About Food Waste?  

Food waste is any unused, left over and any consumable food items being discarded and is usually being handled by waste department and/or privately contracted waste management companies and is being hauled away and dumped into landfills. The sources of food waste mainly comes from leftover of our meals, waste ingredients during preparation of cuisine and the rejected products from food manufacturing and processing industries. In the United States the food waste contributes 35% by weight of the daily municipal solid wastes which are collected from domestic residential, commercial and industrial premises.

Reports indicate that only 5% of the food waste is being recycled and is mainly being turn into fertilizer and renewable energy and the rest sits in landfills and is turning into a problematic issue in health and environment. According to study as high as 50 percent of the food gets thrown into the garbage and that represents $30 billion of wasted food. Plus it cost Americans $1 billion dollars annually just to haul away food waste.

Problems with Food Waste ?

Besides the problem of high cost of handling food waste, rotten food can produce harmful methane gas and if not handled properly can create health problem and cost of life. Also food waste contains high organic and moisture contents, when dumped into landfills and decompose produces offensive smell which seriously affect our living environment. 

In addition, as the country and the world are becoming more environmentally conscious it is not acceptable to just dump garbage into landfills which is running out of space to handle them and no city and citizens want new landfills to be in their neighborhood. With this in mind how is the country and the world going to handle this problematic issue. 

Existing Effort of Handling Food                                                  

Mos of the developed countries have tried putting considerable efforts on food waste recycling and recovery because of recognized problems of health issues and simply running out of landfills. The best idea has been and still is turning food waste into compost. However the efforts are without much success for reasons of priority and technology.

Now that many cities in America such as San Francisco, Portland just to name a few, are revitalizing the food waste recycling effort and even enacted new regulations to mandate food waste recycling. This is putting the food waste issue to the forefront and the business of recycling food waste is worth the attention.