Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

weforum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 174 posts

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

#131

Post by ShinTakuya »

jhanschoo wrote: post #110
justinator wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This sounds more wasteful to me. In terms of manpower and cost of commute.

If it's cheaper for that person to commute in order to eat then it's probably less wasteful from a financial perspective at least. Definitely possible to be even less wasteful of course, but I think without perfect weather and population models (which will never truly exist) it'll be hard to eliminate waste to a certain extent.

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

#132

Post by kwhitefoot »

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. :(

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.

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

#133

Post by benj111 »

jdietrich wrote: post #105
foota wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like the parent was asking the question not as a zing but an earnest question.

I'm a deep green (I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't drive), but I'm also a skeptical green. There is an overwhelming presumption that recycling must be good for the environment, but the evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial. The classic example is plastic versus re-usable gl…

"someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial"

I don't think anyone is, just that its less bad than the alternatives.

You don't drive, presumably you walk or cycle then. Each of those activities have negative environmental externalities compared to not doing them, after all you have to consume extra calories. So while each is infinitely better than driving, they aren't environmentally beneficial.

With your plastic v glass example, you seem to be using sustainability in a way that I wouldn't recognise, to me sustainability is about how long you can keep doing something regardless of how much energy it requires (up to a point, and assuming clean energy sources). The glass is infinitely recyclable, the plastic isn't. Especially when burned, so I would say the glass is sustainable.

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

#134

Post by benj111 »

ohiovr wrote: post #90
avip wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well to be fair, if you were served some nameless meat, would you be confident in your ability to identify human and/ or not like the taste of it?

Chickens will eat egg shells, and it's apparently a good source of minerals for them. You do have to scrunch them up, or else, from what I understand, they start associating egg shells with food, and start pecking their own eggs.

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

#135

Post by benj111 »

thatcat wrote: post #124
newnewpdro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

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

#136

Post by benj111 »

oska wrote: post #103
cjensen wrote: post #64

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…

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 ene…

"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???

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

#137

Post by benj111 »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #53
RickJWagner wrote: post #44

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.

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 simpl…

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.

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

#138

Post by anticensor »

Scoundreller wrote: post #125
anticensor wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mean half a portion of regular selection, not the kids menu. They would happily prepare even if you would pay the same price in the worst case.

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

#139

Post by triangulum »

benj111 wrote: post #133
jdietrich wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a deep green (I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't drive), but I'm also a skeptical green. There is an overwhelming presumption that recycling must be good for the environment, but the evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial. The classic example is plastic versus re-usable gl…

"someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial" I don't think anyone is, just that its less bad than the alternatives. You don't drive, presumably you walk or cycle then. Each of those activities have negative environmental externalities compared to not doing them, after all you have to consume extra calories. So while each is infinitely better than driving, they aren't environmenta…

"to me sustainability is about how long you can keep doing something [...] glass is infinitely recyclable, the plastic isn't"

Exactly - it's about reuse (ie. infinitely recyclable), and the shift in thinking that comes along with that.

Burning plastic releases toxic byproducts into the local environment, and requires us to use more fossil fuel hydrocarbons to make new plastic.

On the other hand, instead of transporting glass bottles across half the country, why not refill them in a local bottling plant, using local produce? Glass bottles can be washed 50-100 times, and after that they can simply be remade into new glass.

In Germany today, there are 5 standard glass beer bottles that everyone uses, so they can be refilled by local breweries all around the country. If a country is thinking of implementing a similar system, it would also be wise to invest in container deposit scheme, to ensure the bottles get returned in a good condition for reuse. Return rates in Germany are upwards of 98%.

It wasn't long ago, when our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents were getting milk delivered in glass bottles, to be washed, refilled and reused. We could easily go back to those more sustainable plastic-free times.

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

#140

Post by triangulum »

jdietrich wrote: post #105
foota wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like the parent was asking the question not as a zing but an earnest question.

I'm a deep green (I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't drive), but I'm also a skeptical green. There is an overwhelming presumption that recycling must be good for the environment, but the evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial. The classic example is plastic versus re-usable gl…

"I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial."

I'd suggest checking out a resource like "City to Soil": https://www.gerrygillespie.net/city-to-soil.html or "Ecologically sustainable recovery of bio-waste" https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37... or anything at "Zero Waste Europe" https://zerowasteeurope.eu/.

The key points: Food is the basis of the human economy. Collecting and composting food waste closes the loop and completes the nutrient cycle in the soil we use to grow food.

Not to mention: half the problems we have with traditional dirty landfills is that the unsorted food waste starts to decompose (releasing methane) and creates a hot environment that causes everything else to degrade in a toxic manner. As soon as you take it out, you have a "dry" landfill, where currently unrecyclable single-use things can be stored in GPS-tagged storage sites, until someone finds a better use for them and/or we start to phase them out.

Post reply on HN