Where Does Food Waste Go?
Have you ever wondered, where does all my food waste go after I throw it out? Well normally when it's thrown out with the trash, it ends up in a landfill. Maybe you’ve driven by a landfill (or maybe you’ve smelled one), regardless, one thing’s for sure…there's something going on in there! Landfills are critical to society but the problem is, there's a limited amount of them and they are filling up FAST. And believe it or not, 30-40% of all the food that gets produced in the US gets wasted. That statistic always makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
Now I know what some of you might be thinking, well food waste is natural and natural things break down outside in nature all the time so what's the problem? Well when food waste ends up in a landfill, it doesn’t really get the attention it needs. It gets dumped onto a pile again, and again, and again. And what ends up happening is the food waste doesn’t get a chance to breathe. In order for it to break down normally like leaves do outside or the same way organic matter turns into compost, it needs oxygen. With no access to oxygen, an ANEROBIC environment starts to develop. When it breaks down outside, exposed to fresh oxygen, it releases a bit of carbon dioxide and it doesn’t smell too bad, all is good. But when that same natural waste breaks down in a landfill, with no oxygen because it's just piled to the sky, it rots. And when it rots it releases a lot of methane gas. Methane gas is one of the worst Greenhouse gasses out there. Luckily there's an easy alternative to sending your food waste to a landfill, and that's composting!
If you're lucky you might have a great compost facility run by your city or town (shoutout to our friends over at the Town of Bethlehem Compost Facility!) that does the work for you! But sometimes that's not always the case, which is OK too! Because composting is a very easy thing to do at home if you have a little bit of space! The general rule of composting is you need the right amount of greens and browns, with a little bit of oxygen and the right amount of moisture. If you got those 3 things locked down you're on your way to
Compostland!
Here at VERMILUV we compost all the food waste we receive from our awesome partners. We’ve partnered with Starbucks, Bountiful Bread, Albany Academy School for Girls, RAW Juice Bar in Schenectady, and the Guilderland food pantry so far, with many more restaurants and institutions on the horizon! There’s 2 main reasons we pre-compost all the food waste we receive before giving it to our hungry hungry worms. Pre-Composting will not only begin to break down the food waste making it easier for the worms to eat, but it’ll also sterilize the food waste as well. We get our piles to a toasty 140F - 150F to make sure we kill allllll the bad juju, pathogens, and seeds hiding in the pile. We're able to do this thanks to a couple composting tricks up our sleeve…passed onto us by composting masters, but we’ll talk more about that in a future blog.
Sometimes the truth stinks. Landfills, while useful, create just as many problems as they solve (if not more!). But composting….that's something anybody can do. That's something your grandparents did, their grandparents did, THEIR grandparents did, THEIR GRANDPARENTS DID…because it works. It’s been working for 1000s of years. And not only do we feel that’s really cool, we feel it could be a great solution to a problem that’s currently affecting everybody. Food Waste.