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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

#151

Post by jdietrich »

triangulum wrote: post #140
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…

"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://zerowasteeuro…

The only relevant data I could find in those links was from "ecologically sustainable recovery of bio-waste". A figure on page 38 suggests that bio-waste recovery could save between 29 and 194kg CO2e per ton of waste, but the breakdown does not appear to include the emissions involved in the collection of domestic food waste and the accompanying text acknowledges that the data is not based on a full lifecycle analysis. I cannot find the source document cited in the figure, possibly because of a translation issue from the original German.

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

#152

Post by benj111 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #141
triangulum wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 transporti…

The key mistake of GP and yours here is this part of GP quote you elided: > regardless of how much energy it requires (up to a point, and assuming clean energy sources) The world isn't yet powered through clean energy sources in any significant way. Electricity production runs mostly on fossil fuels, and then electricity is currently only a part of the equation - heating and transportation is still mostly powered by…

"The key mistake"

Not really because I wrote it.

I could have written 'glass recycling has the possibility to be sustainable', but instead I wrote 'glass recycling is sustainable assuming X'

You could complain if I didn't state my assumptions, but I did.

I currently buy 100% green electricity, I could use that to recycle glass today and that would be sustainable. So this isn't some hypothetical, it is possible today.

That isn't to say that I disagree with your points though. It isn't an easy problem, and 'best' now, doesn't necessarily match 'best' in an ideal world.

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

#153

Post by benj111 »

jdietrich wrote: post #150
triangulum wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I'm talking about technically feasible solutions. And it is entirely feasible to power the world with clean, renewable energy. We have the solar capacity to meet hundreds of times our current energy capacity (using less land space than our existing roads). And over 530,000 potential pumped-hydro sites worldwide to store that energy (of which we'd only need a tiny fraction). For example, there are 22,000 sites…

But we don't currently live in a world that's powered by renewable energy, we live in a world where the vast majority of energy is generated from fossil sources. Making that transition will require decades, billions in investment and a lot of challenging trade-offs. Here in the real world of 2019, energy is the dominant factor. If we need to dig up landfills to recover materials in 2100, so be it - right now, we have…

"If we need to dig up landfills to recover materials in 2100, so be it"

You were talking about burning plastic bottles a minute ago???

Agreed we need to minimise energy usage and move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, plastic usage risks creating a market for fossil fuels, where petrol/gas become cheap byproducts, so it isn't a straight forward trade off.

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

#155

Post by airstrike »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #132
thatwasunusual wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags.

Who drinks tea five times a day??

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

#156

Post by namarie »

airstrike wrote: post #155
kwhitefoot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags. Who drinks tea five times a day??

Lots of people.

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

#157

Post by nicoburns »

airstrike wrote: post #155
kwhitefoot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags. Who drinks tea five times a day??

You are clearly not from the UK! I know lot's of people who have 8-12 cups of tea a day (this is on the higher end, but not super unusual...)

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

#158

Post by all2 »

benj111 wrote: post #134
ohiovr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its also good to bake them for a bit. It helps with the 'scrunching' and nutrient availability (so I've been told).

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

#159

Post by vram22 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #112
avip wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

I'd think that most such waste are still used efficiently. They may not be fit for the stresses of being shipped and stored the full distance to the supermarket and in your home, but much can still be used for animal feed and compost.

Right. Also, there are plenty of other uses of vegetable (by which I mean all non-animal, not just veggies) waste matter too, uses of all kinds, including industrial, home, medical, etc. Just randomly check out say Wikipedia articles for 10-20 common vegetable matter sources, such as corn, coconuts, bananas, soy(a)beans, guar, etc., to get a better idea about this.

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

#160

Post by dyarosla »

nicoburns wrote: post #157
airstrike wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you drink tea five times a day you have 10 g of teabags. Who drinks tea five times a day??

You are clearly not from the UK! I know lot's of people who have 8-12 cups of tea a day (this is on the higher end, but not super unusual...)

Or Russia, or India, or...
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