What's Rotting in the Big Apple?

In New York City, the food and food packaging waste streams create health and environmental concerns. They account for a significant percentage of the city’s garbage and therefore bear responsibility for a bulk of the carbon and particulate matter emissions from garbage trucks. They help support rodent and other disease-carrying pest populations, which creates the need for increasing volumes of pesticides. And the food waste is a major source of methane gas when mixed with other trash in landfills.

Of the 3.24 million tons of commercial solid waste generated in New York City in 2002, commercial businesses created 598,180 tons of food waste (18.5 percent of the total). The accommodations and food services sector, which includes restaurants, accounted for 234,410 tons of this food waste. (Food waste was the second largest category of waste generated; paper was the first at 1.8 million tons.)¹

Because commercial waste characterization studies don’t include a separate category for food packaging waste, we don’t know the exact percentage of the commercial waste stream composed of food packaging waste. However, we know what types of materials enter the waste stream as discarded food packaging: glass, paper, and plastic.

Even though numerous national and international studies have explored alternative food waste management methods—such as industrial grinders, composting, and anaerobic digestion—no widespread action to remediate the food waste situation has been taken.

Our project will lead to necessary action as we create a consortium comprised of business owners and managers from the food industry sectors, including restaurants, grocery stores, and institutions that house large food service concessions (e.g., hospitals or universities), and we will facilitate the consortium through practice and process redesign.

But we won’t stop there. Once consortium members have identified solutions, we will help them implement a pilot project based on the solutions they have chosen.

The primary goals of “What's Rotten in the Big Apple” are:

• to reduce the volume of food and food packaging waste created
  
  
• to increase the amount of unused food distributed to food kitchens and other organizations that assist the needy
  
  
• to establish more sanitary and environmentally responsible methods for managing food and food packaging waste that cannot be eliminated.
  
  Achieving these three goals will help us achieve our overarching goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from two sources:
  
  
• methane from landfills where food and food packaging waste are disposed
  
  
• carbon dioxide and monoxide (as well as particulate matter) from refuse trucks that haul the waste
  
  INFORM is partnering with GreenBlue, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Virginia, that takes a similar approach to environmental change and runs a very successful packaging collaborative.

1. Henningson, Durham, and Richardson Architecture and Engineering, Commercial Waste Management Study, vol. 2, “Commercial Waste Generation and Projections,” New York: New York City Department of Sanitation, March 2004, table 1.4-2, available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/govpub/sanit21.shtml.

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