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Comment by jartelt | Hacker News Reader

This article is pretty off the mark. Yes, eliminating food waste will not solve the climate problem. However, eliminating food waste will absolutely help the climate problem as well as reduce needed landfill space, and provide valuable compost.

There is very little downside to encouraging people to waste less food and to divert food waste from the trash into compost. Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash. Food waste in landfills breaks down super slowly and releases methane into the atmosphere. This is not good. It's much better to use the food waste to make compost or to use an anaerobic digester and make carbon negative methane.

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I never get the argument that because we are not solving the entire problem at once we shouldn't make any step in the right direction. Changing mentalities is a big deal. Eventually it can trickle down to our entire way of life and make for a smooth (r)evolution, with no one missing the old world.

It's easier to tear something down than to build something. This is why people write articles like this. They acknowledge the problem, claim to be on the 'correct' side of the issue and do nothing! It's not their fault all the options are bad. People like this continue the status quo while acting like they want to move to better solutions.

Good is the enemy of perfect. I see it all the time now in all ranges of things but especially in politics and climate change. People want to have their way and if they don't have their way they would prefer nothing at all.

Token solutions that make people feel good but accomplish little or often make things worse distract attention and resources from real problems and significant problems.

Got any evidence to back that up? You’re implying that wasting less food is somehow either distracting or taking resources away from real problems. In my experience it’s the people doing nothing that are so quick to point fingers and find fault with every attempt at improving our situation.

I think bikeshedding [0] is evidence.

[0] https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Parkinsons-law-of-t...

Plastic straws is perfect.

Politicians spending time advocating for, writing legislation, promoting, debating, and bragging about such things is all an enormous distraction which fools people into thinking something is being done and satisfies people would would have been disadvantaged. If politicians literally did nothing all day people would be upset and force action.

Instead politicians do the absolute minimum to seem like they are doing something when they are not.

The reason abortion, alternative identity/sexuality, the NEA, gun restrictions, extreme social benefit changes, etc dominate political attention is precisely because nothing of consequence will ever actually happen while people cheer for their cause and their team.

Kicking stones when mountains need to be moved isn't progress and should be reviled instead of celebrated.

Plastic straws are a good example. I was asking more specifically about wasting less food though, at an individual basis I don't see how this can really be a bad or distracting thing.

Recycling. All that effort to recycle and educate people about recycling and laws and bullshit, all to send it back in containers to China to be dumped in a landfill so that people wouldn’t feel like all their consumption was damaging.

All of that energy and time could have been used to educate people about reducing their consumption of materials, energy, and space. But maybe that’s not what people want anyway.

Fair enough but I'd argue thats a failure of the current recycling industry. My initial comment was related to food wastage, sorry if it wasn't clear.

Another option: I saw a program about a factory in China that takes waste fruit and veg. They mash it up and feed it to billions of cockroaches. The cockroach excrement is used as fertiliser and the cockroaches are fed to chickens.

It's very low tech. The greatest expense seemed to be a team of people picking plastic rubbish out of the incoming waste.

> The greatest expense seemed to be a team of people picking plastic rubbish out of the incoming waste.

This seems kind of unnecessary? The cockroaches will do the same job. (Well, the inverse job of picking the food out of the inedible trash.)

I guess if you're harvesting the excrement, the trash might get in the way.

Bits of plastic smaller than the maximum diameter of beetle poop are probably not going to be recognized and removed as plastic anyway.

Just shake it all through some progressively finer screens and blow the remaining plastics off the tops of the screens with a blast of air.

Perhaps the plastics would gum up the food-shredder?

> Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash.

Really? I live in NYC and have never seen compost anywhere, except perhaps a community garden I'd have to walk to 20 blocks away, that is usually closed and locked? It's certainly not in my building or on the street or in any lunch restaurants I go to.

Even with high-end sustainable chains, it seems you can't trust composting actually happens [1] -- and in any case, they make up a tiny tiny sliver compared to traditional fast food.

I'm not sure where you live but "trivial" composting would appear to be a rare exception in the US. Since you seem to have it wherever you live, I'm curious how your city has made composting trivial for residents? What is the blueprint other cities should start following?

[1] https://ny.eater.com/2020/1/16/21067009/sweetgreen-nyc-compo...

West coast has three bins generally. Trash/landfill, recycle and compost.

New York City has many, _many_ composting options: the city offers organic waste pickup (I don't know the details, but you'll see the brown and orange containers on trash pickup day), some food co-ops and green markets accept compost and, as you've mentioned, some community gardens also accept it.

Most/all? Whole Foods also have a dedicated compost receptacle -- I have no idea what their policy on people depositing compost from outside the store is.

Here's a link to GrowNYC compost drop-off locations: https://www.grownyc.org/compost/locations

The city program is limited. Efforts to expand it have stalled due to issues with compost storage in apartments and rats. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/07/ick-rats-roa...

Also I've found that every outdoor market that sells food will have at least one compost bin

Thanks, that's all very interesting. I can see how, if you're super-dedicated, you could save your organic trash and make a trip to bring it somewhere once a week or something.

However, I'll stand by my point that it's anything but trivial. The city may offer organic waste pickup in theory, but not to my apartment building or any I've ever lived in. I've never even heard of it residentially.

So spending, say, 20 minutes a week saving it and hygienically transporting the incredibly smelly contents on your subway commute, all for a small bag of apple cores, orange rinds, wilted greens and meat trimmings and such... seems like kind of an insane level of effort for a tiny return, no?

I only see composting happening realistically at scale if a law is passed requiring every apartment building to provide a compost receptacle. And I'm honestly not sure how that could be made to work hygienically. Until then...

We have two compost haulers available to us in my midsize Midwestern city. The provider we use gives us a cart that's the same size as our trash and recycling carts, and accepts a wide variety of compostable waste (not just food scraps). We fill up the compost cart much quicker than the trash cart.

I guess it all depends on your perspective and which option you pursue. I've done exactly what you've described and not found it to be a waste of time at all -- it can be a good way to get involved in your community. For instance, in my old neighborhood I found it very satisfying to take my waste to the community garden and participate in rotating it through the various stages of decomposition and then distributing the end result around the garden.

When I was living in Manhattan, I would take compost to the Fourth Street Co-op and it was a good excuse to get exercise, buy inexpensive organic food and interact with people. (You don't need to be a member to shop there and freelance life can get lonely.)

What is the downside?

Having to sort trash and manage a biological process are two that I can think of.

Cynical hottake, 150B of food waste per year in US, aka one mans trash is another's revenue.

Industrial compost sites and anaerobic digesters are likely a bit smelly. People also may gripe about having a compost bin in addition to a recycling and trash bin.

Aerobic compost is not smelly. Anaerobic fermentation caused by not mixing in enough oxygen is very smelly and slow.

Yea, smell issues are from transport of the food waste to the facilities. If you have a facility accepting waste, there will be trunks bringing in smelly stuff on a regular basis.

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