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This is part three and the final part of our series on the problem of food waste. We're throwing
away a third of our food globally, so what can businesses do about it?
For leaders ready to do good. Research, case studies, podcasts, toolkits, actions: everything to help you fast track doing business for good.
[00:00:00] Gillian Pereira:
[00:00:01] This is the final part of our series on food waste. We're throwing away a third of the food that we produce, so what can businesses do about it?
[00:00:11] Gill & Simon: Hey, Gill. Hello. We're here in Castlemaine for our recording today on food waste. That's right. We've covered a lot of ground in this topic, so if you're just coming fresh to this now, go back to part one so you can catch up and see what we're talking about today.
[00:00:27] Gillian Pereira: So far, we've familiarized ourselves with the problem of food waste, its scale, its environmental, social, financial impacts, and what led us to this point. And we've looked at two tried and true ways that businesses can help redistributing food and repurposing food.
[00:00:47] Gill & Simon: Redistribution. If you've got edible food that's good for people to eat, what are ways that you can get it out to those places instead of it going in the bin? And repurposing. So this is taking food that's maybe a little bit worse for wear, but if you transformed it, you could create new products, create new value streams, and basically plug into a market for people to buy those products at a higher value.
[00:01:09] Yeah, I remember the Rubies in the Rubble example turning, um, banana into chutney.
[00:01:13] Yeah. So what are we covering today, Gill?
[00:01:15] Today we're looking at how businesses can tackle those really hard to manage, hard to process food wastes.
[00:01:21] Gillian Pereira: The approaches of redistribution and repurposing work really well for food that is still edible and safe for consumption. But what do we do with the rest?
[00:01:32] Unavoidable food waste consists of elements of food production that we would normally consider inedible. Think about things like meat, bones, eggshells, or coffee grounds, or highly contaminated waste. This kind of food waste is thought to have the least value.
[00:01:49] In these cases, the opportunities for businesses often lie in developing new technologies and systems that are able to process these forms of food waste and create value from them. Sometimes it's a matter of adopting an existing technology in a new and creative way.
[00:02:06] Gill & Simon: So we'll be hearing two really interesting case studies, one from a business based here in Australia called Goterra, and another based in the States called Glanris.
[00:02:16] These are two really exciting stories. And it's interesting you say technology cuz Goterra to me is using what's been around for a long time in a really smart way.
[00:02:24] And then, yeah, Glanris also comes from a waste product that is, very traditional but I didn't realize how much harm it causes.
[00:02:30] Gillian Pereira: Take a moment to think about what goes into a bin in a food court or office building. It's not pretty, is it? Post-consumer food waste from retail and hospitality venues is a complicated mix of avoidable and unavoidable food waste and one of the most difficult to divert from landfill.
[00:02:51] Bob Gordon, Food Waste: Goterra's business model is founded on managing really hard to process wastes. What we don't want to do is skim off the easiest to manage wastes off the top, because then we haven't really affected change.
[00:03:04] We want to find the really hard to manage waste. Manage them and produce a material that can go back into the food supply chain.
[00:03:11] What we want to do is take low grade wastes that can't be used for anything of higher value and valorize them. If we're doing that, we're actually genuinely creating a circular economy.
[00:03:24] Gillian Pereira: That's Bob Gordon, who we heard from in part one of our food waste series. Bob Gordon is a sustainable food systems expert and he's now the director at Zero Carbon Forum in the UK. When we spoke to him, he was based in Australia and working with a team to transform food waste at Goterra.
[00:03:43] Goterra uses insects to effectively process food waste and create high protein chicken feed.
[00:03:49] They do this by installing a robotically managed unit called MIBs, or Modular Infrastructure for Biological Services. By all appearances, it's a high-tech shipping container, and this lives onsite at a venue where food waste is generated such as the basement of a shopping center or a hotel building.
[00:04:08] Food waste can be tipped into the unit where black soldier larvae, maggots to be frank, feed on and naturally process that food waste. The black soldier flies are essentially farmed on the food waste and they can be sold as a protein rich feed for chickens.
[00:04:25] Bob Gordon, Food Waste: So we're taking low value waste that at best will be used to produce soil and given particularly with post-consumer food waste. It's got lots of stuff. That's not particularly good for composting, like meat and dairy and citrus. And it's got lots of contamination. If you pull food out of a food court in a shopping center, there's loads of bits of plastic and stuff in it that you don't want going into compost.
[00:04:51] Whereas our insects that around all of that stuff. And then at the end of the process, we sift it all in and it shakes it all off. So we're able to handle these materials that aren't useful to anybody else and put into really, really good use. And that's where we're creating the circular economy.
[00:05:06] Gill & Simon: When I think of technology, I think of robots and things. But actually what their approach is is super cool.
[00:05:11] Yes. Super cool. Yeah.
[00:05:12] And really what they're doing is using a robotic system to manage and monitor that natural process. Yep. And how businesses can use it as part of their food waste management systems.
[00:05:23] Yeah. And it has so many impacts on the waste management system . From bringing everything on site right to where the waste is generated. and then converting it into a new form of valuable resource.
[00:05:34] Gillian Pereira: Unlike other food waste processes like electronic food waste digesters, which process food waste to extract water and then push this water into existing waste water management systems, Goterra creates a high value product off of food waste without the need for integrating it into an existing waste management logistics network.
[00:05:56] Gill & Simon: That's really exciting. And that's the idea of using a very traditional natural process of bugs eating stuff. Mm-hmm. You work with the environment combined with a little bit of technology, it sounds like it owns some really smart, simple things to produce a natural byproduct. Yeah. Really cool. Yeah. I've been hearing more and more lately of bacteria that can break down plastic Yes. Or convert things from different forms into others using natural processes. There's so much at our disposal in terms of how things work in nature to process what we're terming waste and being able to somehow contextualize that for a business to use onsite is where the real innovation comes.
[00:06:33] Bob Gordon, Food Waste: There are other systems that eliminate the movement of waste, but typically they will either pump the material down the train, which isn't particularly environmentally friendly or at best they will produce some kind of soil product.
[00:06:45] What we've done is designed technical that enables us to decentralize waste management. So existing waste management systems rely on large scale operators, typically further out of town, and then a logistics network that supports that.
[00:07:03] If we're able to take the waste management infrastructure to the site where the waste is managed, then we can be far more efficient and then treat it in a really efficient and sustainable way. We can be far more efficient in the way that we manage our wastes. And we can also get more value locally from those wastes.
[00:07:24] This is a wholly natural process. Insects are nature's cleaners. And all we've done is find a way to put those cleaners in a place that enables us to derive some benefit from it in the way that we operate our societies.
[00:07:43] We've done it in that kind of modern lens of building robotics and systems that can enable us to extract value from that in our economies.
[00:07:55] Gillian Pereira: Thinking back to the waste hierarchy we looked at in our first part in this series, Goterra is taking food waste that falls into the fifth category, unavoidable waste that would otherwise go to landfill, and it moves it up the hierarchy to the third category producing animal feed. As a result, they create a circular economy that turns a low value waste stream into a higher value food product.
[00:08:21] Gill & Simon: What were the other tiers of food waste?
[00:08:23] Yeah. Thinking about that waste hierarchy we've got prevention at the top. That's our number one objective. Might be making less food or preventing waste in the first place.
[00:08:33] Next we've got reuse. Is there something we can do with this food without it going into waste?
[00:08:38] Recycle, that means converting it into, say, animal feed. Not for human consumption, but there's something we can get value out of.
[00:08:46] Then recovery. So it might be recovering energy from using that food or using the water that's within that food.
[00:08:53] And then we've got disposal right down the bottom, which we wanna avoid as much as we can. Food going to a landfill. Awesome.
[00:08:59] Bob Gordon, Food Waste: So a material that would have been down cycled into a lower grade product is now used to produce additional protein local to the place that the food waste was produced. We're also doing that with really no emissions.
[00:09:13] So we haven't done our own LCA lifecycle cycle assessment yet, but we will do in due course, there are a number of academic studies that we've looked at that suggests that using black soldier fly larvae to manage waste reduces the impact of landfill by 97% and reduces the impact of composting by it's a third of the impact of composting.
[00:09:32] Gillian Pereira: As is often the case for businesses that are innovating and turning existing processes and services on their head, Goterra's current challenges lie in changing the way businesses understand food waste management services, and then winning decision makers over to this new model
[00:09:49] Bob Gordon, Food Waste: There's a lot of interest. We're working with waste companies, food, retailers, hospitality, councils shopping center managers, uh, hospitality's other institutions. The challenge I think we have is about changing the system. It takes time for whether it's for a waste management contracts to be up for renewal or for the right people in the business to have the time and bandwidth to really consider whether or not this is the right thing for them to do. And then it takes time to explore that and to. Look at all of the operational and logistical challenges to make it actually work.
[00:10:29] Gillian Pereira: Now let's shift all the way to the other end of the supply chain. In the agricultural production of food, there is one waste product that overtakes the rest: rice hulls. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world's population, but the outer casing of rice grains called the hull or the husk is inedible, and it's removed during harvesting and processing.
[00:10:57] Bryan Eagle: About 20% of the harvest of rice is the hull itself, which has no nutritional value. And for most people they burn it in the fields, which produces almost a trillion pounds of greenhouse gases every year.
[00:11:15] Gill & Simon: The scale of his problem is just shocking.
[00:11:17] Like I never thought of how much waste there is for one piece of rice as well as what is done with that waste and the burning of it and all that sort of stuff. Yes, I assume it's natural and it's wonderful, but one of our biggest food sources in the world. That's a pretty scary problem.
[00:11:30] Bryan Eagle: So what we're on a mission to do is to stop them from burning it in the fields. We take it, we, we don't burn it. We pyrolize it, which means you cook it in the absence of oxygen.
[00:11:44] And what that does is it doesn't release carbon dioxide and methane, and you know, all these other gases, instead you convert it into a stable carbon format and that stable carbon format, as we just talked about, use for filtration. And then when you're done with that, and it goes to wherever you take it today, landfill or whatever you're doing with it, it will stay in that stable carbon format.
[00:12:09] Gillian Pereira: Bryan Eagle is the CEO and founder of Glanris, a startup based in the US that's created a use for this abundant waste material.
[00:12:18] Bryan Eagle: Glanris is Gaelic for clean rice . And what we're doing is we're taking the world's most plentiful ag waste product, which is rice hulls and converting it into a water filtration media that can help to clean up water around the world.
[00:12:39] It's a new application of an old technology. A lot of people call it bio char. It's not a new technology historically. This has been used mostly for soil. For soil amendment, because it's hydrophilic. So it holds on to water.
[00:13:01] It also absorbs phosphorus and nitrogen and other nutrients. So when you put this out to amend your soil, it will retain the water in the soil and make it available for the plant roots.
[00:13:16] So that's been around for, probably 40, 50 years. And people have been doing this aggressively. A lot of the organic farms use this for soil amendment. The problem with that application is that they weren't using as much of the ag waste as is generated. So, you know, very small percentage of the ag waste that's generated actually gets used for soil amendment. Typically in that environment, it's not a high value additive for the farmers.
[00:13:48] Gillian Pereira: Glanris has created a new process to turn these rice husks into a higher value water filter material that's environmentally sustainable and more affordable than existing solutions.
[00:14:00] Bryan Eagle: So the, the Delta for us was to take a look at other novel applications for this. And basically, any plant-based material, that's a carbohydrate based structure, you can go through a process of converting that to a stable carbon. Then you can activate it and have activated carbon and basically an activated carbon, it's like a sponge. If you were to look at it under a microscope that piece of activated carbon it's very much like a sponge ball.
[00:14:34] If you have a Brita filter in your home or pitcher based systems, what's in, there is activated carbon. Cause that pulls out the chlorine and it takes out the odor. And a lot of the things that affect the taste of the water. What we figured out how to do was to add an additional capability to that basic carbon structure, to be able to pull dissolved metals out.
[00:15:02] So now we can not only pull the organics and chlorine out, but we can also deal with lead and copper and other dissolved metals that are in your water.
[00:15:12] If you open up that Brita cartridge and you spilled it out, what you'd see is about 60% of what's in there are these tiny little microplastic beads. And those are used to pull out those metals. It's a petroleum-based microplastic. It's not good for the environment. And so what we're doing is developing this all green, sustainable product from ag waste that is able to do the same thing. It removes organics and it removes dissolved metals in a very economical way.
[00:15:48] Gill & Simon: To me, this is really exciting. It's taking a whole different take on it. Related to what you said around repurposing and reusing and things like that. But this is actually turning it not into another food product, but into a whole nother resource.
[00:15:59] It solves other problem, which is water filters. Yes. Which are bad for the planet full of stuff. We're now getting a more natural solution to that. So it's like a big double win.
[00:16:06] Gillian Pereira: As is the case with Goterra, the challenge for Glanris lies in encouraging industrial businesses, municipal governments, in charge of water supplies and household consumers to adopt this new filtration system and depart from their existing processes and suppliers.
[00:16:25] Bryan Eagle: In the Industrial space, I'd say they're always interested in technologies that are going to save them money. The hurdles that we've already seen in early discussions with the municipal folks is that they're very reticent to adopt new technologies.
[00:16:46] They are risk averse and they're risk averse for good reason because if they mess up your water, people get sick. And so they can't do that. So they don't take risks lightly. Um, they like to see stuff tested and tested and tested and tested. And of course that path through pilot programs and repeated testing is sort of the that's that's the death March for lots of startup companies.
[00:17:13] You just can't get to the other side and get to revenue.
[00:17:17] We're focusing on the industrial market and we, we build up our use cases. We show them that it's working, show them that it has efficacy. They're able to look at the payback back analysis on that application.
[00:17:31] And we're, focused, once we get this certification on some of these pitcher based filtration systems right now.
[00:17:39] When we talk to people in the United States, they go, well, what does it cost? When we talk to people in Europe, they're like, is it green?
[00:17:47] And then they go, well, is it sustainable, is it circular economy. Oh, great. Yeah. We'd love to give it a try. And then they go, what do you mean? It's less expensive. Oh my goodness. It's faster acting in some cases, of course we want to try it.
[00:17:59] But here it's like, well now you gotta be cheaper. Yeah, the sustainability stuff. That's cool, but what does it cost? And that's always the frustrating thing for us here, because while our technology is more economical than a lot of these more complex solutions that people are using today, we really want people to get excited about the green nature of what we're doing.
[00:18:23] Gillian Pereira: For businesses, the need for innovative approaches to food waste diversion, and recovery across the food supply chain presents a big opportunity.
[00:18:34] While they're in their early stages, both Goterra and Glanris indicate some of the potential scope that lies in finding new applications for technologies to sustainably process these unavoidable or hard to manage wastes and create higher value goods and services through that.
[00:18:51] Are there existing initiatives that your business could connect with to transform your existing food waste? Find out what circular solutions are emerging.
[00:19:01] While in our current food system, it might not be possible to completely eliminate food waste, businesses that approach the problem with an attitude of progress over perfection are yielding outcomes that are good for business and for the planet.
[00:19:14] Gill & Simon: So to wrap, food waste is huge. We waste a third of the food that we produce. There's also people who don't have enough food. And then you've mapped out the stages from avoid it, do something with it at some level, reuse or, recover, or in these really innovative cases, turn it into something totally new and add a lot of value.
[00:19:32] That's right. Yeah. So there are so many avenues businesses can go down, and whether you're a food business yourself or you are interacting with food businesses, maybe it's even a matter of reviewing who your suppliers are and seeing what they could be doing to innovate in these ways and avoid food waste as much as we can.
[00:19:49] Yeah. And then maybe talk to your waste management providers and see what they're doing and if you can encourage them. Pay a slight premium to get some better outcomes from it. Yeah.
[00:19:57] And as always, we're just learning about this topic. These are just some of the examples and some of the trends.
[00:20:03] So we'd love if you have any, different examples or points that challenge our findings, please send it through. We're looking to build on this research and share it publicly to hopefully inspire others to learn and do something different.
[00:20:14] And if you wanna keep up with The Business Pickle research and what we've been working on, you can head to our website, thebusinesspickle.com. We've got a newsletter you can subscribe to or find us on socials as well.
[00:20:25] Gillian Pereira: Thanks for listening to The Business Pickle.