One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure In 2025, Waco will have to find a new piece of land to create a new landfill as the current one that we have will be full. One of the biggest contributing items of landfills is food waste. Food waste is food that is still edible, but is discarded for any reason, (Buzby, Wells, Hyman 1) which we are all guilty of doing. The effects of food waste are not only hurtful to our wallets, but to our environment as well.
The United States Department of Agriculture used the Economic Research Service, or ERS, in 2010 to calculate how much food waste was occurring on retailer and consumer levels. The ERS found that a total of 133 pounds, or 31 percent of the available food supply for 2010, was discarded in the
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As stated above consumers contributed to 21 percent of food waste in 2010 and are still considered to be one of the biggest contributors of food waste even now. Consumers often throw out food because they have more than they need. Consumers often buy food in advance which leads to them stocking up in bulk on food items that they think they will need. These large quantities of food items usually go without being eaten and get thrown away rather quickly. Consumers also throw out food because of expiration dates. They often see the expiration dates on their foods as a must use by date and after that date approaches, the food is thrown out even though it is usually still fine to eat. Leftover food is another reason why consumers contribute so much to food waste. Most families eat a different dinner every night which results in a lot of leftovers in the refrigerator. Most leftovers go without being eaten and end up being thrown out on trash …show more content…
Composting would prevent food waste by keeping food from decomposing in a landfill and releasing methane gas while creating a nutrient rich soil for use as fertilizer. Composting is “…a controlled process of decomposition of organic material”. (Home Composting Tips: A Guide to Composting Yard & Food Waste) Composting is done by combining dry materials, or yard wastes, such as leaves, grass clipping, and weeds, with wet materials, or food wastes, such as fruit and vegetable scraps in a pile and allowing them to decompose together. Meat, bones, cheese, grease and oils, invasive weeds and diseased plants should not be added to compost piles. (Home Composting Tips: A Guide to Composting Yard & Food Waste) While consumers and retailers could attempt to compost on their own, there are plenty of variables that could interfere with having a successful compost pile. The compost must have an equal amount of wet and dry materials in order to have a balance of nitrogen and carbon as well as air and water. If you have more wet waste than dry waste, your compost may begin to stink and attract unwanted critters. If you have more dry waste than wet waste, your compost pile will not heat up enough to decompose the contents. (Households) A lot of people are afraid of composting because of the variables involved, yet they still want to avoid placing their food waste into a landfill. This is why I believe that
As Americans, we waste more food than many countries even consume. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in South east Asia” (Hsu). That is about equivalent to eating 10 meals to a consumer in South East Asia’s one meal. We throw away our left over food just because we are done ea...
In elementary school, we are taught by our teachers that fruit peels can be composted to recycle nutrients back into the soil where they came from. Composting food scraps is not a new idea by any means, but what if it was to be expanded into something much bigger? Recently, a study outlining the environmental impact of recycling digested food waste in comparison to that of chemical fertilizer was published by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. In the experiment, the scientists found that currently, the two were relatively equal in terms of general environmental impact, and that in order for the food waste fertilizer to prevail, further enhancements will have to be made to
American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom is a great book where he has been researching about food waste and providing us with facts about this big issue. Bloom’s tone is very optimistic, he knows that is not too late to change our minds while giving us information on who’s to blame for this waste, How have we come to produce so much excess food, what are the solutions to stop wasting nearly 50% of available food. There is many great points found in this book such as food insecurity, redistribution and cultural shift.
We need to stay away from the landfills as much as we can so eventually we can get rid of them all together. The benefits of compost include increased soil organic matter content, nutrients for plant growth, replacement of peat moss in potting media, reduced erosion, plant disease resistance, weed suppression and generally improved plant vigor (Barlaz 62). Instead of taking grass clippings to the trash people can leave them laying in the yard to decompose or they can use them to help make their compost. People can even make their own composting bins to use at their homes. There are several reasons why people should compost. If people start composting they can keep their garbage, yard trimmings or leaves from getting to the landfills. Which in turn will keep those things from getting in our water or water supplies. If these things get in our waterways or water treatment facilities it just makes more work for other people. Also by composting people will help their plants look healthier. Sharon Durham talks about manure, composting and how it effects the soil in her article, “Improving on a Time-Tested Technique.” Durham says, “Composting results in stabilization of nitrogen in organic form for use in soil” (20). The soil the plant is grown in will be better and help the plants produce better if you are growing food. “Compost may even be tailor-made to reduce phosphorus availability and
More than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada and when energy, water and other resource costs are factored in the true cost could be up to as much as $107 Billion each year according to a report published by Value Chain Management International, a consulting firm, which suggests that millions of kilograms of food is wasted every year in Canadian homes, restarants, & grocery stores. This finding shows a 15 % increase from their findings four years ago when the cost was $27 Billion,in 2010. They also go on to say that this is 2% of Canada s GDP and larger than the total economic output of the poorest 29 countries on the planet.
According to Roni Neff, Marie Spiker, and Patricia Truant, up to 40% of all food produced in America is thrown away (Neff, Spiker, & Truant, 2015, p.2). This wasted food is worth hundreds of billions of dollars that is lost each year in the United States alone, and creates many threats to our country. Food waste is an important and widespread issue in the United States because most of the food thrown away is perfectly fine, it could be used to feed the hungry, and the waste hurts the environment.
Though many will see this as only having an affect on Americans, this wastefulness affects everyone on a global scale. Samuel Blackstone wrote the article Waste management: Food waste is a massive global problem, but the solution starts with your Thanksgiving leftovers in 2016 which states “food that is grown but ultimately wasted occupies 1.4 billion hectares of land, representing 30 percent of the world’s entire agricultural land area.”. We may not cause all the worlds food waste, but the waste that we do cause needs to be
The majority of people waste food on a daily basis. In fact, in the U.S. alone there is an estimate that over half of the food produced goes uneaten; meanwhile there are people who are in need of food, and it ultimately goes to waste (Dockterman). For example, in his essay, “On Dumpster Diving,” author Lars Eighner writes about his experiences of dumpster diving with his pet dog, during his years of homelessness. According to Eighner, much of the food and materials he came across in the dumpsters were in usable shape, and many items were new. Clearly there needs to be a change in American food waste, in current and, hopefully not so much in, future generations.
America is a very gluttonous country. On a yearly basis, the average American can consume a grand total of 1 TON (or 2000 pounds) of food. However, the real problem comes before and after the eating. In total, America loses 40% of the food it produces, from farm to landfill. This shows that in 1 ton of food, 800 pounds are lost, in either the waste...
Composting is the process of biodegrading the waste material in which an enormous number of materials like hydrocarbons, nitrogenous compounds, acids, their derivatives and even other organic and inorganic substances can be remediated from the environment (Finstein et al., 1986). Compost pro...
Not only benefiting us, our involvement in making compost benefits the environment also. As if we already don’t have enough garbage filling our landfills, we certainly don’t need our yard waste to waste any more space when we can so easily handle it ourselves. Compost helps reduce the volume it could contribute to landfills. Why put it into the earth that way, when we can enrich it by turning our yard waste into a natural fertilizer? It also helps prevents us from purchasing pesticides and chemical fertilizers that could further damage the environment and the animals around us.
Individuals waste some $14.6 billion worth of food every year, about 47 percent of the total. This mainly consists of food items that Canadians buy with the intention of using in their homes, but never do, so it ends up eventually in a landfill or composted. This is a very sensitive environmental issue as these composting facilities create massive amount of Methane gas that are released into the environment, damaging the ozone and attributing to the man-made manipulation of the global warming/cooling process. Food manufacturing and processing is responsible for as much as one-fifth of the food wasted across the country. Ten per cent of food waste happens on the farm, before even entering the larger food system. Retailers waste another 10 per cent. Restaurants and hotels waste a further nine per cent. The rest is wasted at processing facilities such as food terminals, or during transportation. The report notes that food waste in the travel sector is especially egregious — up to five kilograms per person, per day, according to some estimates. Even using more conservative estimates, these watchdog groups say that we could feed 200,000 inhabitants of poorer countries for a year with nothing more than the food that gets wasted on European airlines every year. On international flights, regulations require any excess food be thrown out after a flight — regardless of whether it was used, cruise liners seem to be the worst culprit, generating the highest per capita food waste. Waste like that costs everyone, not just the person who
Food waste is the biggest space consumer in our landfills, which may seem surprising, but shouldn’t be based on the amount of food that is consumed on a daily basis and the large proportion of food that is wasted. The main problem with the amount of food waste in landfills, is that it produces methane as it decomposes which is detrimental to the atmosphere as a whole, and can have lasting effects. The buildup of all the methane produced results in huge amounts of global warming potential which is extremely detrimental to our environment. Also, because of the fact that so many resources are used in order to grow certain foods, they are all being put to waste when the food that used these resources goes directly to landfills. This applies to water usage, soil richness, and petroleum usage. As far as costs go, food waste affects the economy by about $750 billion a year, which is a massive amount of money that could be going elsewhere. Because we are losing so much money, it is clear that there is a great need for change in the food system, especially in the United
Food waste is huge issue these days. It is a huge amount of waste that ends up in landfills and can have lasting effects on the environment. One of major issues of food waste is the greenhouse gases that it produces. Methane gas is the main culprit when it comes to the gases being released. This can absorb infrared radiation and heat up the earth’s atmosphere and cause climate change. Another issue that food waste causes is, water loss due to use for production of fruits and vegetables.
The United States produces “about 8.25 billion tons of solid wastes each year” (Russell 1). People do not realize the impact they have on our planet and environment. When people throw anything in the trashcan, they are contributing to the destruction of our planet. The number landfills in the United States are decreasing, but the amount and volume of waste being thrown into the new landfills is increasing (Russell 4). Because of this escalating amount of garbage, Methane which contributes to global warming is an outcome of these landfills (Russell 7). As a result, our planet is suffering because of this epidemic. The garbage being put in the landfills could be recycled, but not enough businesses, ...