The two biggest challenges to composting programs remain limited infrastructure and cultural habits. Apparently, people still resist scraping and dumping food into separate bins. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, less than 3 percent of food was recovered or recycled in 2010.
That hasn’t stopped companies like Whole Foods Markets, MGM Resorts International and Bank of America from trying.
Their main motivation is financial: By cutting back on food waste, companies can reduce waste hauling costs for waste sent to landfill.
In addition, requiring employees to separate food scraps and other compostable materials from their solid waste streams can also force them to think differently about procurement, packaging and production processes — saving money upstream.
“It serves as an opportunity for resource reduction across the board,” said Kathy Loftus, global leader for sustainable engineering & energy management for Whole Foods. Her remarks came during a panel about waste management policies during the Sustainable Operations Summit 2012 in New York.
Even though Whole Foods doesn’t yet have a formal composting program, 75 percent of its 300 stores across the United States now have an initiative in place. In New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, the rate is 100 percent. These efforts are being driven at the local level, due to the inconsistent nature of support for composting across the country, she said.
Whole Foods now sends a higher average percentage of its waste for composting than a typical grocery store, about 65 percent of the total waste stream, Loftus said.
“We really need to have coopetition to push the development of this infrastructure,” she said. “We need that before we will have consistent acceptance for composting.”
Shortly after Bank of America adopted a composting program for its headquarters in New York, the hauler went out of business, said Lisa Shpritz, senior vice president and environmental operations executive, another speaker during this week’s summit. The larger challenge for her team, however, has been convincing executives that waste needs to be separated into three different stream: recyclables, compostables and other solid waste.
“It can be very difficult from a cultural standpoint,” Shpritz said.
Source: GreenBiz.com
By Heather Clancy