Waste360 Staff, Staff

April 29, 2016

1 Min Read
Cities Turn to Garbage Disposals to Help Reduce Food Waste

In an effort to reduce food waste, some U.S. cities are turning to in-sink, electric garbage disposals to turn food waste into renewable energy.

One of these cities is Philadelphia, which teamed up with InSinkErator, a business unit of Emerson, to conduct a pilot program. The program led to the city passing a law that now requires in-sink food waste disposers in new residential construction.

Emerson is currently working on rolling out similar garbage disposal initiatives in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Takoma and Washington.

CNBC has the details:

Food waste is a major and growing problem in the U.S.

Americans waste up to 50 percent more food than U.S. consumers did in the 1970s, according to National Institutes of Health. And the government last year declared its first ever, national food waste reduction goals.

Now food waste — and trash in general — are getting to be such big problems that pockets of many U.S. cities are having a difficult time managing rubbish on trash days. (Just try to walk along narrow sidewalks in a New York City neighborhood on trash day. Add frozen mounds of snow to the mix, and forget it.) The garbage, in turn, takes more money and energy to transport to landfill space that's also limited.

Read the full story here.

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