Posted in Food Waste

Strawberry Grower’s Despair Over Mass Dumping of Fruit Amid Demand for Extra Large Sizes

A Queensland strawberry grower has posted an emotional video to social media, despairing about throwing away drum loads of edible fruit because they do not meet retailers’ demand for extra-large berries as the season reaches its peak.

A spike in winter temperatures brought fields to peak production late last week.

In response, Coles dropped prices to as low as $1.00 per 250-gram punnet in New South Wales over the weekend to help suppliers move tonnes of excess produce.

Mandy Schultz was appalled by fruit waste on their farm so decided to freeze and freeze dry strawberries. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

The glut may be great news for strawberry lovers, but growers are counting the cost.

On Friday, Wamuran grower Mandy Schultz received a phone call from a wholesale agent to say he was not accepting anything but extra-large strawberries.

She walked through her family’s packing shed that night, filming the trays of rejected sweet, small fruit that had been emptied into drums for disposal.

The dietitian launched her own waste-fighting program last year.

Titled LuvaBerry’s Our War on Waste, it saw Ms Schultz and her team freezing and freeze-drying excess fruit, that she then sold at scheduled meets in carparks.

But this time, on Friday, the freezers were already full.

“We are a farm that makes a really big effort with our waste, so what about the waste from the farms that don’t have anything in place?” Ms Schultz said.

Farm’s first open day helps address glut

On Sunday Ms Schultz welcomed more than 100 visitors to the farm’s first open day.

Families did their bit to eat excess fruit, picking assorted sizes of strawberries for $10 per kilogram.

Matt Garratt drove up from Brisbane to support the farm’s war on waste and expressed his surprise that size could be such an issue.

“I actually personally quite like small strawberries, I like them better than the large ones, so that’s a bit frustrating,” he said.

Price squeeze

Mandy’s husband Adrian Schultz is the vice-president of the Queensland Strawberry Growers Association and revealed that while production peaks are an annual event, gluts have been exacerbated by larger plantings.

Highly productive new varieties of strawberries that fruit earlier in the season have also impacted profits.

This article was originally published by ABC. Continue reading here.

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How Do Food Scraps Turn Into Renewable Energy?

During a trip in India, Yair Teller, then a curious student and today the co-founder and CSO of Homebiogas, saw a family cooking on gas in a village of people who predominantly cooked over firewood. This was quite shocking.

The family used the biogas their biodigester produced from food waste to cook their food, and the fertilizer it produced to nourish flowers, which they then sold  in the market to create extra source of revenue. They got all of those benefits simply from recycling their cow’s manure in a biodigester.

Fast forward a few years and Yair was joined by Oshik Efrati (CEO) and Erez Lanzer (CFO). The three proceeded to start HomeBiogas the company in 2012, with the main goal of spreading affordable, sustainable and renewable energy to the whole world.

The Association for Sustainability in Business got the chance to speak with Yair about HomeBiogas, off the grid living and the importance of sustainable living.

Q. What is HomeBiogas?

A. Using an anaerobic process, the HomeBiogas 2.0 system takes organic waste (e.g. fruits, veggies, meat, dairy pits, seeds, animal manure etc.) and turns it into cooking gas and liquid fertilizer. This enables you to create renewable energy in your own backyard and close an eco-cycle!

Instead of throwing your food scraps in the garbage, where it will rot in landfills and will emit methane into the atmosphere, you can simply throw your food scraps into HomeBiogas 2.0. The system can accept up to 4KG of organic waste a day, and in return, produces up to 3 hours of cooking gas a day AND up to 12 L of liquid fertilizer a day. With an estimated life span of 10 years, the system is built in a modular way though, so any part can be easily replaced without replacing the entire system.

Inside the HomeBiogas 2.0 digester there is over 1,000 L of water and bacteria that consume the leftovers thrown inside the system. The bacteria break down the leftovers and emit methane, the main component of the biogas that allows the gas to be flammable for cooking.

The HomeBiogas 2.0 system arrives as a DIY (do-it-yourself) kit. You can assemble it in about an hour. To understand exactly what can you put inside the HomeBiogas 2.0 system, click here.

Q. What does it mean to live ‘off the grid?’

A. Living off the grid means being independent when it comes to resources, may it be water supply, electricity, cooking gas or even waste management.

People that choose to live off grid are self-sufficient people that rather use existing and every-day resources to live a more simple or sustainable life.

Because off gridders provide for themselves and their needs, they have a sense of freedom, independence and control over their lives.

Q. What else can you do to live more sustainably? 

A. Having an organic garden is a way of ensuring you take in all the good things that you need, and your food is free of things that can cause you harm (such as the pesticides). From an ecological standpoint- Growing food in your backyard requires much less energy than produce from the supermarket. Why? Produce from the supermarket is packaged with plastics and Styrofoam which cannot be recycled or broken down easily. This packaging is totally unnecessary for a home organic garden.

To get more information on HomeBiogas, browse the Knowledge Center.

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Yellow Fridges Are A Great Anti-Waste Solution!

The start-up collects any meals not served in company canteens and gives them away. A clever solution that helps tackle food waste.

Canteens waste a lot of food. According to ADEME (the French agency for the environment and energy management), collective catering is responsible for wasting 540,000 tonnes of food every year in France – that’s more than 1 million meals lost!

Recovering food waste

To fight this particular source of food waste, the “yellow fridge” (lefrigojaune) start-up set up in 2016 by Laurence Kerjean, found a very clever solution. A yellow fridge for the meals not eaten at lunch, which employees can then take for free.

Image: article supplied

What leftovers are we talking about? As explained by the start-up on its website, there are three main types of food waste in the context of collective catering: waste generated upstream such as peelings, food left on the plate, and unsold items such as the leftovers from buffets and plates of raw vegetables. It’s these last ones concern lefrigojaune.

At the end of the food service, the catering provider packs the unsold food in doggy bags – in fact yellow boxes – which are placed in the fridge. In the evening, company employees can take what they want for free – either to use at home or to give to someone in need – on a first come, first served basis. Lefrigojaune does not let people reserve or choose the contents of the yellow box – only the fact that is a starter / main dish / dessert is shown. A plus is that the yellow boxes are made in France and are fully recyclable too.

A turnkey service

Lefrigojaune offers a subscription to companies, which gives them access to a turnkey service (“fridge as a service”). In return for a monthly payment, the lefrigojaune team is responsible for delivering, installing and cleaning the fridge every day. It also ensures no box is ever discarded since it works with local partners to give any boxes not taken to food redistribution organisations, animal welfare organisations, or composting organisations. The start-up also promotes the scheme to the employees of the companies with which it works and provides quarterly updates about its social and environmental impact.

This was originally published by Living Circular.

Click here to read the entire article.

Tinder for Food: App Shares Leftovers for a Healthier Planet

Too many leftovers from dinner? Vegetables forgotten in the fridge or cans gathering dust at the back of a cupboard? Instead of tossing them out, why not share them with friends and neighbours and care for the planet at the same time?

That is the premise of OLIO, a mobile phone app founded in Britain and part of a wave of businesses using technology to cut waste and help the environment.

OLIO is the brainchild of two women entrepreneurs aiming to tackle food waste, “one of the biggest problems facing humanity today”.

If that sounds sensationalist, Tessa Cook, the company’s co-founder, can rattle off a list of eye-popping statistics to back up her claim.

Globally, one third of all food produced, worth nearly $1 trillion, is thrown away, and in the UK alone, an average family throws away 700 pounds ($945) worth of food each year.

Tinder for Food: App Shares Leftovers for a Healthier Planet

Image: article supplied

All of this is “environmentally catastrophic”, Cook said. Not only does it waste land and water to produce it, when left to rot in landfill, food waste releases methane, a greenhouse gas more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide.

“That whole set up is clearly, absolutely bonkers and needs to be fixed,” Cook told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from London.

And since more than half of food waste occurs at home, it also means consumers can be an important part of the solution.

An app was born

Growing up on a dairy farm in Yorkshire in northern England, Cook said she learnt early on how much hard work goes into producing food.

So when removal workers told the former corporate executive to throw away the leftovers in her fridge – sweet potatoes, a cabbage and some yogurt – while packing to move back from Geneva to London nearly three years ago, the seed of an idea grew.

She set out into the street to find someone to give the food to – but failed.

“I thought, ‘This is perfectly delicious food. I know there is someone within 100 metres who would love it. The problem is they don’t know about it’,” she recalled.

When she discovered there were no mobile apps to share food, Cook teamed up with Saasha Celestial-One, an American former investment banker, to launch OLIO, raising $2.2 million from two rounds of investor funding.

Users download OLIO on their phones, create an account and upload a picture and a short description of the food they want to give away, from bananas to fresh herbs to lactose-free baby powder.

This was originally published by Eco Business.

Click here to read the entire article.

We Have a Collective Responsibility to Halve Food Loss and Waste

Despite the central role food plays in all of our lives, we let a great deal of it go to waste. About one-third of all food produced in the world goes uneaten each year—a fact that harms our climate, costs the global economy billions of dollars and strains natural resources like water and land.

Given the enormous impacts, it’s clear why the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals issued Target 12.3’s call to halve food waste and reduce food losses by 2030.

We Have a Collective Responsibility to Halve Food Loss and Waste

Photo: article supplied

But with 13 short years to go, is the world doing enough?

According to a new report from Champions 12.3, the progress is promising. Countries or regional blocs that have set specific food loss and waste reduction targets cover an estimated 28 per cent of the world’s population. At the same time, nearly 60 per cent of the world’s 50 largest food companies have set targets to reduce food loss and waste. More than 10 per cent of the 50 largest companies also now have active programs to waste less food.

Meanwhile, initiatives have taken off in the European Union, United States, Japan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and in other countries that expand public-private partnerships, government policies and consumer campaigns aimed at reducing food loss and waste.

But it’s not all roses. Only a few countries, accounting for just 7 per cent of the world’s population, currently measure and publicly report on how much food is lost or wasted within their borders.

These latest figures beg the question: Can the world really cut global food loss and waste in half by 2030? The answer is yes—but only if many more governments and companies set ambitious targets, measure this inefficiency and take action to reduce food loss and waste.

To my mind, there are three immediate challenges that require a collective approach.

This was originally published by Eco Business.

Click here to read the entire article.