In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

CREATING MARKETABLE GREEN PRODUCTS

In Business, September-October, 2005, Vol. 27, No. 5, p. 18

North Carolina project turns restaurant food waste into bagged products, while Massachusetts agency uses public/private partnership to get supermarkets involved with composting.

CHEROKEE COMMITMENT
AS DESCRIBED in a 2005 issue of the EPA Tribal Waste Journal, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians operate a successful large-scale food residuals composting operation at the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. The tribe has been composting 72 tons per month of food residuals since 1997. Made from materials collected at seven local restaurants - including three within Harrah's Cherokee Casino - is sold as premium product for $35/ton.
The program begins at the restaurants, where employees manually separate kitchen feedstocks and remove contaminants. Residuals are collected as often as two or three times per day to maintain a positive relationship with staff. After collection, employees transport containers to the transfer station, weigh them, then mix residuals with woodchips and sawdust. Shredded waste paper comes from tribal offices nearby. Operational expenses are about $180,000/year, and the program breaks even from sales of the final product.
Most of the compost is sold to residents, tribal roads divisions and others that pick up product at the transfer station. Harrah's plans to purchase compost as well as the state's Department of Transportation which will use composting berms to replace silt fences. Local organic farmers rave abut the high nutritional value of the compost, while the owner of Cherokee Daylily Gardens says: “In all our years of growing daylilies, we have never experienced this rate of reproduction.” Recently, the tribe's extension office worked with the Chief to provide community members with coupons for compost to promote gardening. People came to pick up the compost and were also given gardening kits. As the program moves forward, Richie Bottchenbaugh - one of the compost site managers - recalls: “The Cherokee people have a rich history of farming, and the composting coupons encourage them to get back to gardening.”

YANKEE PERSISTENCE
“Fifty-four supermarkets are on board and hopefully more to come,” enthusiastically reports Julia Wolfe about the latest results of the Massachusetts Supermarket Organics Recycling Network. Wolfe is the Commercial Waste Reduction Coordinator with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP). In August, MassDEP Commissioner Bob Golledge and the president of the Massachusetts Food Association (MFA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to get supermarkets and grocery stores across the state to increase their recycling participation - particularly to encourage composting such items as spoiled fruits and vegetables, floral and deli wastes, and waxed cardboard. Adds Wolfe: “This has been a real public/private partnership - the individual supermarket and grocery chains, haulers, processing facilities and contractors to reach this tremendous milestone!”
Currently, it's estimated that diversion rates to composting are currently less than 10 percent of the nearly 900,000 tons of commercial food waste generated annually in the state. Commercial food waste is about 19 percent of the total commercial stream. MA DEP has identified supermarkets as a major organics generator with over 400 supermarkets in the state generating an estimated 90,600 tons of organics material per year. With disposal costs at $80 to $100/ton, the stores have a major savings potential from composting. One pilot at Roche Bros. Supermarkets diverted 5 to 10 tons/week/store and showed annual savings of $10,000 to $20,000/store using a dedicated organics compactor process. This chain has since grown its organics program to include 13 of its 16 stores.
To accelerate the shift, MA DEP hired J.F. Connolly & Associates, Waste Recovery Solutions, WasteCap of Massachusetts and the Center for Ecological Technology to expand the Supermarket Recycling Organics Initiative (SROI) program and provide the assistance needed to move this program to the next level through the 2004 Supermarket Organics Recycling Network project. This project team worked with store managers, senior management, etc. at Stop & Shop, Big Y, Roche Bros., Shaw's and Whole Foods to analyze operations, set up financial benchmarks, identify expansion, and provide technical assistance.
The team completed store visits to over 50 locations, established a baseline for organics diversion tonnage, completed site visits to composting facilities and hauling companies.
Another goal was to develop a collaborative, nonregulatory strategy for industry-wide growth of composting in Massachusetts and setting up the voluntary MOU for organics recycling. Lastly, the supermarket chains became part of MA WasteWise program. Team members helped the chains set waste reduction, recycling and purchasing of recycled content materials goals and develop systems for measuring these goals over three years.
DIVERTING TONNAGE
From data collection projects, combined results indicate that approximately 53,300 tons of total waste annually are generated by 62 stores. Of this amount, 26,200 tons are recycled cardboard; 8,900 tons are source separated organics sent to composting facilities; and 18,200 are disposed of as trash. Total percentage recycled is 65.9 percent.
New stores added to the program would add 165 additional tons per year for each new location. An additional 65 new supermarket locations are currently available (total of 119) for diversion of a combined 50,000 tons of organics to composting. Projected percentage of organics and cardboard is 72.3 percent of the total waste stream for these 119 supermarkets. Across five years, this diversion would generate $2.5 million savings for the state's supermarkets.

HALLMARK OF A SUSTAINABLE FARMING INDUSTRY
Timothy W. Jones
WHEN IT COMES to the amount of food waste that winds up in the trash pile, the Washington state apple industry contrasts significantly with other fresh fruit and vegetable farming. The apple orchards dotting the foothills of the Cascade Mountains represent an industry with a refreshing presentation of progress and innovation. For apple growers, their culture includes respect for the land, desire to feed fellow humans, a reverence for the life cycle, and the desire to make a decent living in a spectacular locale. Our research at the University of Arizona on the American food system shows a gargantuan loss costing the American economy at least $100 billion annually.
Losses in the Washington/Oregon apple industry appear high at about 12 percent. But apples are grown and harvested only four or five months of the year and stored the rest. For decades, the apple industry's goal has been to become a stable, sustainable and profitable business rather than chase short-term market fluctuations that characterize much of today's farming. One of the first goals was to develop storage techniques that could provide fresh apples to the market throughout the year. This was accomplished with development of controlled atmosphere storage (referred to as “CA” in the industry). Apples that will last the longest are stored in rooms where the temperature, oxygen, carbon dioxide and humidity are controlled.
With a consistent year-round supply, the industry was able to achieve increasingly consistent prices that enticed consumers toward greater but more predictable consumption. With more predictable consumption, growers, packers and warehouses could better regulate their businesses, increasing efficiencies. Growers work together to maximize orchard and harvest use and yields. They cooperatively control the number of acres under cultivation based on demand, remove diseased and old trees and finance development of higher-yielding and more marketable varieties. They also cull apples that fail fresh standards to produce other products: applesauce, apple juice and sliced apples for canning and dehydration.
Consumers can nearly always find fresh apples in stores at about the same price anytime of the year. Apple products are some of the least expensive fruits found on the store shelf. Barring a cataclysmic natural disaster, the industry could go on forever. It is the hallmark of developing a sustainable farming industry.
The contrasts between the apple and fresh vegetable industries are evidence of the value of instilling an understanding of food and its place in the life cycle and the value of working together as a community. Efficiencies and profits improve. Sustainability increases.

Dr. Timothy Jones is at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, University of Arizona in Tucson.