BioCycle Magazine’s online database, located on the web at www.findacomposter.com.  The site — which was recently redesigned — offers a searchable database of companies which process organic waste.  Unfortunately, not all composters choose to list themselves so the database is incomplete.

The second is a new site located at www.helpmecompost.com.  It includes a searchable database, as well as blogs from organics industry experts.

Together, these sites are important resources for foodservice operators.

When using these databases, it’s important to communicate with prospective composters to confirm they accept commercial food waste (and not just yard waste or other items).  Once that has been established, additional communication will be necessary to assess:

• What hauling options they offer (if any), including pick-up frequency
• Whether they will accept compostable single-use products such as cups, plates and cutlery made from PLA, bagasse, or potato starch.   Do they accept all BPI certified products or do they have special requirements?
• How dothey respond to contamination?
• What type of training will they offer for your staff?
• Will they provide totes or other collection equipment at your site?
• What liners/bags do they accept?
• Would they prefer pulped product or not?
• What do the economics look like and how do they compare to your other options?
• What is their operating history?  Have they been cited, fined, or run into problems with odors, pests, etc?

These are important initial questions, which will lead to others.

Composting is an important mechanism to avoid putting food waste in landfills.    I encourage pairing composting with a strong waste prevention program (e.g. food waste tracking) so you reduce as much waste as possible and only have to compost the minimum amount.

Download Practice Greenhealth Guide here: Composting 10StepGuide

Practice Greenhealth offers many other excellent resources on waste management. Visit their site at www.practicegreenhealth.org.

To answer these questions, you don’t need to start from scratch. Operators should check out a new class of green restaurant and foodservice “standards” (such as Green Seal’s GS-46 standard and the National Restaurant Association’s soon-to-be-revealed Greener Restaurants program) that provide excellent prioritized checklists for your waste management toolkit. These tools leverage the knowledge and experience of industry experts, providing a roadmap that shows what matters most and which steps simply should not be missed along the journey. They also speak to foodservice sustainability and green practices beyond waste management.

Additionally, there are other tools which address specialized foodservice areas such as convention centers, colleges and hospitals (the convention industry APEX standards, AASHE STARS program, Green Guide for Healthcare, respectively). The US EPA also has a powerful central organizing framework called the Food Waste Recovery Hierarchy which helps prioritize.

At LeanPath, we’re excited that most every one of these standards recommends tracking or auditing food waste as a first step in a waste management program. They recognize that waste prevention is the place to start and you can’t make any progress toward that goal without food waste tracking. (Learn more about LeanPath’s automated tracking tools.)

So check out these standards and compare with what you are currently doing. Are you missing a key area? Are you spending a lot of resources on something that doesn’t rate highly or appear at all? Are you addressing food waste prevention by tracking all your pre-consumer food waste every day?

Once you’ve done a self-assessment using the checklists provided by these tools, you can decide whether you want to pursue an official certification or recognition. Green Seal offers formal, third-party certified recognition while most of the other players allow for self-certification. What’s important is to tap into the knowledge underlying these standards first and then, once you’ve started down the path, go get credit for your hard work.

The answer is to track waste in the form that makes the most sense for that item and then convert it to a common metric for comparison purposes. 

For example:

Weight is a measure that can apply to all food categories. By converting to weight you have the ability to compare food waste by different sources. It’s also easy to get a scale to weight many items at the time you are throwing them away. (or to get an automated tracking system)

To do this, you must figure out an easy way to convert volume, serving and each measurements into weights. The conversion will be different for each item, of course (e.g. the density of soup and water, while both liquid, are very different).

A great tool to help set conversion standards for different foods is this online converter. It takes into account the different densities of food items in providing a volume-to-weight conversion.

Although this article focused on healthcare (regulated medical waste, preferred purchasing, etc.), they spoke about a Practice Greenhealth study and their efforts to break ‘greening’ down into specific categories.  By doing this it helps the operations to identify the different areas that support and improve the ‘green’ initiatives.

Take a look at your company.  Is sustainability a separate department or part of every department?  Has the responsibility of sustainability fallen on one person as an addition to their ‘regular’ job? The study sites this:

Greening activity is moving beyond grassroots and departmental efforts towards a more coordinated effort and strategy. In fact, 97% of the applicant pool has a green team at their facility and 52% report the activity takes place within the Environment of Care Committee structure. Green teams provide the structure to gather baseline data, set goals, develop metrics, and through a diverse team approach and subcommittees for specific programmatic areas, work together to improve performance.

At LeanPath, we have found that the operations with Green Teams have higher success rates.  More people are involved, there is better ‘buy-in’ from all levels of staff and management, and everyone shares in the success of each accomplishment.  Gathering baseline data and setting goals helps to make everyone aware of the challenges.  We often see shocked faces when we report the actual pounds and dollars of an operations food waste.  The staff knows they aren’t purposely wasting food, but to see the waste in ‘black and white’, printed on a page really brings the challenge into the light.  Setting and achieving goals in a team dynamic also allows you to get many different solutions to one problem.

Another great reason to use a team approach for sustainability is to gather data on the life cycle of a product.  See the example below:

With an increased focus on waste prevention and life cycle analysis, some waste prevention activities are harder to capture. Cleveland Clinic, for example, boasts an over 25% recycling rate, which recently dipped as they conducted life cycle computing and electronics, which reduced the amount of computer “waste” generated altogether. All computers now go back to the manufacturer for refurbish, reuse, and redeployment. So while one may be impressed by hefty recycling rates, waste prevention activities deserve mention and can sometimes get lost in the numbers. This is why total waste generation should be tracked to reflect waste prevention successes.

An important goal for any type of organization: tracking total waste generation to reflect waste prevention successes.  We encourage everyone to work on waste reduction as the first step.  Purchasing less, producing less – leads to less waste.

Practice Greenhealth has just started tracking data this way, but they intend to continue tracking this data.  This long term tracking will help the industry to see how sustainability grows and trends over a long period.   More trend information should be available after the 2010 Environmental Excellence Awards to be presented at CleanMed 2010 in Baltimore Maryland, May 11-13.

Web links:

1. CleanMed: http://www.cleanmed.org
2. Green Guide for Health Care: http://www.gghc.org
3. Global Health and Safety Initiative: http://www.globalhealthsafety.org
4. Health Care Without Harm: http://www.noharm.org
5. Practice Greenhealth: http://www.practicegreenhealth.org
6. The Center for Health Design: http://www.health design.org

The map is a collaboration between the USDA Economic Research Service, the Agricultural Marketing Service and the Food and Nutrition Service to share data resources. The map is also designed to include geographic coordinates for farmer’s market locations and farmers markets/farm stands with EBT redemption capabilities in the US. This is an incredible piece of work.

You can view the country as a whole or by individual state.  Clicking on any of the map indicators allows you to see:

· Access and proximity to grocery stores

· Availability of different food stores (convenience stores with food, super- and bulk-stores, etc.)

· SNAP and WIC authorized stores

· Availability of restaurants and Expenditures of food at restaurants

· Food assistance

· Food eaten at home

· Food insecurity

· Food prices (at stores, not restaurants)

· Food taxes

· Health

· Local foods (farms with direct sales to consumers, farmers markets, etc.)

· Physical activity levels & outlets

· Socio-economic characteristics

Click here: http://maps.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

]]> http://blog.leanpath.com/2010/02/food-environment-atlas/feed/ 0 http://blog.leanpath.com/2010/02/produce-calculator-for-foodservice/ http://blog.leanpath.com/2010/02/produce-calculator-for-foodservice/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:27:05 +0000 Jennifer Hancox http://blog.leanpath.com/?p=1082 We ran across this cool calculator today and wanted to pass it along.  Originally intended for K-12 school foodservice, it can be applied to most other foodservice groups (hospitals, university, corporate dining) with a little adjustment.

The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture created this produce calculator so that when a foodservice director  says, “I need enough apples/pears/oranges to serve 300 1/4 cup servings to the students” that measurement will be converted to to cases or pounds.  This easy conversion tool helps to prevent waste through planning – by stating only the case amount or pounds need to serve your number of students (or patients, or guests).  This can help your cooks or prep staff to get a better idea of what ’300 portions’ looks like in the bulk state.

(BTW: 300 1/4 cup portions = 20.3 lbs)

This produce calculator can be especially helpful at the salad bar.  Look at your POS reports for the retail operations.  Do you sell 100 ‘salad bars’ per day?  200?  Adjust prep sheets to reflect the differences between sales and prep.

This is a free document that you can download as an excel spreadsheet, with a very straight-forward design.  Try it out.  Click on this link, then scroll to the bottom of the page: Produce Calculator

Sometimes it takes an example like this to help everyone get a grasp on the true volume of food waste.  A single item, filling up a familiar space…

The best solution is to reuse service ware – convert from disposables to durables.  But this is not be possible in many scenarios.

The alternative is to buy environmentally preferable disposables, but this can be tricky.  Is paper always better than plastic?  Is plastic always better than foam?  What happens if the paper is bleached or coated?

Here are two resources to help you consider the pros and cons of your purchasing decisions:

• Healthcare Without Harm has created an excellent whitepaper that digs into the complexity of these issues and should be read by all foodservice operators.  Download it here.

• The City of Portland, Oregon has developed a whitepaper titled “Compostable Plastic: Does it Work in Portland.”   It identifies some challenges associated with bio-plastic disposables.  While I’m confident bio-plastic disposables deserve consideration as part of an overall  foodservice packaging strategy, operators definitely need to think about the issues in this whitepaper.  Specifically, how will these disposables integrate into the local composting, recycling and trash collection infrastructure?

Both of these resources offer pragmatic “news you can use.”

There is also a larger, more theoretical discussion going on in the industry.  It has to do with the carbon footprint of various compostable disposables v. traditional options.  Not everyone agrees on how to interpret the science that’s been completed, but there is a lot of data out there.  While this consensus emerges, most will at least agree that oil is a non-renewable  resource so we can’t build our future assuming we can throw away foam and plastic forever.

Food Rescue: the practice of safely retrieving edible food that would otherwise go to waste and distributing it to those in need.

Why is this important? 90% of low-income households with at least one child under the age of 12 use food pantries and soup kitchens and also participate in the School Lunch Program.  At least 20% of America’s food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills, which is about $31 billion. But the real story is that roughly 49 million people could have been fed by those lost resources. (Source: USDA)

Consider participating in a food recovery program in your operation.  For more information, contact Food Donation Connection.