November 28th, 2012

How do you plan on doing away with your tasty Thanksgiving leftovers? According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Americans throw away a grand total of $282 million worth of uneaten turkey each year. And you can bet that that number is just as high for wasted Christmas ham and roast birds.

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October 4th, 2012

Beekeepers in northeastern France say they have produced batches of unusually colored honey in recent months as a result of bees carrying unknown substances from a nearby plant processing waste from an M&M’S candy factory. Since August, beekeepers in…

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September 26th, 2012

A student in Omaha, Neb., has identified a problem with school lunches — as well as a solution that could help solve an entrenched food waste issue in school cafeterias across the country.

In order to get the best price for a school lunch, kids are required to take one serving of a fruit or a vegetable to create a full meal. If they don’t, they can end up paying higher ala carte prices.

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August 20th, 2012

A team of scientists is working with the Starbucks coffee chain to develop a bio-refinery process that would convert the company’s discarded coffee grounds and day-old bakery goods into a key ingredient for making plastics and other products. The pro…

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January 16th, 2012

School cafeterias that want to reduce food waste are finding that taking away student’s trays encourages them to take less and waste less.
Now a researcher at Kansas State University has found that posting a few basic reminders to not waste food results in…less food waste.

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July 19th, 2011

A mozzarella stick grilled cheese sandwich? A burger topped with pork belly smoked cheese AND a fried egg?

What will American restaurants not do to entice us to belly up, literally?
Apparently, despite all the warning bells about American obesity, shortened lifespans and soaring health care costs, they won’t tone it down, or help you tone up.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has turned a spotlight on menu trends, discovering that mainstream American eateries continue to roll out over-stuffed, grease-packed new concoctions in an apparent competition to out fat the competition.

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June 30th, 2011

Grocery stores deal with an incredible amount of churn — produce that spoils, cardboard boxes that need breaking down, delivery pallets coming and going, meat departments cycling the old inventory out.

Getting a grocery to achieve zero waste conjures images of work crews heaving cantaloupes into mountainous compost piles and employees working chain gang-style folding boxes into the night.

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January 19th, 2011

We in America have grown up hearing how we live in a world of plenty, and for many of us, that has been true.

But hundreds of millions of the world’s human residents have so much less than ‘plenty’, they don’t even have adequate food.

WorldWatch Institute, which tracks human welfare around the globe, reports that 265 million people are malnourished, and continue to suffer from food shortages because they lack the ability to safely store crops or keep produce fresh.

WorldWatch sponsors a program, Nourishing the Planet, that’s taking a closer look at how to alleviate hunger in Africa and elsewhere, and not necessarily through food giveaways, but through innovative solutions that help imperiled populations become more food secure.

The project’s team members have pinpointed one cause of food scarcity that can be found in SubSaharan Africa and in the United States: Food waste.

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November 17th, 2010

Sodexo employees at eight college campuses cut kitchen waste by about one third, simply by tracking and monitoring food waste, according to the preliminary findings from the first eight weeks of a pilot study that is part of the company’s initiative to stop wasting food to curb climate change and improve business practices.

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September 13th, 2010

If you really ponder how spoiled Americans are, you’ll eventually have to consider how much food they spoil. It’s all around us, trash cans spilling over with fast food remnants; restaurants and cafeterias and household waste bins teeming in leftovers. The government estimates that Americans throw out about 25 percent of the food they prepare, or about 31 billion tons of food every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

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January 29th, 2010

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

Consumers are being more conscious now than ever before of their own sustainable practices. They are buying from local farmers markets, recycling, and switching to LED lights.

But when a person leaves home, say to go out to eat, they could pack on the carbon calories without realizing it — especially if the restaurant they visit isn’t treading lightly on the environment.

According to the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), the certification body aiming to create an environmentally sustainable restaurant industry, an average restaurant uses 300,000 gallons of water and produces 150,000 pounds of garbage a year. Even worse, the restaurant industry as a whole, which includes approximately 900,000 restaurants in the United States, is the largest consumer of electricity in the commercial sector.

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November 12th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports

In 1995, The ULS (Use Less Stuff) Report developed a statistic that is frequently quoted to describe how much extra waste is generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day: 5 million tons. Use Less Stuff Day (the third Thursday of November) was created to educate people and help them reduce that waste.

Rather than declining, that number has grown by 20%, to 6 million tons. Obviously, Use Less Stuff Day hasn’t been a big enough event to get people into the conservation spirit. Starting this year, ULS is proclaiming the entire week before Thanksgiving (Nov. 19-25, 2009) to be Use Less Stuff Week.

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