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South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

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Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#71

Post by the8472 »

kraftman wrote: post #60
the8472 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't measure nutritional values like that. Not everything that can be burned is available to the human metabolism. Cellulose being one obvious example.

Isn't that how all food is measured though?

no, foods are analyzed for their digestible contents (fats, fiber, carbs, various kinds of alcohos etc.) and their energy content is then looked up in reference tables. The reference tables are in turn populated with more careful experiments that take digestion, waste products and metabolic efficiency into account.

Directly measuring the physiological energy content for millions of food products would be impractical.

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#72

Post by darkpuma »

benj111 wrote: post #8

"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???

If anything, Americans should be throwing out even more food. With the astronomical obesity rates, I don't think we should be encouraging people to finish what's on their plate.

If that seems wasteful to you, then I assert you're not looking at the big picture. Habitual overeating causes even worse portion control in the future, which causes even more food waste in the long run.

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#74

Post by vonmoltke »

gambiting wrote: post #52
Haga wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can extract the energy in food?

I mean, that's exactly how kcal count is measured - a portion of food is burnt and the energy released is then measured.

That's how it was measured, once. Now it is measured based on the components of the food (fat, carbohydrates, and protein).

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#75

Post by briandear »

benj111 wrote: post #8

"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???

Do you eat onion peels? How about banana peel? Do you eat the bones of meat? 2kg isn’t that much.

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#76

Post by thatwasunusual »

punnerud wrote: post #20

Norway: 50% of food, 77% of energy in waste, and 97% of toxic waste is recycled. https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... 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 learnin…

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

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#77

Post by bjelkeman-again »

ip26 wrote: post #46
OldHand2018 wrote: post #26

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...

This seems like a ridiculous chart. First of all, no homeless people or animals want to eat leaf litter, moldy vegetables, or coffee grounds. Second of all, the only inputs to my garden are water, sunlight, and compost, so as far as I'm concerned composting garden scraps is net zero at worst.

There is a lot of waste in the food supply chain. Some of that is suitable for human consumption at the point where it is classified as waste [1]. In Europe the food waste in fruit and vegetables is over 50% [2], of which at least half could be turned into black soldier fly or mealworm feed, which makes for good poultry or fish feed. But most of it today is going into waste dumps or at best turned into biogas.

Disclosure, I work for a startup that turns this into a circular food production system, from food waste, via insects to fish and vegetables via aquaponics.

[1] EU rules say eggs should be marked “Best before date” as 28 days after they have been laid, but stored propperly they are good for at least double that time. (Swedish) http://www.svenskaagg.se/?p=19895 In the UK supposedly 720 million eggs are thrown away each year. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/eggs...

[2] http://www.fao.org/3/mb060e/mb060e00.htm

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#78

Post by nradov »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #2

> 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.

Yes my uncle used to feed almost all food waste to his pigs. Then we ate the pigs. Unfortunately suburban Silicon Valley residents don't appreciate backyard pigs.

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#79

Post by osrec »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #76
punnerud wrote: post #20

Norway: 50% of food, 77% of energy in waste, and 97% of toxic waste is recycled. https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... 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 learnin…

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

Is that as a result of overproduction or just wastefulness?

Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

#80

Post by siruncledrew »

swombat wrote: post #62
webignition wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 20 years ago I stayed for two weeks on a rural rice farm in Goa. The toilets fed directly into the pig sty. Very directly down a short chute add though a hole. An eager pig snout poked through the hole could make contact. Never before nor never again have I been so startled.

But... why... Pigs don’t eat human faeces...

If you want to see what happens when pigs that eat near human faeces are eaten by us: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/health/brain-parasites-case-s...
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