Waste not news - the austin chronicle

4/29/2015 Waste Not - News - The Austin Chronicle
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2015-02-20/waste-not/print/ 1/6
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/20150220/wastenot/
Local groups work to reduce, redistribute, and "rescue" food from loss and landfills
BY ROBYN ROSS, FEBRUARY 20, 2015, NEWS
At 7am on a chilly Wednesday, Jennifer James stands on the loading dock behind the Arboretumarea
Trader Joe's. She watches as clerks wheel 16 boxes full of food from the back room to a waiting pickup
truck. Inside are baskets of strawberries. Muffins. Prepackaged salads. Hot dog buns, bread, and tortillas.
All of it is older than its sellby date, but not expired. That means James' two fellow volunteers can haul it to
their food pantry at nearby Covenant Methodist Church and distribute it that evening. "This is probably
about 400 pounds," James says, surveying the packed truck bed, "which is a light day. Since today wasn't
much, I'm guessing there will be more tomorrow."
James, who has volunteered with Keep Austin Fed since October 2013, was right: Weighed at the church,
the food totaled 442 pounds. She added the numbers to her records, which indicate that Keep Austin Fed
rescues about 40,000 pounds of food every single month.
Rescued from what? The landfill. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that roughly 40% of
food in the U.S. goes to waste. That statistic is an estimate that includes waste throughout the life span of
food – from bruised tomatoes left to rot in the field, to ricotta past its sellby date at the grocery store, to
lasagna forgotten at the back of the fridge. Much of it ends up in landfills; EPA numbers show that about a
third of what fills municipal landfills is organic material, like food scraps and yard trimmings, and half of that
amount is food waste. Austin's numbers may not parallel the national statistics exactly, Austin Resource
Recovery Director Bob Gedert told the Zero Waste Advisory Commission last week, but they're a good
baseline.
The average American wastes about $644 worth of food annually, according to a 2011 article in the
International Journal on Food System Dynamics. But money isn't only leaking out of the kitchen. It takes
water to produce food, and energy to truck it to stores. Hauling trashed food to the landfill expends still
more energy.
Worse, food in the landfill doesn't break down and turn into soil. Because such materials are covered with
dirt each day and are cut off from oxygen, they break down anaerobically, creating gases, including
methane. Analyses by the EPA reflect that methane has at least 20 times the impact on climate change as
equal amounts of carbon dioxide, and that landfills contribute about a fifth of the methane emissions

created by human activity. Some landfills, including the Waste Management site in Northeast Austin,
capture methane and turn it into electricity. Others flare it away.
"It's a missed opportunity on so many levels," says Brandi Clark Burton, the founder of Aus tin EcoNetwork,
announced to become a senior policy advisor with the Mayor's Better Austin Foundation, and a major force
behind Austin's food wasteprevention efforts. "We could have fed people, we could have fed animals, we
could have built soil – why would we put it in the landfill, the worst possible place? There are so many other
things we could do, so we've got to build the infrastructure to make those accessible."
Burton's list of alternatives to landfilling – people, animals, soil – is based on the EPA's Food Recovery
Hierarchy, an inverted pyramid that lists, in descending order of desirability, where surplus food should go.
("Soil" means composting.) The EPA guidelines also include, at the top, source reduction – preventing the
waste through advance planning – and, farther down, industrial uses, such as biofuels. The Food Recovery
Hierarchy is included as a guideline in Austin's Universal Recycling Ordinance, the city policy affecting
businesses and apartment and condo buildings. Large foodservice businesses will be required, starting in
October 2016, to divert organic material from the landfill. For many, this will mean implementing a compost
program, but food rescue efforts can be included in a business' annual diversion plan, a document
explaining how it will comply with city rules. For now, efforts to reduce food waste are largely voluntary and
motivated by environmental or social concerns. This story addresses the two first layers of the hierarchy:
source reduction and feeding hungry people.
The Food Shift
In the fall of 2011, Burton, then on the Sus tain able Food Policy Board, initiated the creation of a Food
Surplus & Salvage Work ing Group. Members of that group, as well as a community effort called EcoCam
paigns, researched the problem of food waste and options for local solutions. One outcome was a City
Council proclamation that named 2013 the Year of Food Waste Prevention and Recovery.
Another outcome was a mentoring relationship between the Austin volunteers and the Oaklandbased food
waste prevention group, Food Shift. Members of Food Shift Austin, particularly Burton and Janis Bookout,
drafted the city's food donation guidelines, which spell out how food handlers can safely convey extra
resources to the needy. Food Shift Austin and the Zero Waste Network also worked to secure a pledge by
government and industry to reduce food waste in accordance with the Food Recovery Hierarchy. Called the
Emerging Solutions Project Charter, it was signed on Sept. 18, 2014, by thenMayor Lee Leffingwell, the
Greater Austin Restaurant Association, the Austin Hotel & Lodging Association, and Keep Austin Fed,
among others. It marked a milestone in an EPAfunded community building effort to find ways restaurants
and hotels can reduce loss – of both food and money. The EPA grant was written by Burton and Thomas
Vinson of the Zero Waste Network, an Austinbased international organization dedicated to reducing waste
at its source. The Zero Waste Network works with businesses to prevent waste in a way that saves them
money.

"They pay for a material to come in the door, and then they pay to throw it away," Vinson says. If food is
being thrown out because of overordering, "that's a sign of multiple inefficiencies. They're unloading it,
they're putting it on the shelf, they're taking it off the shelf, they're spending hours and hours dealing with
things that make them no profit."
As administrators of the EPA grant, Vinson, his colleague Morgan Whitney, and project manager Bookout
have convened conversations among local food service professionals to identify projects for reducing food
waste and saving businesses money. One project involves Stinson's Bistro, where the chef is developing
partnerships with other neighborhood restaurants to share their surpluses. A second project involves the
AT&T Executive Education and Con fer ence Center on the UTAustin campus, which currently recycles or
composts 60% of its waste and is looking for ways to increase that to 75%.
"This isn't about recycling," Vinson says. "If you can get ahead of the game and reduce at the source, that's
always the best way."
UT has done that in its two allyoucaretoeat cafeterias by eliminating trays, so people are less
susceptible to taking food they won't eat. A 2008 "plate waste" study determined that about 112 tons of
edible food was being left on diners' plates each year. Removing trays from the dining halls cut the waste in
half. Hunter Mangrum, sustainability coordinator for the Division of Housing & Food Service, says the
cafeterias also try to repurpose unserved food for the next day's menu and donate excess to a soup
kitchen.
On a larger scale, Burton would like to see zerowaste strategies included in management training at
culinary and hotel schools, and in the process of food handler certification. "When we build requirements
into places where you're asking for resources, or going for training, and the guidelines say 'this is the
standard,' then people do it because it's required," she says, citing the example of environmental
improvements resulting from green building codes.
Half Is More
Local nonprofit Halfsies and its partner restaurants also focus on the "front end," eliminating waste before it
even gets onto the plate. At participating businesses, diners choose menu items that can be scaled down to
a halfportion. The customer pays full price, and part of the bill goes to a charity that fights hunger. It's an
option suitable for light eaters, travelers, and people who are dining out before heading to the theatre or
somewhere else without a fridge. Founder Rachel Smith came up with the idea several years ago when
she traveled for work and often found herself without a way to store leftovers. She tried to order smaller
portions but was told it wasn't an option. "I thought it doesn't make sense to have so many people who are
hungry and don't have enough to eat, while I'm wasting food because the portions are so big," she says.
"On one side there's excess, and on the other there's this great lack."
The project kicked off in Austin in Octo ber with two partner restaurants – Russian House (Downtown), and

Cedro, near Lake line Mall. Smith says she and her team – it's an allvolunteer project at this point – would
like to expand into more dining rooms, particularly in chain restaurants. "The donation comes out of the
difference in the food cost that's not served to the customer," which actually helps restaurants save on
supplies, she says. Theoretically, participation in Halfsies could eventually allow a restaurant to adjust its
supply orders downward.
Partnering with Halfsies was instinctive for Moscowborn Varda Tamoulianis, coowner of Russian House.
"Food waste was absolutely prohibited in my family, because we didn't have so much food on the table,"
she says. "We've gone through some hard economical situations in our country. When I came here I was
like, 'Oh my gosh, everything's so huge' – but that's what people expect, coming to a restaurant."
The Russian House menu has a laminated insert describing the Halfsies initiative and indicating which
dishes can be halved: for instance, golubtsy (one cabbage roll instead of two) and borscht (the regular
portion is pretty big). When the program kicked off last fall, patrons were excited, Tamou li anis says, but
participation has slowed; she estimates a few dozen people have gone halfsies. She's searching for a
quicker way to communicate the information to customers, particularly those who are dining at Russian
House for the first time and aren't familiar with the portion sizes.
Breaking Bread
If a surplus of food can't be avoided, the EPA says the next best thing is to get it to hungry people. Of the
31 million pounds of food the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas distributed last year, just over half were
rescued from wholesalers, farms, and 130 retailers. Much of it is food whose sellby date is about to pass,
but that's still perfectly good. "Just because a company can't sell a food item doesn't mean that it's bad and
should be thrown away," says food sourcing supervisor Bethany Carney. "I let people know that if they ever
have a pallet of food that's mislabeled, or something is wrong with the coding on the packaging, if it's not
OK for them to distribute but it's OK to eat, give us a call."
Keep Austin Fed, an allvolunteer group, does similar work on a smaller scale. Unlike the food bank, it
doesn't have a storage facility, so food is transferred directly from donors to shelters and food pantries. The
group's 20 suppliers include both Trader Joe's locations, Snap Kitchen, and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
But, operations director Joseph de Leon says, it's a drop in the bucket. "In a year's time, 20 donors have
given us the equivalent of 500,000 meals, but multiply that by the remainder of the food providers in town,
and there's still a huge volume of food going to the landfill," he says. "At a certain point it seems like we're
going to run out of places to take the food – after we stock every shelter and food pantry out there, I bet
there will still be food. Where does that go?"
One of the most common donations is bread. Artisan bread. Loaves of white bread. Baguettes. Pastries.
Donuts. Tortillas. Keep Austin Fed can't place all the bread that comes its way. De Leon says that, in the
past, volunteers have arrived at a food pantry with a big delivery of bread only to find that the charity
already has bags and bags of it on the shelf.

"We have a huge bread problem," he says. "It's ironic, because bread is that icon of sharing – breaking
bread with a friend – and hunger, and fellowship. It's actually our logo, a slice of bread with a heart in it. But
the reality is that there is so much being produced at bakeries and grocery stores, I know it gets thrown
away more than anything else we pick up." Keep Austin Fed briefly partnered with a large grocery store that
offered the group eight shopping carts of bread. De Leon thought that was the weekly surplus – then later
realized that the store pulled that much off the shelves each day.
Diverting Abundance
Because Keep Austin Fed volunteers take food directly from donors to recipients, there's no way for them
to predict exactly what they'll be bringing, or whether it will constitute complete meals. De Leon says the
group once received a donation of 300 pounds of French cheese left over from an event during SXSW and
took it to shelters. "A lot of the residents knew what it was and were appreciative, but I saw looks on other
faces like, 'So you bring me 20 pounds of cheese – where's the bread?'"
Reducing waste can fly in the face of American preferences for abundance and choice, on the bread aisle
or elsewhere. "When you're in the grocery store, you want to see the shelves fully stocked, and you want to
have a good variety to choose from," the food bank's Carney says, adding that such practices mean her
workplace receives a full truckload of bread several times a week.
Sometimes the abundance is for logistical reasons: Ted Hibler, general manager of the AT&T Conference
Center, says the hotel serves a breakfast buffet that offers guests convenience and variety they wouldn't
get with à la carte ordering. "We have to overproduce, because on a buffet you can't just have enough food
for that one person," he says. What's left over "is perfectly viable, and if someone could take it away and
give it to someone else, and we weren't in a litigious situation, I'd be happy to do that."
Serveyourself buffet and banquet food is one of a few categories of food that can't be donated, because
the public has been able to touch it. But most potential donations are covered by the Good Samaritan Food
Donation Act, a 1996 federal law that protects donors from legal liability if they donate "apparently
wholesome" food in good faith (Texas has had a similar law on the books since 1981). "Often the first
question a donor asks is, 'What's the liability if someone gets sick?'" de Leon says. "Once that's explained,
there's usually no reason they can't donate."
Reducing food waste is one way Austin can inch closer to its goal of diverting 50% of materials from
landfills by year's end. The most recent numbers show the city hovering at 39% diversion.
"Obviously there's still work to do, and we aren't capturing every ounce of food that's being thrown away,
but the community has pulled together around the idea of food rescue," Carney says. "I don't know that it
was something people talked about much a few years ago, but now they think it's important: Good food
shouldn't be going to waste."

Waste not news - the austin chronicle

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