Posted in fruit & vegetables

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.

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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.

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Sprout Stack: Shipping containers provide farm-free vegies

Shipping containers could bring farming to the heart of the city as hydroponics and mobile phone apps are harnessed for large-scale urban food production.

A Sydney start-up company Sprout Stack has perfected the commercial production of large volumes of leafy greens in shipping containers, producing as much lettuce, herbs or spinach leaves in eight weeks as a hectare of fertile farmland. The containers, filled with towers for growing vegetables, tomatoes and strawberries hydroponically, require only electricity and water.

Sprout Stack founder Francisco Caffarena says the farming containers, which can be leased or bought outright, can be stacked on top of each other in places where land is scarce or unsuitable for growing vegetables, to prod­uce commercial quantities of fresh food all year round.

Start-up: Sprout Stack’s Francisco Caffarena, left, and Michael Harder in one of their growing containers in Sydney. Picture: John FederPicture: John Feder

Start-up: Sprout Stack’s Francisco Caffarena, left, and Michael Harder in one of their growing containers in Sydney. Picture: John FederPicture: John Feder

The container systems uses 95 per cent less water than a vegetable farm with drip irrigation to grow 900 lettuces, requiring just 60-100 litres of water a week for its plants to drink and 60 kilowatt hours of power a day to run its lighting, heating and sensors. All crops grown are pesticide-free because the container’s controlled environment virtually elim­inates pests, disease and bugs, while the production of six cycles of crops a year is not exposed to the vagaries of weather.

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