It seems odd because it is the most natural waste humans produce, yet the mere amount and ways we manage it after it becomes waste, is what causes the problem. 44% of ALL global waste produced around the world each year, is organic food waste. Shocking amounts adding up to almost 1 billion tons of organic waste. Every single year. It comes from commercial kitchens, municipalities, different institutions, and just normal life, and so we cannot ‘just’ regulate its production or put quotas on it. We have to redesign how we think about waste, to change our behaviour around it, for the better.
Here is the issue. If we collect organic waste in the normal bin with other residual waste, it goes to an incineration facility to be burnt or – in some countries – left in a landfill to rot. Burning it will release dioxins to the atmosphere. Leaving it in landfills will produce large amounts of methane gas into the open air. A gas, that is 28 times as damaging to the atmosphere as CO2.
Consequently, both are bad solutions, but worse so, they both completely overlook the potency and value that lies within the food waste itself.
Avoiding the heavy pollution is therefore one thing, but it’s quite another thing to recover the valuable resources that lie within the waste. We can actually use this waste to give clean nutrition back into the Bioeconomy, but for that to be an option, we need to use a different waste bag.
If sorted and collected separately, organic waste can be converted into biogas or nutritious compost to grow new crops in and spread on the fields to nurture the soil. If we collect the leftovers food scraps with a conventional plastic bag, it will contaminate the compost and atmosphere with microplastic fractions no matter how meticulous we are in the handling process. That’s why it is so important to change the waste bag to a fully certified compostable alternative. Only then, can we make sure that the compost goes back into the soil without microplastic contamination!
We must redesign how we think about organic waste, and not tunnel-focus on ‘just’ how to discard it with the least amount of pollution. With a different perspective, organic waste is a highly valuable resource to the environment, and treated as such, it would no longer be among the top-5 threats to global warming, but a constant source of nutrition going back into the Bioeconomy. It truly is a no-brainer, and changing the mere perspective on the problem, has led to finding a positive solution within the problem itself. Creative and amazing, isn’t it?
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