With more than one-third of food produced in the United States going to waste, new private sector ventures, government agencies and farmers are tackling the challenge of reducing the environmental and economic costs of food waste by diverting it into new uses.
Windsor, Pennsylvania, cattle raiser Jim Rexroth buys discarded produce not only to reduce his feed costs but also to ease societal impact. He purchases 70 to 95 tons of fruit and vegetable waste each week to mix into cattle feed rations, saving him more than $100,000 per year by using less shelled corn and reducing water needs with high liquid content of produce.
His cattle “don’t care if the oranges are just a little soft or the watermelons or pumpkins don’t get sold,” Rexroth said, adding that minimal processing on his farm makes dry shelled corn more digestible with no lost nutritional value or decline in weight gain for the cattle.
Rexroth works with Denali, a waste disposal and recycling company based in Russellville, Arkansas, one of a number of companies focused on food waste diversion. Denali delivers about 500 million pounds of animal feed to 235 farms like Rexroth’s. Last year, the company diverted 2.6 billion pounds of food waste from landfills into animal feed, bagged soil and mulch, fertilizer and renewable energy, Justin McCurnin, Denali executive vice president of sustainability, told Agri-Pulse.
Denali got its start recycling poultry processing plant refuse into a nutrient-rich fertilizer, said spokesman Sam Lieble. It now hopes to get more farmers using produce waste from retailers. He sees an opening for applying nutrient-rich fertilizer to strip mine reclamation areas such as those in Appalachia, restoring land to look like a “lush meadow.”
McCurnin said Wal-Mart recently committed with Denali to provide food waste recycling at all its 4,700 locations with a 2025 goal for zero waste. Wal-Mart last year diverted 524 million pounds of food waste to animal feed, 163 million pounds to composting and 113 million pounds to anaerobic digestion, according to the company’s report.
Waste diversion methods not created environmentally equal
Another company devoted to recycling food waste is Divert, a technology firm based in Concord, Massachusetts, that cites an October 2023 report from the Environmental Protection Agency to describe the many ways the company helps the food supply chain divert wasted food from landfills.
Another EPA report — Quantifying Methane Emissions from Landfilled Food Waste — finds that wasted food makes up about 24% of municipal solid waste in landfills and estimates that food waste is responsible for 58% of methane emissions from solid waste landfills.
Not all food waste management methods provide the same environmental impact, EPA said in creating a new Waste Food Scale ranking 11 common pathways. Despite the federal government's touting of anaerobic digesters, the EPA scale lists the technology as one of the least effective at reducing environmental impacts, but also stresses that beneficial use of the leftovers, or digestate, from the process makes it more attractive, although specific actions companies take can move it further up the scale of preferred.
"Divert's new integrated diversion and energy facilities implement the most preferred wasted food reduction pathways on EPA's new Wasted Food Scale: prevent wasted food, donate and stand-alone anaerobic digestion," said Chris Thomas, Divert’s vice president of public affairs. Divert's unique “stand-alone" digestion is different from digestion that also incorporates yard waste, animal manure or human wastewater, and instead enables digestate byproduct to be composted for beneficial agricultural use.
"This incorporates the best elements of anaerobic digestion and composting and was demonstrated in EPA's report to be superior to the pathways on the least preferred half of the new food scale," Thomas added.
After 17 years in the business, Thomas said the company recognized that landfill diversion is not the first choice but instead should be “the very last step in the process.”
He says Divert’s large grocery store customers' waste is roughly equivalent to their entire profit margin. Any step retailers take to reduce the amount of waste and learn more specifics about it is “going to actually improve their profit margin.”
Food waste powers increased production of renewable energy
Divert and Denali both point to their contribution to the production of renewable energy to eliminate traditional gas and electricity use through anaerobic digestion, or AD.
Earlier this year, Divert announced $1 billion in financing to establish 30 food waste energy facilities to use anaerobic digesters to produce renewable energy for the utility grid. These facilities would all be about within 100 miles of 80% of the U.S. population, it said.
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When Divert started their business, they powered individual grocery distribution centers, and by expanding the business to accept feedstock from dozens and dozens of grocery distribution centers, they were able to have enough feedstock to produce renewable energy to power the utility grid of an individual distribution center. When these facilities scale their production beyond just powering beyond each facility, this creates a greater impact on methane reduction and replaces fossil fuel energy in the grid, Thomas said.
For example, the company recently broke ground on a facility in Turlock, California, where they have an interconnection agreement with PG&E for renewable energy production that will supply roughly 3,000 homes each year.
He sees the EPA report as a “strong validator of the promise of stand-alone AD and its contribution to global warming reduction, energy demand and agricultural circularity.”
Food waste to get attention at UN’s COP28 gathering
Heading into the U.N. Climate Change Conference known as COP28 in Dubai, Doug O'Brien, vice president of programs at The Global FoodBanking Network (GFN), expects food waste becoming more prominent as countries seek to cut carbon emissions.
Members of GFN in nearly 50 countries recovered enough food from loss or wastage to feed some 32 million people and prevented 1.5 billion kilograms of CO2 equivalent from food waste, the equivalent of taking 336,000 passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
If the amount of food that was lost or wasted was redistributed or redirected, it would feed every person on earth one and a half times, O’Brien said. “Hunger on our planet is not a food problem. It’s not a farmer problem. It is a foods logistics problem,” he added.
O’Brien believes the COP28 promises to give food waste greater attention because solutions exist today to reduce wasted food that also brings high environmental benefits. “There are negative social, environmental and economic impacts of food loss and waste,” he said.
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