Recycling Food?
Food mega-site Culinate brings us the news that Seattle will soon start requiring its residents to recycle food in the same manner as plastic, aluminum, paper, and glass. All of Seattle's residents living in single-family homes will be required to put their food waste in special recycling containers, but the law will not be extended to residents of apartments or businesses, despite the fact that businesses produce twice as much food trash as residents. The law's proponents claim that the recycling measure will help Seattle hugely reduce the amount of garbage it sends to landfills.
We think this sounds like a great idea. There's no good reason for leftover food to take up space in landfills while it's degrading, and by being recycled, it could be used for compost and other helpful things. One question, however, remains. What do you think the over/under is on Brookline adopting a similar policy? We give it six months.
Food Recycling Program Aims to Keep Landfills Small [Culinate]
Food-trash recycling at homes to be required by Seattle in '09 [Seattle Times]
[Photo: Stanford Recycling Center]
Comments
when discussing food waste, worth remembering that most U.S. homes use food waste disposers (garbage disposals) for that purpose, and most municipalities create compost-quality fertilizer products from the biosolids processed at wastewater treatment plants...using trucks to collect food that's 70% water on average isn't particularly economical or environmentally friendly, esp compared with using gravity in underground sewers for that same purpose....
Posted by: kendallgaia | July 19, 2007 09:22 PM
Great post!
If the economics don't work, recycling efforts won't either.
As our little contribution to make this economics of recycling more appealing, http://LivePaths.com blogs about people and companies that make money selling recycled or reused items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources.
Posted by: Luis | August 28, 2007 12:34 PM