It is no secret that there is a food waste problem in the North America and Europe. Currently, ⅓ of all food produced in the world goes to waste. Countries like France have tried to address this issue with new legislation mandating that wholesome food waste from restaurants and businesses must be donate, while Italy strongly encourages this behavior. Now there is a new opportunity for waste management: turning it into fuel for transportation, heat and energy.
While turning food waste into fuel may sound futuristic and cool, but there are many steps everyone should take before turning to the fuel option. The first step is waste avoidance -making sure there is no food waste at all by not over buying and eating all food that is edible. The food that goes to waste even though it is still edible is called “spreco.” Managing spreco is SenzaSpreco’s main focus, and we recommend avoiding spreco through these options: sell the food at a discounted price if you have a ton of surplus food, donating the food to a local food shelter or using the food to feed livestock. These options are best for waste avoidance because it means someone is still able to get a meal out of the food you were not able to use. Using food waste as fuel is a waste management technique because it deals with “rifuti”, food that is not edible. SenzaSpreco does not deal with food scraps, so managing rifuti is not their concern.
We three Americans attempted to interview six local, Tuscan farmers and shop owners about their food waste practices in an effort to scout them for SenzaSpreco. However, most of the farmers did not distinguish between “spreco alimentare” and “rifiuto alimentare” in their interview answers and mostly discussed how they handle their rifiuti -information we weren’t seeking. Not only can it sometimes be difficult for Italians to distinguish between the two, but we also don’t speak sufficiently good Italian to try to clarify to the interviewees what we were asking. Furthermore, English only has one catch-all umbrella term for both “spreco” and “rifiuti:” both are labeled as “food waste”, with no word or brief phrase to delineate between the two. We grew up calling two very different problems the same thing.
Food waste – specifically rifiuti, since it’s harder to find viable uses for it than for “spreco” – can be turned into energy through a process called anaerobic digestion. Food waste is put into an oxygen free chamber (anaerobic means without oxygen), and the food is left to decompose. As the food decomposes, it produces a natural biogas. This biogas is a combination of natural methane and carbon dioxide. Once this gas is collected in the chamber, it can then be put into a combined heat and power tank (CHP) to power electricity or heat, and the decomposed food scraps can be used as fertilizer. Or, the natural gas can be used for transportationpurposes if it is converted into compressed or liquid natural gas.
Biogas from anaerobic digestion is not the only way food scraps can provide energy. It is possible that the grease accumulated from cooking with animal or plant fats could replace standard diesel used for diesel engines. This natural diesel would produce only half the amount of greenhouse gases as standard diesel, making this option particularly fruitful.
Generally, the environmental impacts of this opportunity are positive. As of now, food waste typically sits in landfills and decomposes, releasing methane into the air that eventually creates greenhouse gases (GHG) and contributes to climate change. This increase in GHG levels are coupled by the amount of methane released due to the energy used to heat homes, power cars, etc. By using food waste as fuel, the amount of GHG released from food waste in landfills, and the amount of GHG from traditional energy sources will lessen.
What is being done now? There are many different organizations working to discover how to best utilize organic fuel. There are 800industrial waste-to-energy plants around the world that create energy from organic waste, 282 of which are in Europe. In the US, the Air Force Academy and East Bay Municipal Utility District are researching the conditions in which anaerobic digestion of food scraps works best. As you can see, using food waste as fuel can be an environmentally friendly solution to both the energy crisis and waste management issues, but more work needs to be done to learn how to best utilize this energy.
