Food Waste - Part 3

Reducing food waste comes in many stages, with changing habits and practices as core to its success. To review food waste and loss, the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy, and approaches to reducing wasteful habits, refer to Part 1. If you are more focused on minimizing waste at the customer level, such as JIT serving and tips on presentation, check out Part 2.

Even after following appropriate techniques to reduce the volume of food being sourced and therefore limiting the remaining surplus, additional steps can be taken to recover the otherwise wasted nutrition, such as diverting it to other sources or giving it new life as a nutrient-rich soil.

Diverting Food for Animal Consumption

While distributing leftover food for human consumption is an unpopular practice due to the liability that mishandled food carries, this does not prevent food from being diverted for animal waste. In fact, this practice is already being utilized on a national level through farmer and restaurant partnerships.

Some restaurants that already practice this type of diversion extend to those operating within national parks, such as Jenny Lake and Jackson Lake Lodges in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP). Specifically, employees at Jenny Lake Lodge partnered with a local farm to develop the Kelly Garden Project, which aims to reduce waste by donating pre-consumer waste to feed the farmers’ chickens and composting the organic, yet ineligible material. This practice became so popular that, after diverting 3,400 pounds of waste in 2015, they decided to expand it to Jackson Lake Lodge, who partnered with Purely by Chance Farm in Alta, WY to further grow the impact of the project by 406% in the following year!

Repurposing food scraps for animal consumption simultaneously saves farmers on animal feeding costs and reduces the financial burden on parks to transport their waste to landfills. In the case of Jenny Lake Lodge and GTNP, their symbiotic relationship surpassed these bounds when farmers allowed employees to harvest the literal fruits and vegetables of their charitable labor to be prepared for lodge customers.

Composting and Anaerobic Digesting

Though composting and digesting both aid in the decomposition of organic material, they do so in differing ways. Foremost, composting performs in the presence of oxygen and is a more popular practice due to the lower initial capital investment and training required to implement it. For this reason, various parks listed later in the article, as well as ample additional parks, have begun to engage in composting.

However, this is not necessarily the optimal organic waste management system for all. Unfortunately, composting does not always provide a sanitary output and might require additional processing to produce a usable product. Anaerobic digesting requires significantly less energy to operate and maintains the capability to produce renewable energy as biogas, thereby making it the “greener” option in the long run. This characteristic was particularly attractive to an aspiring carbon-neutral park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which opted to offset its transportation and waste/energy emissions by funding anaerobic digesters for Cottonwood Dairy Farm and South Kent Landfill, respectively.

Each solution provides diverse benefits and drawbacks and should be evaluated based on the best fit for the park. In either case, the potential odor and detrimental wildlife impacts are possible and must be kept at bay with neutralizing enzyme spray applications and containment of contents with bags and secure bins.

Pilot Parks

The National Park Service chose three pilot parks to spearhead the waste reduction movement through the 2017 Zero Landfill Initiative. Partnering with Subaru and the National Parks Conservation, GTNP, Denali National Park & Preserve, and Yosemite National Park are working to wholly eliminate garbage within the parks by implementing some of the aforementioned solutions in addition to other initiatives.

Grand Teton National Park

Previously discussed for their partnerships with local farms, GTNP was also heavily involved in other measures to reduce their overall waste. Food waste proved to be the most cumbersome during this transition, which prompted them to adopt composting processes.

Collaborating with the county-contracted waste hauler, Westbank Sanitation, GTNP was able to have 73.3 tons of food waste composted during the first season with the help of West Yellowstone.

Yosemite National Park

Through the program, Yosemite was able to replace traditional plastic cups and utensils with biodegradable versions composed of plant starches, introduce bulk as opposed to single-serving condiments, and greatly improve its involvement in composting programs.

Partnering with Mariposa County, Yosemite received a discount of $55 per organic ton compared to $121 per trash ton since processing of organic matter requires minimal efforts by the county. This practice, in cooperation with concessioners offering 95% biodegradable containers, allowed Yosemite to drastically cut back on their waste by hundreds of tons.

Denali National Park

As part of the initiative, Denali welcomed a variety of changes: introducing 33 triple-bin BearSaver recycling containers, upgrading recycling equipment, and reducing food trash through composting programs and Green Mountain Technology’s Earth Cube composting containers.

Despite a record number of visitors (640,000 in 2017), Denali’s diversion rate rose from 15% in 2015 to 22% in 2017, while diminishing their rate of waste to local landfills from 392 tons to 244 tons during the same time period.

Since commencement of the program, pilot parks and concessioners have diverted nearly 13 million pounds by reusing, recycling, or composting — drastically reducing their explicit waste by 32%. Other parks are following suit: Yellowstone National Park recycled 34% and composted 18% of their waste, as of 2018.

Although undertaking projects such as these requires some forethought and extensive planning, the benefits might outweigh the costs sooner than you expect through the reduction of cost of waste management, incidents involving wildlife, and overall environmental impact.