"KitchenWaste" news and stories

No matter how much we talk about the environment, no matter how many times we're told to decrease our waste, we're inundated with food products. They are practically suffocating with extra or unrecyclable packaging. I write this as someone who not only finds it ridiculous to buy products that result in tons of hard-to-reuse waste the minute you get it home and unpackage it, but also as someone who has a cap on the amount of garbage that's picked up free of charge.

This isn't just an argument for the environment -- the space available to dump garbage continues to be a problem, so why fill it with needless waste? Save it for the garbage that's much harder to prevent. It's a matter of common sense. Do you want to waste space on fleeting convenience, or the garbage that you can't avoid?

The biggest culprit is styrofoam. My god, it's everywhere, and in most cases, highly unnecessary. The saran+styrofoam combo is rampant in grocery stores -- with meats, vegetables, sliced cheeses, mushrooms. Since much of the food doesn't last long in that packaging, like mushrooms and meats, it must be unwrapped and used immediately, or repackaged in something else to maintain freshness or freeze. The styrofoam is left behind -- useless, unrecyclable. And cheese slices -- my god, I've seen four slices of cheese wrapped this way before -- which is particularly infuriating when it's right next to the same cheese on a deli counter that can be sliced on request and slipped inside one small plastic bag.

The city council in Wellington, New Zealand is embracing green issues with the start of a new scheme entitled Kai into Compost.

 

Now I am waiting to hear that this is a widespread practice throughout all forward thinking cities but Wellington is trailing the scheme to collect kitchen waste from food outlets and turn it into compost.

A truck collects kitchen waste from 50 hotels, supermarkets, restaurants and other food serving establishments and dumps it in a municipal compost plant.17% of waste that ends up in landfall is food waste which breaks down into harmful leachates and methane this can only be an environmental sound policy. They hope to extend the collection to household food waste shortly.