Bioplastics manufacturer Novamont unveiled this week a new iPad and iPhone app called ‘Food Scrap Recycling Truck’ that helps teach kids how to sort food waste and to value the environmental benefits of food scrap recycling and composting. Young users can drive a recycling truck as it passes through the neighbourhood to collect food scraps for composting and sort it out into compostable bags from other recycling items on the moving kitchen top conveyor. Kids are allowed to customise their truck and driver choosing the same colours as their municipality, operate the heavy loader and windrow turner to help make the compost rows and visit the lab to learn about composting.
Paul Darby, VP and head of Marketing of Novamont North America, said: “Ninety four per cent of all food scraps produced on average in the US (38 million tons) and 84% in Europe (50 million tonnes) is still incinerated or buried in landfill where it releases methane, a 25-times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Our new ‘Food Scrap Recycling Truck’ app teaches kids about household waste source separation and the value of producing compost that can help to return nutrients to the soil, capture CO2 and regenerate our land.”
Compostable shopping and produce bags can be re-used to collect food scraps and are proven to help increase the residential participation rate of food waste recycling and help reduce conventional plastic bag contamination to compost facilities. Compostable products also have great potential in all those sectors where recycling operations are complex or impractical because of the simultaneous use of different materials and contamination by food waste. In these cases, using compostable bioplastics means that these materials and their contents can be included in the separate collection of organic waste, thus helping to improve the recyclability of other waste and prevent precious biomass from being sent to landfills.
Developed by Goodglue Studios in the USA, ‘Food Scrap Recycling Truck’ features lots of interactive surprises, is simple to use at the touch of a screen and is available for free download on iPads and iPhones all over the world here.