By Diane Ackerman
Food waste is a type of solid waste, meaning the garbage that you regularly wheel to the curb to be taken to landfill.
A third of the food in America is wasted. Where does this incredible amount of food come from? Surplus from catering events, spoiled and leftover food and vegetable scraps from family homes, spoiled and kitchen scraps from grocery stores, restaurants, schools, hospitals, etc. Surplus zucchini or tomatoes that you have in your home garden could potentially be food waste that has not been harvested and shared.
Fuel emissions are significant considering transporting food that ends up in a landfill: methane gas produced from buried food waste is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases. The good news is that many municipalities in this country compost food waste, and if not the municipalities themselves, there are municipal composting opportunities in many places.
Then when the compost goes into a garden, the food made with that compost creates a circular economy for food, which is a great thing.
What is a circular food economy? A circular food economy is a model of producing and consuming food where there is no waste (a more familiar term we associate with this model is permaculture). On-site composting creates all the inputs needed to grow food, with little or no waste.
Such things often occur in nature. Think of forests where leaves fall to the forest floor and become nutrient-rich material that feeds not only the forest vegetation but many other creatures that live in the decaying ecosystem they create.
Our vegetable gardens can resemble the forest. When our gardens mimic the nature-based forest analogy, they become a circular food economy. Not all of us grow the food we eat, but we do prepare the food at home, so it makes sense to think about this process that begins in our kitchen. As I prepare meals, I collect discarded vegetable scraps in a bin on my kitchen counter. This constant supply of carrot tops and potato skins goes into my compost where it breaks down and nourishes the food I grow.
End of season garden waste and other organic materials also go into my compost heap. If you don’t have a garden, you can dig a hole and bury vegetable waste, perhaps somewhere on your property or even in a large flower pot filled with soil. I’ve seen small, cylindrical kitchen waste compost heaps in small backyards protected from vermin with a chicken wire cage. You can watch the material decompose if kept sufficiently moist and ventilated.
The point is that our gardens can produce food with essentially zero waste.
We are fortunate in Moab to have several public gardens that grow and market food and have active on-site composting: the Youth Garden Project (youthgardenproject.org) and the Moab Community Gardens ([email protected]). ). Additionally, these resources offer free workshops: You may have attended the composting workshop I led at the preschool this spring, where participants built a compost heap together. By mixing and piling up grass clippings, tree leaves and other organic matter, and mixing in a healthy amount of horse manure and water, we created a 5 foot high pile. You may see a much smaller pile near the Mill Creek Parkway signs next to the YGP Gardens, because when the pile collapses, it shrinks a lot!
There are other community-supported farming projects in the area, such as Easy Bee Farm (easybeefarm.com). Farmer Sean from Castle Valley Farms (castlevalleyfarms.com) recently gave me a tour of their facility. They sell food around Castle Valley and Moab grown with compost made from locally sourced garden waste and locally sourced horse manure. One can begin to associate nutrient dense foods with composting by looking at the processes themselves.
I hope you are curious and take the time to visit one of these gardens: contact them and arrange a tour to see what a circular food economy looks like.
I believe that all options should be on the table to tackle food waste in our community. We could get creative and take the circular food economy model to a new level, just like the residents of the state of California did: In 2022, California State Bill 1383 made it illegal to throw leftovers in the trash! Local communities are scrambling to find ways to comply. One solution that seems to be working for some is a decentralized, human-powered, community-centric business model. A study by the California Alliance for Community Composting (CACC) comparing this model to industrial composting found that community composting gets compost into the soil faster and at a significantly lower cost.
The Moab Sustainability Action Plan could be a starting point for the conversation. Through the collaboration of city partners and local nonprofits, the City of Moab could be a catalyst in expanding the circular food economy model and finding innovative solutions to the problem of food waste in the community.
Diane Ackerman serves on the Board of Directors of the Canyonlands Solid Waste Authority and the Technical Advisory Committee – Moab Stability Action Plan.
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