South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
81–90 of 174 posts
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
At every point in the supply chain (grow, pick, sort, package, deliver...) a % of produce becomes more expensive to keep than to throw. So it being dropped.
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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?
> If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is it not profitable?
That was clearly intended as a zing, but it just shows you aren't thinking about this right. Conventional ammonia production is vastly less efficient than just composting your garbage. Be real here. Bacteria literally do the job at a labor cost of zero and all you need to do is keep it in a stable environment.
What hurts is what always hurts: scale. If the composting facility is across town, you also need to haul the biomass around and haul the fertilizer back. If the industry is tooled up to spread pellet fertilizer it's going to see an immediate cost moving to equipment that can spread and till compost.
But stop pretending that there's an "efficiency" argument to baking nitrogen into ammonia in a 20 barr, 500C pressure cooker. That's nonsense.
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#84Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that as a result of overproduction or just wastefulness?
At every point in the supply chain (grow, pick, sort, package, deliver...) a % of produce becomes more expensive to keep than to throw. So it being dropped.
Is that not overproduction in a sense?
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#86They can make a lot of
Kimchi with all that fermentation.
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
At every point in the supply chain (grow, pick, sort, package, deliver...) a % of produce becomes more expensive to keep than to throw. So it being dropped.
Is that not overproduction in a sense?
Not exactly. For example, if you have a picker machine harvesting 80% of crop, and manual work ain't cheap (it's Norway), you'd probably throw 20%. But you can't "ungrow" it in any meaningful sense. Agriculture is complex.
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#88Norway: 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…
Once upon a time I came across AMP Robotics[0], a company that also uses ML and robotics for sorting waste. Pretty nifty project, in case you're curious. You can see the robots in action on their website[1] __________ 0. https://www.amprobotics.com/ 1. https://www.amprobotics.com/amp-cortex
Sorting trash maybe useful but sorting Legos is where it’s at!
https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#89>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 resour…
It certainly can be a reduction if you can compost at home. The result is useful. The effort is very minimal if you don't need it to compost quickly. It doesn't need to be transported to a landfill. And my understanding is that it breaks down into carbon dioxide instead of methane if you compost instead of landfill, which is a win for climate change.
I compost and one selfish advantage is I now never run out of space in my bin. That food waste takes up a lot of volume.
Re: South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... why... Pigs don’t eat human faeces...
Pigs eat everything, including humans.
Pigs even eat pork. There is currently a problem with swine fever infected pork being reintroduced as feed in places like china. It is one of several vectors for the lethal (to pigs) disease.