The Footprint of Food Waste - And What We're Doing About It

Despite loving, nagging admonitions from mom to ‘clean your plate!’ – we don’t.

We leave a lot on our collective plates … and in our pantries, stadiums, restaurants and grocery stores. So much, in fact, that one-third of the food produced for human consumption goes uneaten. One-third.

The amount is staggering. One of the best ways to address food waste is prevention, or the reduction of the food that is being tossed out.  This has some of the greatest economic and environmental benefits.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization calculates worldwide food waste costs at about $750 billion annually – along with the addition of 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Here in the U.S., food waste comprises nearly 22 percent of the solid waste stream, so Waste Management sees the enormity of implications first-hand. And, we’ve been intently focused on innovation that allows us to develop workable, sustainable solutions.

Among our most promising advances is our CORe? organics recycling process, which allows us to use the energy in organic material to produce biogas that can be converted to electricity, heat and fuel.

Here’s how it works:

• Waste Management receives food waste from industrial, institutional and residential sources.
• We screen organic intake to remove incidental contamination – packaging, bones, utensils, plastic, etc.
• We then blend the organic waste into our EBS? product, an engineered slurry whose high BTU content is ideal for renewable energy production – and for achieving maximum benefit in anaerobic digesters.

And that’s the next step: Following careful laboratory sampling, analysis and certification, our EBS? product is transported to waste water treatment plants in major U.S. metro centers like New York, Boston, Northern New Jersey, and Orange County, California. The slurry dramatically increases the production of biogas in anaerobic digesters.

WM’s processed food waste slurry dramatically increases the production of biogas in anaerobic digesters. In fact, adding just 10% of added organic material in the form of WM’s engineered slurry to a wastewater treatment plant’s existing anaerobic digesters can increase renewable energy output by over 70%.   

We see tremendous potential in our CORe? process – and so do our partners.

For example, in the Boston area, Waste Management of New England is working with the Greater Lawrence Sanitary District (GLSD) to operate an advanced recycling facility that converts food waste into renewable energy – and help the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection achieve its long-term sustainability goals. Our project with the GLSD has the potential to convert more than 100,000 tons per year of organic food waste into renewable energy and fuel – offsetting more than 100 percent of the GLSD plant-wide power consumption and more than 347,000 gallons of fossil fuel oil consumption annually. Click here to hear from them and learn more about our focus and results.

We’ve got a lot on our plate. But we think Mom would be pleased.

If you’d like to explore collaboration opportunities, let us know. For more information on WM’s CORe Technology, contact Eric Myers, [email protected].