Here’s How Recycling Could Fix It.
Each year, Americans throw out 66 billion pounds of food — organic material wasting away at the bottom of a landfill. While successful programs recycle tons of aluminum cans, glass, plastic, cardboard, and newspaper and help account for 63 percent of waste diverted from landfills in California, you can’t say the same about table scraps. With no widespread re-use and few programs, food waste has emerged as one of the biggest categories of refuse filling up the nation’s landfills, making up 18 percent of the trash buried in California landfills, according to state records.
Aside from the social issues of Americans wasting billions of pounds of food every year, there’s an environmental problem. Organic material decomposing in landfills creates methane, which can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is 87 times more potent in terms of warming the Earth than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, scientists point out.
The double-whammy effect on landfill space and climate change has made food waste a prime target for recycling by environmental groups, the legislature, city, county and state agencies and private garbage companies, spurring a new kind of recycling.
“Food waste is really a big problem,” said Heather Jones, spokesperson for CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing recycling. “If we get programs in place, they can make a big difference and quickly, as to how much goes to landfills.”
COUNTY ‘DIGESTING’ FOOD WASTE
About two years ago, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts began sprinkling food waste into the 24 giant sewage digester tanks that encircle its Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in Carson on South Figueroa Avenue.
Robert Ferrante and Mark McDannel, both engineers with the Sanitation Districts with decades of experience in solid waste and wastewater treatment, had a hunch that the same kind of recycling they do with sewage solids can work for food scraps.
The theory turned out to be true.
The Sanitation Districts is the first public agency in Los Angeles County to take food waste and turn it into methane or biogas using existing systems. The fuel from decomposing sewage — and now food waste — helps run the Carson wastewater plant and generates excess electricity sold to Southern California Edison. Solids from both sources are converted into fertilizers for hay farms and backyard gardens.
“We have the existing infrastructure that we now are using to solve a different problem,” said McDannel, energy recovery section head at the Sanitation Districts.
To read the full story, visit http://www.sgvtribune.com/environment-and-nature/20160730/your-food-waste-is-clogging-up-californias-landfills-heres-how-recycling-could-fix-it.