South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

Post by spraak » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #77

ip26 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Disclo…

Post by foota » Sun, Apr 14, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #83

jdietrich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Post by crispinb » Sun, Apr 14, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

tgb wrote: post #41

jdietrich wrote: post #7

>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.

Post by hopler » Sun, Apr 14, 2019, 12:11 AM UTC

newnewpdro wrote: post #22

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've lived with a variety of random people in shared circumstances, and it seems quite common for people to pack a refrigerator with perishables either in the form of leftovers or new groceries then forget it exists while continuing to eat the most convenient stuff at restaurants/the office. Refrigeration in general encourages the behavior, without delivering on convenience since you generally have to reheat or parti…

Post by caiob » Sun, Apr 14, 2019, 12:15 AM UTC

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…