American cities have a trash problem: there’s too much of it, and not enough places to put it. Even Nashville, which stores its waste in nearby Rutherford County, is going to have a reckoning when that landfill reaches capacity—which is expected to happen in the next few years.
In many cities, much of the discarded refuse is scrapped food. As CityLab reported last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently took stock of the landscape of food waste in Nashville, Denver, and New York. Spoiler alert: There was a lot of it.
The total amount of food squandered in Nashville each week works out to be 3.4 pounds per capita. In New York, it’s 3.2 pounds. Within the industrial, commercial, and institutional sectors, restaurants were the biggest contributors to wasted food. In Nashville, 34 percent of the total food waste came from the restaurant world; in New York, scraps from these kitchens comprised 20 percent of the city’s trashed food.
A sliver of potential good news: With new public-private models, both metros are doubling down on incentives to nudge restaurants to reduce the volume of food lost along the way.
The city of Nashville has partnered with restaurants and the NRDC to come up with its solution. After Nashville mayor Megan Barry convened a task force, the group devised the Nashville Food Saver Challenge, which focused on changing behavior through a spirit of competition between restaurants.
The Food Saver Challenge called on restaurants to reuse what they could, donate leftover food, and send their scraps to be composted. The 55 participating businesses chose five sustainability measures to commit to over a three-month period. Now, beyond restaurants, the city is asking food retailers, like grocery stores, to come on board.
“We had originally gone in thinking we’ll require everyone to weigh their food waste, and the feedback we got was no one’s going to do that! If you want people to participate, it has to be more flexible,” says Linda Breggin, the Nashville Food Waste Initiative’s project coordinator.
Mayor Barry said the legislature, too, would have balked at anything they perceived as government overreach. “As a blue city in a red state, we are aware of what legislators would do if we tried to mandate something,” Barry said during an interview at the recent CityLab summit in Paris. That meant convincing local businesses that rethinking the way they dealt with food waste was in their best interest. “The private sector is always excited when you can talk about saving money,” said Barry. So she pointed out that repurposing food—like using scraps to make broth—could help restaurants feed their margins and cut back on how much they had to spend on trash collection.
To read the full story, visit https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/11/cities-businesses-food-waste-partnerships/544526/.