Power hoursĭairy products followed by fruits and vegetables make up the largest portion of food that is wasted, but these food items (along with eggs) can be recycled by composting. Additionally, in July 2016 the city mandated Business Organic Waste program, where qualified business are required to separate their organic waste for composting. The 31 businesses that participated in the challenge collectively diverted 37,000 tons of waste by increasing recycling efforts, composting over 24,500 tons of organic material, and donating 322 tons of food. Restaurants composted organic waste, trained chefs to improve meal planning, reduced the amount of food produced after peak periods, and donated surplus food to an NGO that provides meals to the city’s homeless shelters. The Home Composting Rebate Program offers consumers a $75 rebate on a home composting system after attending a free composting class.īusinesses in New York City have also heeded the call of a Zero Waste Challenge. CalRecycle has online resources that help consumers manage food waste, and it has been conducting workshops in support of a newly proposed Food Waste Prevention Grant Program.Īs part of its Zero Waste Initiative, the City of Austin, Texas, recently voted unanimously for a city ordinance that requires all large restaurants (over 5,000 square feet) to separate compostable waste from other waste material by 2016 smaller restaurants are required to do so by 2017. ![]() The good news: We do have cities leading the effort to reduce food waste across the country.Ĭalifornia has recently introduced a Mandatory Commercial Organics Recycling law that requires all businesses to recycle their organic waste. The amount of food wasted varies from city to city, and with only nine of the top 25 most populated cities mandating food waste legislation, there is a lot of room for improvement. As a result, a large portion of uneaten food is discarded and simply replaced with even more food (which may later go uneaten). This wastage is driven by affluent consumers who stock up their refrigerators with far more food than they can possibly eat before the recommended “best-by” dates. While food loss along the production line is a large contributor to waste in developing countries, in developed countries, food wastage tends to occur after it reaches the supermarket. According to a recently published report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), global hunger could be alleviated if just 25 percent of the food wasted each year was saved instead. In fact, one-third of all food produced globally goes to waste each year, amounting to 1.3 billion tons of wasted food with a value exceeding $1 trillion. ![]() At the same time, by showing that markets do not seamlessly translate preferences expressed at the cash register into changes in production, Freegans exposes the limits of consumer activism.Considering that 795 million people around the world go hungry on any given day, it is shocking that many of us throw away food on a daily basis. Through several years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with freegans in New York City, Alex Barnard has created a portrait of freegans that leads to questions about ethical consumption-like buying organic, fair trade, or vegan-and the search for effective forms of action in an era of political disillusionment.īarnard’s analysis of this pressing concern reveals how waste is integrally bound up with our food system. Freegans is a close look at the people in this movement, offering a broader perspective on ethical consumption and the changing nature of capitalism.įreegans object to the overconsumption and environmental degradation on which they claim our economic order depends, and they register that dissent by opting out of it, recovering, redistributing, and consuming wasted goods, from dumpster-dived food to cast-off clothes and furniture. food production go to waste-while one in six people in the nation face hunger? This startling truth has stirred increasing interest and action of late, but none so radical as that of the freegans, who live on what capitalism throws away-including food culled from supermarket dumpsters. ![]() If capitalism is such an efficient system, why does 40 percent of all U.S.
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