Making Food Waste Recycling Easy & Convenient is Key
By: Guest Contributor,
Namju Cho, ENN.com
There is no question
that food waste is a monumental environmental problem and recycling food waste
would make a significant dent in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The barrier
to food waste recycling isn’t so much about people’s willingness to compost.
The willingness is there but the key to composting’s success will be how easy
and convenient governments will make it so that food waste recycling becomes as
established as recycling paper.
Fact: Food waste was the
second largest waste material in 2011, accounting for 15% of all waste behind
paper and paperboard, which accounted for 28%, according to the EPA. Of those, however, over half of the paper/paperboard was
recycled while a meager 1.6% of food waste was recycled.
New York recently launched
pilot food waste recycling programs on select sites and is following the lead
of cities like San Francisco to combine convenience, incentives and slight
nudges to prompt residents to recycle food waste.
A recent survey by BioCycle, a magazine that promotes
recycling, found that some municipalities are offering less frequent garbage
collection to steer residents away from the trash bin, according to the New York Times. Others have offered free recycling pickup
services as an incentive.
Behavior change, after
all, is about removing barriers and motivators to adopt the behavior. Awareness
alone isn’t enough to prompt people to act. Smokers know tobacco causes cancer
but they still smoke. Bottom line is that it has to be easy.
The NYT article added
that apartment buildings were the most challenging as residents don’t want to
come all the way down to a garage or basement to dump their scraps. “…Space for
bins must be found at least on some floors. Buildings must also devote staff to
removing the waste every day, or at least keep it out of sight, to avoid
putting off the squeamish,” the article stated.
Portland scaled back
residential garbage pickup to once every two weeks and also launched a weekly
compost pickup – and got results. The volume of garbage collected decreased to
58,300 tons in the 12-month period ending in October 2012 compared with 94,100
tons of garbage collected in the same period the previous year when
the program launched.
Moreover, collections of compostable material rose to
85,400 tons from 30,600 tons in the same period, a figure that includes yard
waste, according to a Yale Environment360 report.
Are you sold yet? What
have you found to be the most effective ways to make composting successful in
your neighborhood?