Food Waste Focus

How important is Food Donation?  Looking at the EPA Food Waste Hierarchy we see that the best way to eliminate food waste is to reduce it at the source.  Source reduction is the easiest, best and least expensive way to reduce your waste footprint.  The next best thing is food donation – feeding hungry people.  [...]

In February 2010, we wrote a post about Food Holidays as possible reuse opportunities.  We had great response and wanted to continue posting about these for this month and next. We mention these holidays, because they are fun (of course!), but also because incorporating these dates into your menu can help to reduce food waste [...]

We know about big food holidays – Christmas, Easter, Passover, Ramadan (fried honey donuts!).  We know about other holidays that include a particular type of food in their celebrations like St. Valentine’s Day (chocolate), St. Patrick’s (green beer, green cookies, green everything), Oktoberfest (beer).  But what about those ‘other’ food holidays? You see them sometimes [...]

Just to recap – Reducing food waste at the source is the first and best thing you can do.  It’s easiest, free and doesn’t take a lot of time. But what do you do with food that can’t be reduced any farther?  Well, in order from best to least desirable, first feed people (donate to [...]

Hey folks! Just attended a good training webinar for the NEW Re-Trac program from WasteWise.  Re-Trac is a great program that can be used by any type of operation to “collect, organize, analyze and report” all recycling and waste.  Re-Trac is a web-based system that allows an operator to track many different types of waste:  [...]

Hi folks – here’s a little industry ‘inside scoop‘ for you… I just received an e-mail from our favorite contact at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  She told me that they are almost finished with the newest version of the Food Waste Calculator.  It should be done later this month (August) and ready for [...]

We ran across this excellent post recently and thought you might like to see this.  A Boston area poultry farm has started thinking outside of the box (or coop)… Silverbrook Farms: Your Waste is our Treasure! Food waste (excluding poultry products) can be used to feed our hens – providing eggs, meat and fertilizer!   It’s [...]

Putting Surplus Food to Good Use – A How-To Guide for Food Service Providers. This link takes you to the EPA website where you can download this informational 2-page document. The document has over ten separate links for additional resources on reducing food waste. http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/pubs/food-guide.pdf There are many ways food service providers can improve the [...]

We just read this in another e-newsletter and thought it would be interesting for everyone to see the sheer volume of waste we generate… “Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” said Benjamin Franklin Our wasteful habits wouldn’t matter much if there were just a few of us—a Neanderthal hunting [...]

Remember that cartoon on School House Rock – “I’m just bill“?  It followed a bill through all the stages of becoming a law. Cute characters, catchy music. Well – this cute video follow “Miles the Can” through the different stages of becoming a can, and then all of his different recycled ‘lives’ – (minus the [...]