[PRACTICE] Food Recycling

"I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use."  – Mother Teresa

Spring swept by and it's almost summer time! Even though spring in New York is infamous for it's close-to-nonexistence, it feels like it's getting shorter with extremely fluctuating weather ranging from 90 degrees hot mess to 40 degrees 'winter is coming AGAIN'.

More concerning is happening in the Midwest regions in the United States, however, as they are suffering from tornado causing injuries and deaths. The scientists have predicted that this record-breaking floods across the Midwest could be worse than the historic floods of 1993 along the Mississippi river. Although it is too early for a verdict to rule climate change guilty, it seems like the rising temperature definitely contributes to the higher precipitation and therefore, unprecedented amount of rainfalls in the region, that was already suffering from extreme weathers this time of the year. You can make donations to help families that are displaced due to the flood through notable organizations including the Salvation Army, American Red Cross, or United Way of the Midlands.

On another note, the second week of May (May 5 - 11) was International Compost Awareness Week. The educational initiative began in 1995 in Canada to raise awareness of the benefits of composting from sending waste back to the soil, providing resistance to drought and disease, and reducing the release of nitrous oxide. Living in New York City, I hardly know one person who knows how to compost. Honestly, I am not sure if anyone in my network really knows what composting even is. 

What is composting? Composting is an aerobic process of decomposing various organic materials including leaves, grass, and food scraps, to produce soil conditioner (aka. the compost aka. fertilizer). In other words, this is the only and the most sustainable way to reuse and recycle wasted food. An important note to make, however, is that not all food scrap are compostable, since there are types of edibles that can be toxic to the environment or too slow in its biodegrading process.

In this issue, I observed compost practices in two major cities in East Asia - Hong Kong and Seoul, South Korea. Both cities pride themselves upon huge street food scenes and never-ending nightlife, meaning late night snacks and dropped food scraps on the streets. Food is awesome when going into our bodies. Not so much when gone wasted.

Food Recycling Gone Wrong in Hong Kong

By Jiwon Choi

When in Hong Kong, you “eat, drink, spend and repeat”, as the saying goes. The streets lined up with trendy restaurants and cafés remind anyone that Hong Kong is a hustle-and-bustle tourist destination.

Yet, to an environmentalist, the awe quickly fades away. As much as tourists spend on food and beverage (f&b), Hong Kong has an insurmountable food waste problem––more than 3,000 tonnes of food, or 36% of all solid waste, gets diverted straight to the landfill each day. Due to the misconception that food is naturally biodegradable, there is a sense of apathy towards the need for composting and recycling infrastructure.

The city is most well-known for its enormous food scenes and therefore, has a huge generation of food waste. In a fast-moving city like Hong Kong, people seldom bring leftover meals to go from the restaurants, despite big portions and leftovers on rounds and rounds of tables. There's barely a governmental monitoring of how food wastes are treated by restaurants. The owners and retailers already pay high fees for effluent discharge and cleaners to clear their garbage that they wouldn't engage further than to throw away food scraps along with all the other wastes.

Reducing food waste is one and foremost solution. Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department has set an aggressive goal to reduce food waste diverted to landfills by 40% by 2022 and is investing more than $600 million on various projects to meet the target. The initiatives include developing technology to separate food for use as fertilizer; building infrastructure so that households can separate food waste from other waste; designing food waste pre-treatment facilities; and promoting and educating the public. While there is no silver bullet to this problem, there are ways all sectors can come together to improve the city's putrid problem. The government can sanction retailers with financial rebates to stop waste from going to the landfills. The retailers can establish an internal audit team to measure the current food waste levels and identify key sources of food waste generation. Identifying and eradicating the sources will naturally lead to reduction. For consumers, order less and rescue leftover food for tomorrow’s meal.

Adopting the sustainable culture is another solution. Recently, foreign expats in Hong Kong have been leading grassroots movement and coming up with long-term solutions to food waste. One of those movements is displayed in a form of zero waste-themed restaurants. Although still early to say, retailers at "green" restaurants are exploring ways to reduce wastage, by purchasing compost machines that convert food waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer for its own garden; donating the rest to schools with gardens; trying streamline orders; and making things in small batches.

Grassroots Pantry is one of the leading well-known, plant-based and eco-conscious restaurant in Hong Kong today. Peggy Chan, a vegetarian and environmentalist born in Hong Kong and raised in Montreal started this as a chef and owner back in 2012. At Grassroots, innovation meets sustainability and food culture. The chefs make sure to use all leftover parts of the produce in all parts of the food making process, from juices and appetizers to desserts - reducing food costs while also diverting waste from the landfill. Its sustainable practices have allowed the restaurant to divert 8 tonnes of food a year from landfills alone, and it also is Hong Kong's first restaurant to install an ORCA technology's food waste digester. Grassroots also promotes transparency and has turned a zero-waste concept into a brand. The restaurant recently published its first annual Sustainability Report, which includes an analysis of waste, recycling, and sourcing. It has committed to release the report every year. 

How Seoul Did It

By Lizzie Yang

"The Country Winning the Battle On Food Waste" (Huntington Post) "South Korea has Cracked the Food Waste Code" (Grist) "Don't Waste That Banchan: Where South Korea's Food Waste Goes" (Korea Exposé) "South Korea Has Almost Zero Food Waste, Here's How" (intelligentliving.com) 

These are just a few headlines on the search engine. In fact, the title of this segment is misleading because South Korea as a country managed to go from recycling 2% of its food waste in 1995 to 95% today. A country with a cuisine full of grains, soup dishes to ease their souls, and shareable banchans (small side dishes that most likely includes kimchi) used to have one of the world's highest rates of food wastage. Also, looking back to my childhood spent in Korea, there's no such thing as "one serving per person." Mothers' and grandmothers' affection are mostly shown through the warmth in the meals they cooked and from refilling the bowls and plates over and over again. So, now you get it. Lots of leftovers!

Here's how they did it. In 2013, South Korean government passed a law that requires every household and every commercial business to discard food waste in designated biodegradable bags. Not just any plastic bag, but biodegradable and marked. These are available for purchases in almost any supermarkets and convenience stores in various sizes, costing the average 4-person family about $6 a month. This pay-for-your-food-wastage system is brilliant because the families and businesses would have to pay tax upfront. The tax would then be used to cover the cost of collecting and processing the food scraps for compost in each city/district. Enforcing this law allowed households to measure how much food they had been wasting and motivated families to reduce waste.

Then technology comes into picture. Now that every household needs to hoard food scraps in a container for possibly more than a day at a time, electronic conglomerates like LG and Samsung invented products to better store food scraps before they leave the house. Earlier products included food-waste dryer that sucked out all moisture from the food scraps (and like I said, Koreans love soup dishes) so that any liquid doesn't smear out of biodegradable bags. This solved the odor issue too. Communal compost bins sit outside the apartment complex or on the corners of the residential alleys and get picked up by the city.

In the recent years, those communal  bins transformed as well. The city districts have been installing large metal buckets with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip readers. For one, people can now dump food scraps without the biodegradable bags. That's right, going #zerowaste. And residents can now weigh their wastage each day and collect records with their unique electronic ID tags, which then adds up to a monthly bill. In other words, instead of paying for biodegradable bags, they will be taxed every month based on how much wastage they produce. (See picture on the right: the very left bin is an outdated version where people put the entire bag of food scraps into. The bigger orange/white bins have RFID chip readers.) 

In the case of Seoul, the capital city, the city takes 60% of the food scraps and the rest are for private contractors. In both cases, the waste goes to processing plants where it gets 100% dried, heat-treated, and grated. The grated product then transforms into either animal feed or fertilizer. This is the most typical procedure of industrial composting. 

South Korea had the infrastructure and culture that allowed success of food recycling from the beginning. The country already had a well-designed recycling programs and adding food-recycling portion was nothing completely new to the citizens. The system worked well in unprecedented circumstances too, because it naturally encouraged households to reduce wastage in the beginning by lowering the number of banchans served or often resorting to one-plate dining. Despite the ready-made success, the government is continuing to search for solutions to lower the amount of food waste and new ways to use food waste as fuels.

I must say I cannot hide my joy as an environmentalist and a Korean descendant. At the same time, I cannot say for sure if any other city can benchmark the kind of infrastructure as well as cities around South Korea managed to do so. In the case of New York City, where I'm residing, it is far and hard to imagine. However, the success story in South Korea hopefully encourages other nations to pursue 100% food recycling goals. I am soon going to come back with my experiences of composting in New York City.

Special thanks to my friend Jiwon for letting me use her eyes and legs to observe the scenes of Hong Kong. It is a true blessing to have like-minded friends.