5 Ways Food Waste Is Being Used To Help The Planet
by Matt York
I love food.
I mean, who doesn’t? It’s literally a building block to sustain life. Sadly though, the Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that 22% of all solid waste comes directly from food. That’s a whopping 41 million tons of food doing nothing more than rotting in a landfill somewhere. However, there is hope! Food waste can be used for many things outside of compost, and these companies are all up in that “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” thing.
[Editor’s note: We’re not getting paid to promote any of this. We just like what these companies are doing.]
Electricity From Yogurt? No Whey!
The cold food section at my local Walmart has a seemingly endless variety of yogurt: everything from über-gut-healthy to practically dessert. Yogurt is a fantastic way to get probiotics and calcium into one’s diet; or at least, that's what the commercials tell me.
All of this comes at a cost, though. Greek yogurt represents about 40% of all yogurt produced in the U.S., but every kilogram made creates another two to three kilograms of waste in the form of acid whey — the main waste byproduct of making the stuff.
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Not pictured: The plastic waste byproduct of making it.
To offset some of this, General Mills has developed a way to turn the acid whey into useable electricity. They built a behemoth concrete tank that holds six and a half million gallons of product which is constantly being churned. Inside, microorganisms break down natural material without needing oxygen in a process called anaerobic digestion. This method of reusing waste is shown to reduce that facility’s entire electricity consumption by ten percent. If every facility were to implement this, the cost and need for electricity to those buildings would go way down.
But hey, maybe yogurt isn’t your thing, and instead, you prefer a simple cup of coffee.
Using Shrooms to Stay Grounded
Like most people I know, the first thing I want in the morning is a cup of coffee. You pour the water, scoop the grounds, push the button, and eventually, you're rewarded by the maddeningly slow tide of caffeine-infused elixir into your system on its inexorable way to waking you up. Although, it didn’t occur to me until recently just how wasteful drinking coffee is. After poking around, I found out that the world produces seven million tons of coffee grounds a year and yet less than one percent of that actually goes into your daily cup. Fortunately, however, there’s an excellent way to reuse the spent grounds, at home, using oyster mushrooms.
Sorry if you were hoping for a cool story about the trippy variety.
Oyster mushrooms are extremely healthy, not only for humans, but for the environment as well. They're jam-packed with vitamins and nutrients such as B₂ (riboflavin), B₃ (niacin), and B₅ (pantothenic acid), and they're also an excellent source of protein, which could help balance out the meat production that’s been shown to hurt the climate. Unlike other substances used to grow mushrooms, old coffee grounds don’t require any sterilization, and the process is very low maintenance. All that’s required is the coffee grounds, oyster mushroom spawn, and straw that you can probably find at Home Depot.
I know, all of this sounds crazy, but oh my god just wait until you read about beer.
Raising a Toast
Personally, bread loaf heels don’t bother me. I also only eat one type of bread, so maybe I’m not the best source of judgement, but it does raise an interesting point. Some 44% of all bread is just thrown away, which seems astronomically high to me. Luckily, there’s a company that’s directly changing how we use old bread and turning it into very drinkable beer.
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Insert Homer Simpson quote here.
Toast Ale is a UK company that uses nearly 700 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of bread in every batch of beer they make. They partner with local bakeries so that the overall amount of bread waste goes down. Additionally, the brewing process requires a lot of energy. But, by using bread for the base instead of barley, they’re offsetting their overall carbon emissions. They’ve also donated around £81,000 ($100,000) to charities. And who doesn’t love charity?
Jerks, I guess.
Scaling Up
Band-Aids, or rather bandages in general, are pretty great. They protect sensitive tissue from bugs and bacteria and other nasty things. They sometimes even have cool characters on them, like Spider-Man or Barbie, which is rad.
The only problem is that your skin can heal at only one rate ... or so we thought. Researchers have figured out a way to use fish skin to heal human tissue that reacts virtually the same as a skin graft. Having been tested on both humans and donkeys, it seems like fish skin is a fairly resourceful way to heal burns and other wounds.
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“Why are you giving me that look and holding a knife?”
This works because fish skin naturally has a very high amount of Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. I know that sounds a bit too sciencey, but the non-scientist version is that when in contact with exposed tissue, the skin essentially tricks the body into sending more cells to the affected area, and ultimately turns the skin into living tissue. Scientists in India have even figured out a way to use eel skin, combined with a 3D printer, to make personalized and unique tissue replacements.
That's ... holy crap. We really are living in the future!
Fighting Board-om Using Fruit
You've probably heard that old saying: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
But in fact, several apples a day could actually build a house. So says the Norwegian company Kebony, at least; they use fruit scraps to make wood that’s stronger than most traditional hardwoods.
“How is that even possible?” your curious mind may be asking. You see, they use a process by which liquid waste is obtained from the sugar industry, and using a lot of heat and pressure, they’re able to make a resin that binds to the wood at a cellular level and permanently makes that wood stronger and more durable.
It's a bit bonkers, given the average American wastes ten bucks’ worth of fruit a week, whether it’s spoiled, unused, or actually used for a dumb YouTube video. That's over $500 a year. And this is just from a standard household, not even including all the waste from grocery stores that don’t sell “unpretty” produce. This is not only wasteful of the produce itself, but all the water and energy needed to get that fruit from the soil to your house is also completely wasted.
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And all they wanted was to be in a tummy.
I mean, we only have one life and one Earth. And in this rogue’s humble opinion, we should all be doing our part to help conserve it as much as possible. Whether that means (safely and scientifically) using fish skin for your injuries, buying local food from a farmers’ market, or even just participating in “meatless Mondays,” there’s something everyone can be doing to help the next generation of rogues.
After all, not doing so would just be a waste, right?
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