Clumps of congealed pasta tumble out of tangled plastic bags, the noodles gone gray and fuzzy around the edges. In a loading dock a few blocks from Manhattan’s Union Square, bags of garbage spew their contents across white plastic folding tables littered with desiccated orange peels, egg shells, and the occasional shard of glass.
Throngs of pedestrians trundle by outside, clomping along in winter boots and holding cups of quickly-cooling coffee. The January afternoon is tingly, prickly cold, and Belinda Li yanks down her respirator to say that was a welcome change. It had been considerably balmier a few months earlier, when Li and her band of fellow garbage sleuths were tearing into trash in Nashville. “Some of the stuff was really stinky,” she says. A few of the bags, cooked in the sun, had been wriggling with maggots. Tyvek suits, steel-toed boots, safety goggles, gloves, and respirators insulated the team against close contact. But they’ve spent months wrist-deep in kitchen scraps.
Li, a project engineer at Tetra Tech, has been dispatched by the Natural Resources Defense Council to excavate hundreds of samples of trash in Nashville, Denver, and New York City—three cities where the NRDC has rooting or established relationships with local organizations. The bin digs are a quest to exhume data from detritus—and from there, to glean information about consumer behavior and food waste.
Trashed food exacts an enormous environmental and economic toll: By some estimates, each American family spends some $1,600 each year on uneaten eats. “Imagine walking out of a grocery store, leaving one bag in the parking lot, and driving home—that’s essentially what you’re doing,” says Zia Khan, vice president of initiatives and strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Researchers and advocates know that the general scope of wasted food is unsustainable: It has environmental ripples across the supply chain, slurping up valuable water and then emitting greenhouse gases as it clogs landfills. But the nitty-gritty details are harder to come by. In order to help implement policy interventions, researchers and organizations needed to know exactly what was rotting away. One way to do that is to grab the trashed items before they end up in a heap.
Backed by support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NRDC has been conducting a sort of forensic analysis on residential and business-sector trash. In each city, researchers recruited households to keep week-long kitchen diaries, tracking what they tossed and why they bagged it (maybe it had turned moldy, or was inedible, such as an eggshell). Then, a subset of that cohort agreed to have their trash audited, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the NRDC, who worked on the project.
To read the full story, visit https://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2017/02/mining-heaps-of-garbage-for-data-about-food-waste/516852/.