
South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste - okket
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/south-korea-recycling-food-waste/
======
punnerud
Norway: 50% of food, 77% of energy in waste, and 97% of toxic waste is
recycled.
[https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=no&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.avfallnorge.no/bransjen/n%25C3%25B8kkeltall&xid=25657,15700021,15700186,15700191,15700253,15700256,15700259&usg=ALkJrhhGeEjP4WguBQt-
gvJq0BA4nJsL6A)

We are also rebuilding some of our plants to sort waste with machine learning.
The initial tests are really promising. Several of them are already sorting
out most plastic using spectrometer-sensors, so we don’t need to do it
manually. In combination with the machine learning the tests get it up to
99.9% or higher.
[https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=no&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.tu.no/artikler/her-
skal-de-bygge-en-av-verdens-mest-avanserte-
papirlinjer/453987&xid=25657,15700021,15700186,15700191,15700253,15700256,15700259&usg=ALkJrhgcw40Kc8kLEI75jOZRYcls9JL8Vw)

~~~
thatwasunusual
Recycling doesn't help much as long as Norwegians throw away 40-50 kg of food
per person each year. :(

~~~
kwhitefoot
That's less than a kilo a week, say 120 g per person per day.

In my household I suspect that most of that is potato peelings, onion skins,
orange, apple, and banana peel, teabags, etc.

If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags.

So, what is the definition of food waste? If it is food that could be eaten
then in my household of four people it is very close to zero. But still the
kitchen compost bin is always full.

~~~
airstrike
> If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags.

Who drinks tea five times a day??

~~~
nicoburns
You are clearly not from the UK! I know lot's of people who have 8-12 cups of
tea a day (this is on the higher end, but not super unusual...)

~~~
dyarosla
Or Russia, or India, or...

------
jdietrich
_> The bag charges also meet 60% of the cost of running the scheme_

Recycling metals is substantially profitable, because scrap metal is actually
worth something. Making new metal from old metal requires far less energy than
making new metals from raw ore, even factoring in the costs of transportation
and processing.

Does collecting and composting food waste actually result in a net reduction
of our use of finite resources, or is it just a sop to make us feel better
about throwing away food? Is this really recycling, or is it a waste of
resources at one step removed?

~~~
AngryData
60% of the world's crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel derived
fertilizers. Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels, otherwise it just ends
up rotting into the environment and polluting it just the same as burning the
fuels except you aren't doing anything with it if it just rots in a landfill.

~~~
jdietrich
_> Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels_

How much fuel do you have to burn to turn that waste food into usable
nitrates? If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is
it not profitable?

~~~
AngryData
Or you can compost it into fertilizer. It isn't profitable because fossil
fuels are artificially cheap and aren't paying for the externalized costs of
pollution. Also, if you did it right you can also burn food directly as fuel.

Haber-Bosch process isn't a free lunch where free energy just pops into
existence.

~~~
darkpuma
> _" It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap "_

Not that cheap. In the aforementioned metal recycling example, the energy is
typically coming from fossil fuels too; refining aluminum from ore takes an
insane amount of electrical power. Even if you do that with renewable energy,
that's still that much power that can't be used for other things that must be
supplied by another power source (e.g. fossil fuels.)

~~~
azernik
That just indicates that metal recycling is _super_ advantageous, to be
profitable even with the abnormally low price of energy.

------
maerF0x0
> There’s a limit to how much food waste fertilizer can actually be used

once upon a time we fed food waste to animals to "recycle" the caloric
content. Think table scraps(but not meat) going to pigs or chickens.

Would be interesting if we close the loop on this household content

Edit: Added note that I meant "vegan" scraps.

~~~
benj111
I believe in China it was common to site toilets over pig stys. Some loop
closing isn't a very good idea.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet)

~~~
linuxftw
Gross.

Much of the 'compost' you receive at big-box stores is treated human waste:
[https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-
bioso...](https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-biosolids)

Not much goes to waste in the USA on an industrial scale.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Much of the 'compost' you receive at big-box stores is treated human waste:
> [https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-
> bioso...](https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-biosolids)

I don't see anything on that page to support this specific claim.

~~~
mythrwy
Not "most", but there is milorganite.

[https://www.milorganite.com/using-milorganite/what-is-
milorg...](https://www.milorganite.com/using-milorganite/what-is-milorganite)

~~~
hanniabu
> So Milorganite is actually a bag of dried microbes!

great marketing

------
garfieldnate
Every time I ate pork there they always bragged about how it had been fed
garbage T_T When I researched it later, it turned out that in the US we
stopped feeding leftovers to pigs a long time ago due to health concerns. Laws
were passed stipulating that garbage be boiled before being fed to pigs, but
that made it too expensive so everyone stopped doing it.

~~~
hw
Here in the SF Bay Area, some cities have started collecting food waste to be
treated and fed to animals. There's been some minor backlash, due to the
uncertainties around what goes into the food waste bin and how that gets
treated and sorted and eventually processed into animal feed. I'm not aware of
the law you mentioned, but it's being done.

------
OldHand2018
It's important to bring up the Food Recovery Hierarchy when talking about food
waste. Composting is not the least desirable outcome, but it is close. We
really need to focus on the higher priority reduction methods:

[https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-
recover...](https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-
hierarchy)

~~~
newnewpdro
This implies composting food waste is only slightly better than landfill,
which is _obviously_ absurd.

Illustrating that the next best existing option after composting is landfill,
says nothing of the delta separating the two on the efficacy axis. It only
speaks to a lack of altnernatives separating composting and landfill.

I'd argue that burying your food waste in any land that food will potentially
be grown in is infinitely superior to sticking it in a landfill where food
will _never_ be deliberately grown.

From my perspective, living on a rural property with an outhouse where all
food waste and human waste is buried and eventually grown food from your
comment strikes me as ridiculous. I add obvious value to my land burying this
waste, it completely escapes reuse, effectively exiting the system, when I put
it in the dumpster.

~~~
thatcat
There is a high loss to atmosphere/runoff on burying your food in the soil for
recovering it later as available fertilizer nutrients.

~~~
newnewpdro
There is 100% loss of what's sent to the landfill, while consuming energy to
move it there.

On my property in particular, runoff is not an issue (desert). From what I've
seen there's mostly increased insect activity in the compost area. I view it
as more generally increasing the fertility of the area from waste using
minimal effort.

Most of it is consumed by other lifeforms before I grow anything there. But
those lifeforms are residents of my land and will continue to multiply (and
die) here. Their increased activity effectively locks up the resources and I
can leverage that with a large garden when time permits.

~~~
thatcat
The landfill has CH4 off gassing, which is usually burned and used to power
things. It also supports it's own ecology and residents. The transporting of
rotting food around is pretty ridiculous though.

You might make your distributed practices even more efficient with
vermicompost / bokashi; by selecting an organism with known beneficial outputs
to metabolize the waste you'll end up with a higher conversion to usable
nutrients and beneficial microbes for your plants.

~~~
benj111
"which is usually burned"

Have you got any sources for the usually?

Any ex landfill I've seen just has vents to the open air, and mentions of
landfill gas never give the impression its mainstream.

~~~
triangulum
There are plenty of landfill gas capture systems around. Veolia are
particularly proud of their so-called "Bio-reactor". These kinds of systems
don't work as well as advertised, but if you have a landfill, it's better than
nothing. [https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-
facilities/landf...](https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-
facilities/landfills/woodlawn-bioreactor-facility)

But as others have been saying, it makes much more sense to simply bury the
food in your garden. Or collect food waste on a municipal level, which has,
for example, been the law in Germany since 2015.

The "dry fermentation" system used in Munich is a particularly good example.
They collect food waste in the city, compost and ferment it in a big sealed
hall near the soccer stadium, wait 12 weeks for the bacteria to work, collect
the resulting biogas to put into their gas network (or power garbage trucks),
and sell the leftover organic compost and fertilisers to local residents and
farmers. A closed and sustainable cycle.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0gU9ljHo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0gU9ljHo4)

[https://www.awm-muenchen.de/fileadmin/PDF-
Dokumente/awm/Fold...](https://www.awm-muenchen.de/fileadmin/PDF-
Dokumente/awm/Folder_TFA_2012_englisch_fin_72dpi.pdf)

------
the_economist
Before Haber–Bosch, everyone recycled 100% of their food waste.

~~~
aitchnyu
And countries went batshit crazy - Saltpetre war with Chile vs Bolivia and
Peru were fought over caves with bat guano which was the most valuable
fertiliser of the day.

------
benj111
"per capita food waste in Europe and North America is 95kg to 105kg a year"

That's a massive amount, and that is just waste in the household, not waste in
the farm or factory.

I can understand some wastage of salad and berries etc, but they're all
lighter stuff. How can the average westerner waste 2kg food a week???

~~~
linuxftw
Many people don't eat leftovers. In some cases it's cheaper to buy 5 lbs of
something and throw out 2 pounds than to pay for 3 1-lb packages.

Have you ever been to a restaurant? Most people throw out over 25% of the food
on their plates.

This is all a symptom of a distorted market place. Food's too cheap thanks to
subsidized farming.

~~~
benj111
"Have you ever been to a restaurant? Most people throw out over 25% of the
food on their plates"

I've worked in a few. As a European I'd say food waste was lower than that.

Id expect restaurant food waste to be higher, as they can't personalise
portion sizes as effectively, so unless most people eat out most days, I don't
see how that could account for all the waste.

But apparently it does? I really hope peelings etc are included, because even
then there's still a family out there wasting 3kg+ of food/person/wk, just to
balance my family out.

~~~
allannienhuis
Europeans out out a lot less than most places in the world. Perhaps a stronger
home-cooking culture.

[https://www.nielsen.com/ca/en/insights/news/2016/dining-
with...](https://www.nielsen.com/ca/en/insights/news/2016/dining-without-
doing-dishes-almost-half-globally-eat-away-from-home.html)

Looks like it's about twice as often as in Europe. Interestingly Asia/Pacific
is even higher (cheap street food FTW!)

------
peteradio
My neighbors probably hate me but I compost all my food in the backyard. Last
year was the first year we did it overwinter when the compost isn't even
active and it also was the first year we didn't have mice in the house.

~~~
luhn
I know you're probably joking, but for the sake of anybody reading this who
may be consider composting: A healthy compost doesn't smell bad (I honestly
kind of like the smell) and doesn't smell strongly either, so neighbors won't
mind or even know it's there. I compost in my small patio; there's table and
chairs just a couple feet from the composter and it hasn't been a problem.

~~~
avip
Good compost does not smell but does attract (in NA) the likes of racoons and
black bears and some people vocally don't like that.

~~~
viraptor
It also attracts lots of insects. While it's ok in general, you probably don't
want a farm of them right next to where you sit/eat.

~~~
topmonk
In Taiwan, that translates to giant flying cockroaches. And the giant wolf
spiders that eat them.

------
cjensen
Food used on farms decomposes directly into the atmosphere, including methane.
Food sent to landfill decomposes poorly with an increased methane output, but
some of the methane can be captured to generate electricity.

I'm not qualified at all to analyze this properly. The former method makes use
of food to displace use of fossil fuels in farming. The latter displaces use
of fossil fuels for electricity generation.

Is there research which demonstrates that one method is better than the other?

~~~
oska
I recently learnt of a food waste recycling method that avoids decomposition
and release of methane. It is called _bokashi_ and it uses homolactic
fermentation to break down the food waste. Quoting the wikipedia article [1]:

> Homolactic fermentation breaks no carbon bonds and emits no gas; its overall
> equation is C6H12O6 (carbohydrate) → 2 CH3CHOHCOOH (lactic acid). It is a
> mildly endothermic reaction, emitting no energy; the fermentation vessel
> remains at ambient temperature.

Interestingly, this method was historically developed in Korea, as is also
detailed in the wikipedia article.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_\(horticulture\))

~~~
benj111
"It is a mildly endothermic reaction, emitting no energy; the fermentation
vessel remains at ambient temperature"

Surely if its endothermic the container would get cool???

~~~
oska
Perhaps that part of the article could be edited to "remains _close_ to
ambient temperature".

------
RickJWagner
That's awesome!

Food waste seems so very easily preventable. Take what you want, but eat what
you take. Composting what's left over is an awesome idea.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
Food waste is a bigger issue than people putting too much on their plates. One
of the highest sources of food waste is in the "manufacturing"/distribution
phases -- malformed, misshapen, and otherwise "unsalable" produce is either
left unpicked in the fields or rejected by groceries. More waste comes from
rejections due to food safety regulations, overproduction, logistical errors
resulting in spoilage, and the simple fact of groceries needing to display
full bins/shelves of food at all times, even for low-volume products which
they can never hope to sell in time.

It's like when individuals are made to feel bad over taking a five minute
shower instead of a three minute shower, while Nestle is extracting millions
of gallons of water without paying a cent for it. Individuals should
absolutely do everything they can to reduce their own food waste, and
composting is better than nothing, but as a global society we should really be
focusing our efforts on the largest sources of waste first.

~~~
benj111
Let us assume that 90% of food is wasted before consumers even see it. Any
reduction in demand has an outsize waste reduction because every kg results in
another 9kg not being produced and wasted further up the chain.

So yes that 90% headline should definitely be cut, it is _our_ waste, and we
should be doing everything we can our end also.

------
Yuval_Halevi
that's just insane. I start to see more and more news about countries that
understand how crucial it is to recycle.

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huhwatnow
But do they feed it back to the fabricants already ?

------
m3kw9
They can make a lot of Kimchi with all that fermentation.

