6 High-Tech Innovations That Could Solve Our Food-Waste Woes

Americans can be a wasteful bunch. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimates that our country threw away 38 million tons of food, the equivalent of every person in the country junking two-thirds of a pound every day. We dumped milk that had spoiled, vegetables that had turned brown and hamburger patties we were too full to eat. Not only did this excess cost us a collective $161 billion, it caused unnecessary environmental strain. Food waste, after all, is the most common material in landfills and incinerators, constituting 21.6 percent of all solid waste, according to the U.S.D.A. To fix the problem, there are some easy strategies each household should adopt (hint: buy less, freeze more, compost). But there are also some high-tech innovations that could revamp the entire food supply. Below, the most promising efforts at reducing waste, from the time food is first harvested all the way to its final destination in a Dumpster.

1. Diverting Unwanted Food

Because of the government’s health and safety regulations, supply counts or simply cosmetic issues, a warehouse manager might reject a food shipment before it even makes it to the retail stand. The app Food Cowboy redirects this ugly or unwanted surplus to food banks. A truck driver simply programs her route into the mobile app, along with what’s on offer, like a pallet of bruised bananas or knobby carrots. By the time she’s ready to hit the road, the driver might receive a message from a charity who will meet her at a rest stop to take the produce. The soup kitchen gets their week’s supply of produce, and the distributor can take a tax deduction for the donation: a win-win.

Recipients at a food bank in New York City pack up their groceries.

2. Rethinking Plastic Packaging

Beyond the tons of food that Americans discard, there’s also the problem of all the packaging in which it’s wrapped: the egg cartons, salsa jars and snack wrappers, not to mention shopping bags. Scientists at the U.S.D.A. are trying to replace the ubiquitous plastic in grocery aisles with a mixture of casein, an edible milk protein, and pectin, a citrus extract often used to thicken jams. As long as it’s kept dry, the biodegradable film is actually 250 times better than plastic at blocking oxygen, which helps prevent food from going stale. And, because it’s edible, a consumer could plunk the whole package into water for an extra protein boost. “Everything is in smaller and smaller packaging, which is great for grabbing for lunch [or] for school, but then it generates so much waste,” Laetitia Bonnaillie, a U.S.D.A. researcher who co-led the research, tells Bloomberg. “Edible packaging can be great for that.”

3. Looking Beyond the Sell-By Date

We tend to throw out massive quantities of food because it spoils before we can eat it. Or, more accurately, because we worry that it has. Often, though, food is perfectly safe to eat after the sell-by date, but a home cook won’t want to take the risk of poisoning his family. The FoodKeeper App, a collaboration by the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Cornell University, provides guidelines online about whether an ingredient has spoiled and how long it can be kept in a pantry, refrigerator or freezer. So far, the database contains over 400 different food and beverage items.

If that’s not technical enough to determine whether food’s still safe to eat, M.I.T. scientists have another device: chemically actuated resonant devices (or more simply, CARDs), which can tell if food has gone bad by the gases it releases. “The beauty of these sensors is that they are really cheap. You put them up, they sit there, and then you come around and read them [with a smartphone]. There’s no wiring involved. There’s no power,” says Timothy Swager, the chemistry professor whose lab built gas-detecting sensors. Pretty soon, this “smart packaging” could do a more reliable job than the old trick of taking a whiff.

Many Americans toss out produce because it’s browning or otherwise looks unsavory, even when it’s still safe to eat.

4. Bypassing the Landfill

Only 5.1 percent of the food Americans currently trash is diverted; the rest ends up in the dump. Over time, this refuse releases clouds of pollutants into the atmosphere: either smoky emissions as it burns in an incinerator or methane, a gas that’s 28 times more dangerous for global warming than carbon dioxide, as it decomposes in a landfill. To reduce the burden on dumps, a device known as the Eco-Safe Digester, produced by BioHiTech for commercial kitchens like The Cheesecake Factory and those inside Marriott hotels, can divert up to 2,500 pounds of waste elsewhere daily. Liquefied by hungry microorganisms, a sloshing smoothie of leftovers goes down the drain, reducing the burden on dumps. That is, as long as the municipal sewers can handle the extra wastewater.

5. Cutting Back in Commercial Kitchens

As chefs rush to meet diners’ demands, some waste is expected. For many restaurants and dining halls, the thinking goes that it’s better to have a surplus of entrées ready than to run out halfway through dinner. But what if these establishments are consistently overdoing it? LeanPath, an Oregon-based software company, analyzes what’s being trashed in commercial kitchens and creates actionable steps for managers, cooks and servers to reduce waste. “Our business is about culture and shaping behavior,” Andrew Shakman, the co-founder, tells Bloomberg. “It’s not rocket science to figure out how to make less mashed potatoes. It is hard to identify that it’s mashed potatoes [that are overproduced] and to change behavior.” After staff has inputted a night’s worth of waste, the algorithm might recommend eliminating the rhubarb no one ever orders, peeling less skin off the potatoes or adding one less bread roll in the basket. By following its advice, LeanPath estimates it can save up to 6 percent of a kitchen’s food costs.

Food scraps from The Slanted Door restaurant in San Francisco make their way to the compost bin.

6. Designing a Smarter Dumpster

Of course, some food will always make its way to the rubbish heap. And when it does, we might as well have garbage trucks pick it up in the most efficient way possible. Compology, a San Francisco waste-management startup, installs sensors on dumpsters to gauge volume. As the bins fill to capacity, an algorithm plans drivers’ most efficient route, eliminating the stop-and-go emissions from weekly garbage collection. The more infrequent pickups can also save haulers tons of cash, up to 40 percent of collection costs, according to the co-founders’ reports from Santa Cruz, Calif., where sensors already been installed.
Continue reading “6 High-Tech Innovations That Could Solve Our Food-Waste Woes”

Litterati: Tapping the Power of Instagram for a Litter-Free World

On a routine hike with his two kids through California’s hilly and heavily wooded Oakland Hills, Jeff Kirschner found his picturesque view suddenly interrupted. Gazing down into the winding Sausal Creek, he spotted an empty cat-litter tub sittingon the banks. Kirschner went through the usual string of emotions he experienced when he saw litter — disbelief, frustration, anger — before calling it a day with a silent harumph.
His 4-year-old daughter, Tali, however, voiced Kirschner’s thoughts out loud — and a little more succinctly:
“Daddy, that doesn’t go there,” she said.
It’s an anecdote Kirschner, 41, likes to tell often, and for good reason. Looking back on that hike almost two years later, he considers Tali’s matter-of-fact statement an “aha” moment. “We have cats at home, so I think she was just commenting on the fact that this tub was out of place, not necessarily that it was trash or even litter,” he says. “But I realized she was absolutely right. It didn’t belong there — no litter does — and I wanted to do something about that.”
In fall 2012, Kirschner founded Litterati, a website and online community that aims to create a litter-free world by crowdsourcing trash cleanup. The idea is simple: After identifying a piece of litter, users photograph it with Instagram, adding the hashtag “#litterati.” Then, they throw away or recycle the item.
To date, Kirschner himself has recorded nearly 5,000 pieces of litter on the Litterati Instagram account, while users from 50 countries have contributed some 55,000 photos that live in a “Digital Landfill” on the organization’s site. Kirschner originally decided to use the photo-sharing app Instagram because of its convenience — it’s free to download and easy to use, with a number of photo filter options that make litter appear almost art-like.
MORE: Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)
Shortly after starting his Litterati account, Kirschner uncovered a much more significant benefit to the social media platform: location tagging, which allowed him to see not only what trash was being picked up, but also when and where cleanup was happening. “The hashtag created a record of the impact we were making,” says Kirschner, who had stints in advertising, screenwriting and tech startups before creating Litterati, which is now his full-time job. “The geo-tagged pictures came with dates and locations, and I was suddenly able to see patterns of where litter was sitting and what kind of litter was there. It has helped us figure out which neighborhoods might need more trash cans or recycling bins, and that’s something I didn’t predict when I started.”
Like the proliferation of litter itself, there’s no shortage of organizations trying to get rid of it, including high-profile groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and Keep America Beautiful. Kirschner has nothing but praise for these like-minded efforts, but he sees Litterati filling a void in the data his organization provides on recycled and removed trash — information that’s critical, in his opinion, in creating long-term solutions and policies on waste removal.
Kirschner’s group is also filling a void for those seeking a global network of eco-minded citizens. “Litterati creates a sense of community — people in Brussels are picking up trash and posting pictures of it while I’m doing the same thing here in San Francisco,” says Jon Braslaw, assistant group manager at Recology, a San Francisco company that reduces waste by trying to find new, sustainable uses for trash that typically sits in landfills. Earlier this year, Recology partnered with Litterati to stage an art exhibition in San Francisco called “Litterati: Using Technology to Clean the Planet,” which featured select images from the Digital Landfill. “We’re a society of consumers, so being able to demonstrate the value in the materials we consume — and how they can be recycled and reused — is important,” Braslaw says. “The show was a tool to help teach people about being conscious of what they throw away, and it gave Jeff physical pieces of artwork that he could use to continue to tell Litterati’s story.”
Kirschner has also teamed up with corporate brands in an effort to raise awareness about waste reduction. A Whole Foods store in Oakland, Calif., gave away free cups of coffee to anyone who had posted a #Litterati-tagged Instagram photo, and Chipotle donated a year of free burritos as a prize to the winners of a Litterati photo contest sponsored by the California Coastal Commission. In a fitting tribute, the winning photos showed young children holding up pieces of litter they’d thrown away.
ALSO: You’ll Never Guess What NYC Is Turning Its Biggest Trash Heap Into

This year Litterati even made its way to schools such as Fremont Open Plan, an alternative education program in nearby Modesto City, Calif., that mixes students of different grades in one classroom. Levi Sello, a teacher at the school, uses Litterati’s database in class to help his fourth- through sixth-grade students document the waste in their own school and community using iPads borrowed from a local aquarium. The kids became so passionate about the project that they even lobbied their school to put recycling containers in the cafeteria, after realizing plastic wrap around forks and spoons was the most common waste item found on site. They’re now asking school administrators to replace the cafeteria’s wasteful Styrofoam plates with a greener alternative.
“Being able to go out and see the trash in their own space has really helped them understand waste in a way that makes sense for their age,” Sello says. Students have started using Litterati at home, too, using their parents’ phones to make Instagram accounts of their own. Sello’s favorite story: The mother of one of his students told him that her child was too busy picking up trash to enjoy the beach on a recent family vacation. “That showed to me that this project with Litterati is really making a lasting impression on them,” he says.
The school’s use of Litterati is particularly meaningful to Kirschner, whose own daughter inspired the site, and for whom he’d like to leave a cleaner, more sustainable world. “I think that’s the wish of any parent — to leave this world in a better place for their kids,” he says.
DON’T MISS: One Company’s Quest to Reduce eWaste in Landfills

Need Cheap Housing Materials? Look No Further Than Your Local Landfill

It’s the ultimate recycling project: building a house out of discarded plastic bottles. It hasn’t caught on in the U.S. yet, but aid organizations in Africa and Asia are busy erecting plastic-bottle homes and other structures to house people in need. The bottles are simply filled with sand, then laid down like bricks, mortared together with mud or cement. Homes crafted from bottles are bullet-proof, fire-proof and resistant to the elements.
It takes about 14,000 bottles to construct a two-bedroom, 1,200-sq.-ft. home. Just think how many houses could be built with the 47.3 billion plastic bottles that end up in American landfills each year. (More than 3 million.) That’s a lot of cheap housing and a boon for the environment too.
MORE: Veterans Administration Aims to End Vet Homelessness with New Grants