Category: Food waste

Warriors Against Waste: These Restaurants And Bars Are Aiming For Zero

Read the full story from NPR.

Zero waste has become a sort of buzzword in the foodie world recently. From San Francisco to New York, London to Amsterdam, restaurateurs are challenging themselves to reduce the staggering amount of food waste that the industry generates (an estimated 571,000 tons annually by U.S. restaurants alone) and the amount of other resources they use — including electricity and water. From rejecting plastic straws to making byproducts like whey the star of a meal — restaurants are approaching that challenge in different ways.

KAB teams up with EREF for K-12 food waste programs

Read the full post at Waste Dive.

The Environmental Research & Education Foundation (EREF) and Keep America Beautiful (KAB) have signed a memorandum of understanding that will lead to collaboration on food waste research and education in K-12 schools.

Free eBook: A Strategic Guide for Using Data to Drive Food Loss and Waste Reductions

Download the document.

Effective food waste reduction programs are built upon comprehensive data. Data provides insight into why food losses occur in operations; which areas provide the biggest opportunity for improvement; and how to continously make progress towards goals. This guide is intended for food manufacturers, wholesale distributors, and grocery retailers interested in using data to better manage unsold inventory and reduce the volume of food sent to landfill.

Legislature Passes Bills To Cut Food Waste

Read the full story in Biocycle.

Earlier this week, the California state legislature passed two bills that offer solutions to some of the leading causes of wasted food. Over 5.5 million tons of food is dumped in landfills every year in California, and an alarming amount of that landfilled food is actually edible at the time it’s thrown out.

Floodwater pathogens can’t be washed off of fresh produce

Read the full story in Food Safety News.

The state of Florida produces more fresh fruits and vegetables than any other state except California, and is the top tomato state in the country. As with backyard gardens, Hurricane Irma has turned many of Florida’s commercial fruit and vegetable fields into patches of pathogens that can’t be washed away.

Can Congress cut food waste? It depends on the success of this bill

Read the full story at Waste Dive.

For decades, the federal government has regulated how landfills operate, how air and water are protected and how dangerous sites are cleaned up. However, the federal government has yet to implement a national policy on how to handle food waste.

The lack of federal guidance on food waste has left the U.S. with a patchwork of food waste solutions, with some states, like New Jersey, pursuing ambitious food waste goals — while others seem to all but ignore the issue. Now with the introduction of the Food Recovery Act (H.R. 3444), a vision of what could become the first national food waste policy is taking shape. A similar measure was introduced in 2015, but did not make it out of committee.

Rep. Chellie Pingree introduced the legislation at the end of June, and it has been referred to half a dozen House committees. Sen. Richard Blumenthal introduced the same legislation in the Senate a few days later. While some time may pass before either measure comes to a vote — especially since Congress is now in recess — even a trimmed-down version of the introduced measures would have wide-ranging implications for how the U.S. handles food waste. Featured here is a breakdown of some of the impacts of the legislation, if enacted into law.

Food Loss and Waste: A Quick Guide to Understanding the FLW Standard

Read the full post at Spoiler Alert.

Banana peels. Oversized apples. Mislabeled packaged goods.

In different circles, these products might be considered ‘food waste’, yet in others, they might represent a meal or an input for value-added processing. Awareness of the food waste problem has increased tremendously, catalyzing action from the private, public, and civil sectors to develop solutions to an issue that costs the U.S. $218 billion every year. But even among the experts and practitioners leading the charge, you may find mixed definitions of what constitutes ‘food waste’.

That is why in 2013, a multi-stakeholder partnership named the Food Loss & Waste Protocol set out to develop an internationally-recognized standard that outlines requirements and guidance for measuring and reporting on the weight of food and/or associated inedible parts that are removed from the supply chain, otherwise known as ‘food loss and waste’ (FLW).

What this group produced and launched in 2016 is known as the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard (FLW Standard). Led by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the partnership includes representatives from the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), with review and feedback provided by more than 200 additional stakeholders from business, government, civil society, and academia.