Food Waste - How You Can Help This Holiday Season

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s the time we gather with loved ones to count our blessings, watch some football, and overindulge in turkey, mashed potatoes and PIE. Good times!

Then, after a nice long nap, there’s the cleanup. And you realize just how much you fixed and mixed, tasted and wasted.

Food waste is a big, messy problem – not just on Thanksgiving, but every day of the year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, about 40 percent of food grown in the U.S. is never consumed. Every year, our country sends more than 52 million tons of food to landfills. Nearly 15 percent of material in trash bins is food, but less than three percent of that waste is diverted from the landfill.

The effects of food waste encompass a tremendous toll on our nation’s natural resources: 21 percent of fresh water, 18 percent of cropland, and 21 percent of landfill volume goes toward cultivating and disposing discarded food. Unused resources that could be feeding our nation, and those in need, are being tossed in the trash.

At Waste Management, we are dedicated to finding efficient uses for society’s discards and are doing our part to address the issue of organic waste:

• We process about 3.8 million tons of source-separated organic materials annually and send most of the collected waste to facilities that create marketable compost and soil amendment products, like fertilizers and other additives that improve plant growth and health.
• We operate 44 organics processing facilities, 40 of which have composting capabilities and 13 of which can accept food waste.
• Over 950,000 of our residential customers participate in food waste collection and thousands of our commercial customers separate their food waste for collection.
• CORe?, our patented centralized organics recycling process, allows us to use the energy in organic materials to produce biogas that can be converted to electricity, heat, and fuel.  Read more about CORe here.

We’re proud of our innovations and efforts to help solve the food waste dilemma; however, we know there’s more we can be doing, and we need your help.

Prevention – reducing the amount of food that is ultimately discarded – is the most economically and environmentally responsible way to address food waste. For example, avoiding one ton of food waste results in six times larger lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits than recycling a ton of food through composting and results in seven times the GHG emissions benefits of anaerobic digestion. The facts are compelling; addressing food waste on the front end is a far better option than dealing with it downstream.

Here are some simple ways you can be a responsible food consumer:

• Plan your meals with care. Shop accordingly; buy what you need to avoid tossing extras that may spoil or go to waste.
• Shop your refrigerator first. Know what you have on hand before heading to the grocery store. Do a pantry and refrigerator check so you don’t double up.
• Make a list and stick to it. Unnecessary impulse purchases often end up in the trash bin.
• Use it up – root to stem. A ham bone can flavor soup, celery leaves can be tossed in a salad, and vegetable skins, stalks, and roots can be added to stock, smoothies, stir-fry, or pesto. 
• Love leftovers. Give yourself a night off from cooking and learn to enjoy low-hassle leftovers.
• Responsible restaurant dining. Order only what you can eat when dining out. Don’t over serve from all-you-can-eat buffets and ask for takeout containers to bring home leftovers.
• Be a good neighbor. Get to know your local food banks and other organizations that feed those in need. Donate requested items. If you garden, share your harvest bounty with neighbors.

Preventing food waste is a simple way we can all contribute to conserving energy and the resources we’re so very thankful for – every day of the year.