage away continue to rise, almost 16 percent of New York City's trash is food.
Believe it or not, New York residents and businesses could solve the problems of wasted food with three steps. The first is simple: buy only enough food for meals. The next two are key: donate leftover food, and compost the waste. This may sound like some crunchy granola and impractical notion for urbanites with too little time and too little space. But the city itself feels the economic pain, and feeding the hungry and composting food will save everyone some dough. That's something New Yorkers can sink their teeth into.
Donating Spare Fare
When a food drive is announced, good-hearted families scavenge their cabinets for that extra box of 'mac & cheese' and cans of soup or beans. But what about the pounds of bread, meat and vegetables that banquets, parties and restaurants never serve—food that adds to garbage piles daily? Is this waste unavoidable, just a product of a successful, busy economy? Absolutely not.
20,000,000 pounds of food a year are salvaged by City Harvest, a non-profit organization in Manhattan. City Harvest collects left-overs from business cafeterias, corporate dining rooms, hotels, restaurants, and grocery stores and then distributes it to soup kitchens, shelters, and senior citizen facilities.
With over 2,000 donors, 14 trucks service the city picking up food. And the group shows resourcefulness. Recently an upstate farmer unloaded piles of pumpkins on the group, some as hefty as 300 pounds. According to Jessica Brown, Food Resources Manager, an on-site chef turned the unexpected donation into 100 gallons of soup.
New Yorkers prove their compassion for the hungry with monetary donations, making City Harvest an organization that is 99 percent privately funded. Yet as 1.5 million residents visit food pantries and soup kitchens annually, food continues to be trashed.
One barrier to getting healthy left-overs into the hands of the hungry has recently been overcome. For many companies and organizations, a lack of donations is not due so much to ignorance or thoughtlessness, but to a growing fear of lawsuits. The fear that someone may sue if taken ill by food that was mishandled or improperly stored has kept contributions to food banks low and garbage trucks full. Aramark, one of the most "admired companies in America," according to Fortune magazine, boasts that it serves over 200 million meals to college students annually and has a strict policy against donating left-over prepared food.
That may change with recent legislation that reduces liability to food donors.Congress recently passed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which provides protection for those giving away food. Food donations will also be tax deductible beginning this year.
That's Garbage!
Of course, not all left-overs are edible. Mom can't donate scraps from the family's plates, and the grocery store's lettuce can't be sold past date. What then? Composting organic waste can divert more weight from landfills, develop rich soil and lead to cheaper prices for business owners.
While New York City leads the nation in food waste, the problem with what to do with it is being addressed more constructively around the world.
Australians spend $5 billion on uneaten food – 13 times what the country gave in foreign aid in 2004. But, from Australia to Singapore to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, citizens have taken action to set up government-sponsored or commercial compost systems to divert food from the waste stream. Major U.S. cities, other than New York, are getting a handle on the situation, too.
New Yorkers might flinch at comparisons to left-coasters, some assuming composters are leftover waste from the '60s themselves, but Seattle leads the nation with residential recycling and provides its residents free composting bins. That diverts some 850 million pounds of waste from landfills yearly. Boulder, Colorado is striving for "zero waste." Farmers' markets provide composting bins alongside recycling cans, so that very little actually goes to a landfill. Counties all over the country, like Hennepin in Minnesota, distribute bins and kitchen food-waste buckets to residents along with composting instructions. And San Francisco's food scrap compost program, offering curbside pickup of organic waste, takes 300 tons of material daily to a compost facility, continuing the process of diverting over 50 percent of their waste from landfills.
What's wrong with sending trash to landfills, anyway? First off, think of the space that could be put to other uses, like playgrounds, parks or commercial projects, and the monumental costs to the city—but there's more. Few people truly understand what sending garbage to a landfill means.
A landfill is actually a gigantic bathtub says Nelson Widell, Marketing Director of Woodhue Ltd., a N.J. composting facility. "It's designed to contain things. Consequently, what goes in there is going to stay there."
Many New Yorkers harbor the delusion that organic waste thrown away will "biodegrade." Not so. In such a warm, dark, air-deprived, plastic-lined disposal ground, 25-year-old hot dogs emerge unspoiled and newspapers "as fresh as the day they were discarded," says Will Steger, author of "Saving the Earth, a Citizen's Guide to Environmental Action." New Yorkers can recycle, and their left-overs will biodegrade, but not in the nation's landfills.
Theoretically, anything coming from a plant or animal can be composted. Through the process of composting leaves, yard trimmings and leftover table scraps, all organic matter will transform to "black gold," a rich loam that, with watering, could actually turn the Sahara Desert into a garden, said Widell.
Woodhue and operations like it throughout the country collect leaves and brush, cardboard and loads of supermarket waste from bread to fruit to discarded flowers and convert it to compost and other soil products for sale to landscaping, gardening, golf course and other agricultural markets.
Widell contends that big businesses that run landfill operations want to fill them up and keep the trucks coming, and it is their power that keeps facilities like Woodhue from cropping up and growing as successful alternatives. He admits that it's easier to throw garbage together in one container and that it takes care to separate compostables, but "it's the right thing to do." With commercial garbage haulers charging up to $160 a ton, Woodhue's competitive pricing may be the right thing to do for more reasons than one.
Compost & the City
Brussels, Belgium has government-sponsored curbside pickup of food waste. New York City has Christina Datz-Romero, co-founder of the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
In hiking boots, fanny pack and a long dreadlock wrapped in a bun, Datz-Romero recently led a group of Pratt Institute sustainable architecture students along the East River where 60 tons of food waste is converted to 10 tons of saleable compost every year. They walked, watched and laughed as Datz-Romero told stories of hermaphroditic worms saving the Earth. Though her organization does successfully sell compost bins and red wiggler worms for attempting the process in one's own apartment, doing the work oneself isn't necessary.
Datz-Romero started on the path to a full-scale composting business in 1994, when the community garden she helped open was in need of soil. Local residents dropped off leftover food for composting and thus the land was reborn. By 1998, and with money from the Empire State Development Fund, among other organizations, the LES Ecology Center took root just off the FDR Drive at the East River Park. Datz-Romero now lords over eight large airtight compost bins filled with earthy combinations of food, sawdust, oxygen, bugs and worms.
Joe Macatori, a Long Island family vineyard owner, uses a "compost tea" mixture on his growing grapes. According to the New York Times, because of his reliance on a composted blend of "ground-up egg and oyster shells, seaweed, fish scraps, and kitchen waste" along with manure from a local farm, he and his family use "a fraction of the chemicals" that nearby vineyards are forced to use in saving their crops from pest infestation. Macatori claims that a field of sand became "dirt dark, crumbly and rich" after applications of his compost.
Rikers Island prison's program recycles 5,000 tons of food waste a year, producing a similar product, which can be used for fertilizer, potting and top soils. With the ability to turn garbage into a valuable commodity, the city can see a 20 percent reduction in solid waste and reduce costs of trash bags and removal while creating nutrient-rich gardening soil for sale.
This same "black gold" sells for $1 a pound and $10 for twenty pounds from the LES Ecology Center stand at the Union Square Market, where city residents can also drop off their compostable food waste in plastic bags.
Kids & Their Trash These Days
After 1,100 students at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts wasted 90,000 pounds of food in 1999, the school introduced "The Clean Plate" program, offering prizes for cleared trays. Students at the University of Connecticut recently studied waste in a school cafeteria at dinnertime, 1,200 students a heat. They found that the food left on plates alone at one meal at one dining hall totaled 720 pounds.
At the Audubon Center in Sandstone, Minnesota, school children participate in an "Ort Report." Ort—perhaps the least known single-syllable word in English language—are the scraps of food left after a meal. Students collect and weigh their ort at mealtimes with a goal of reducing waste at each subsequent sitting.
"Students learn about the amount of energy, resources, time and money that go into growing, harvesting and preparing food," states the Full Circle Institute, a nonprofit organization fostering sustainable communities, who sponsors the program. "Who would have thought that a parent…enforcing that rule [to 'clean your plate'] really was doing a favor to our planet?" The children get excited to compete with themselves and learn to choose servings responsibly. This reduces food that needs to be grown and purchased and lessens the burden on landfills.
With a city-wide effort to educate its citizens, provide composting bins and food-scraps waste pickup and an "Ort Report" in public schools, food and spending waste in New York City would greatly diminish. The city would spend less on landfill space, tipping fees and trucking and could instead partner a business to make money composting food waste. Visy Paper, a packaging and recycling plant on Staten Island contracted by the city, proves that New Yorkers can transform diverted waste from landfills into a business. Why stop with paper?
Datz-Romero proposes full-scale composting efforts with city government collaboration and commercial pickup of food waste. Drop-off points for bags of food near subways and city parks could encourage residents to give back to the greenery they're enjoying, while the larger system of trucks, charging less than commercial garbage haulers, take food waste from businesses to a composting facility. Using the LES Ecology Center's in-vessel methods as a model, the compost containers pump methane gas out of the bins and back into the grid, powering their operation and allowing the business to sell the extra energy to a utility company. An open-space area for curing could be purchased upstate with the product sold upon finishing.New Yorkers don't need to drastically change their lifestyles, nor do they seriously have to alter their views. Common sense, a little thought, and a keen eye for business leads in the direction of the old standby, "reduce, reuse, recycle." Here's another one: Give and you shall receive.
New York City produces 25,000 tons of garbage a day.
The New York City Department of Sanitation recently conducted a waste characterization study to determine what actually is being discarded as garbage or recyclables in New York City. Highlights of the study have been published and can be viewed online through the DSNY website here.
The full text of the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act can be found here.
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Comments: 6
-Alison Byrne
-Frank Ehling April 18,2006