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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

#121

Post by Scoundreller »

darkpuma wrote: post #30
AngryData wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> " 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. fo…

A lot of natural gas is stranded or considered a waste product of oil production.

So fertilizer plants in those areas suck up that cheap CH4 to reform it into H2 and heat up the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia and then into more transportable fertilizers like urea.

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

#122

Post by avip »

justinator wrote: post #107
avip wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One "solution": Invite people to come down to hand-harvest the rest of it. Charge them a nominal fee (if at all).

Yes that is what we do here. It’s inspiring but the impact on food waste is negligible.

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

#123

Post by hw »

garfieldnate wrote: post #101

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.

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.

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

#124

Post by thatcat »

newnewpdro wrote: post #48
thatcat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 lif…

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.

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

#125

Post by Scoundreller »

anticensor wrote: post #119
linuxftw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Have you ever been to a restaurant? Most people throw out over 25% of the food on their plates. It is easy to order a smaller portion of most meals. The problem lies on the client in this case.

Is it? Most non-fast food places get cranky if you try to order off the kids menu.

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

#126

Post by Scoundreller »

ip26 wrote: post #47
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???

I always want to know where that's measured. Presumably it includes food that went bad in the fridge, and food that was thrown away from the plate. But does it also include apple cores, animal bones, coffee grounds, onion peels, citrus rinds, banana peels, and so on & so forth? In a perfect world we'd make more soup stock, zest, and marmalade but I think compost is a pretty reasonable path for carrot tops and potato…

Or foods that don’t require peeling, like potatoes, carrots or cucumbers.

On that note, it’s nearing time for me to make more limoncello/orangecello...

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

#127

Post by Scoundreller »

linuxftw wrote: post #49
newnewpdro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have to look further than the convenience culture to explain the behavior. It's not, in my experience, economical at all. The people I see wasting food are being very wasteful of their money in the process, they're just being stupid and careless.

Well, I'd argue, it's because they can afford to. Most people don't throw away relatively more expensive items. If a pound of meat cost $30, would people be so careless with it?

Merely growing up poor fixes that problem. Older family members would finish off a lot more from each chicken wing than I would.

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

#128

Post by adrian_mrd »

spraak wrote: post #91
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Disclo…

Can you share which startup you work for? I've been wanting to work for a company like that

From bjelkeman-again's HN profile: "CO-founder & co-director at http://akvo.org ... We build open source data systems which we run as a service that are used in international development and increasingly in country governance."

From https://akvo.org/ "With our unique approach to development, we help our partners design their projects so that they can capture and understand reliable data which they can act upon."

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

#129

Post by bjelkeman-again »

spraak wrote: post #91
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Disclo…

Can you share which startup you work for? I've been wanting to work for a company like that

This is a new one, Johanna’s Urban Farms, in Stockholm. We are just now building the pilot installation. https://www.johannas.org

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

#130

Post by bjelkeman-again »

adrian_mrd wrote: post #128
spraak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share which startup you work for? I've been wanting to work for a company like that

From bjelkeman-again's HN profile: "CO-founder & co-director at http://akvo.org ... We build open source data systems which we run as a service that are used in international development and increasingly in country governance." From https://akvo.org/ "With our unique approach to development, we help our partners design their projects so that they can capture and understand reliable data which they can act upon."

Thanks, updated my profile to include our new startup.
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