Metro Vancouver Sustainability Breakfast - Food Waste

Attended the Metro Vancouver Sustainability Breakfast today.

Today’s topic was the challenges and opportunities presented by the upcoming ban of organics in the waste stream in 2015.

Todd Jeanotte of the Four Seasons hotel presented how the hotel works to minimize food waste in their different restaurants and catering business.  This involves staff engagement, menu engineering, preference reports, collaboration with suppliers, forecast management, and accurate measurement of input and output.

Erin Nichols represented the Vancouver Food Bank and spoke of how the organizations Food Runners program helps divert food that is near the expiration date from over 200 donors to those that can make best use of the food.  The interesting point made was that there is no liability for businesses that donate food which was a concern in the past.

Stuary Lilley of Enterra Feed described the process of how they take food waste and convert it into feedstock for chickens/farmed fished, oil and fertilizer.  Their process is described as a bioconversion process which uses the food waste to feed black soldier fly larvae which are then processed to make animal feed and fertilizer.  It helps close the loop in terms of minimizing waste and putting back the nutrients used to grow food into the agricultural process.

Steve Harpur, founder of Earth Renu, described how his company takes food waste and processes it into natural gas or biodiesel.  His main message is that there should be no food waste (packaged or unpackaged) going to landfill.  There are sufficient technologies capable of dealing with the waste and by locating his facility on Annacis Island, he reduces the distance that waste needs to travel – rather than the 700 km round trip to Cache Creek.

There was also a representative from Recycle Smart, a company that connect sustainability and business.  Many businesses do not know where to start, especially in dealing with the upcoming organics ban.  They also demonstrate that working towards meeting these requirements is not that costly and may actually save a business money by reducing waste collection fees.  Your waste may actually be a resource for another company.

The main message is that food waste represents nearly a third of the food produced in the world and that being organize material there exists the means and technologies to make use of this material rather than sending it to landfill.