Encouraging more people to properly separate their food waste for composting can help boost domestic fertiliser production.
The comments from Pauline McDonogh, circular economy coordinator, Southern Waste Region, come as this year’s National Food Waste Recycling Week 2023 kicks off today, Monday, June 5.
Around 800,000t of food is wasted every year across the entire food chain from producers, to retailers, to householders.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the average household wastes approximately €60 worth of food per month, which equates to €700/year.
Food waste
“We want to try and prevent as much food waste from occurring as possible. But even when we do that, there’s always going to be wasted food. Some of it is unavoidable waste food such as peelings, bones that are left over after a meal or plate scrapings.
“The aim of this week is improving the public’s knowledge of what to do with this wasted food,” McDonagh told Agriland.
“If we put this food directly into our general waste bin, we’re losing a fantastic resource. A resource that if we separate it, we can either send it for composting or to make green energy through anaerobic digestion (AD), which is a circular activity then all of it done right here on the island of Ireland.”
Over 60% of households already have a recycling bin for food from their waste collector.
In 2020, only 11% of food waste separated, according to data from the EPA. The agency also found that 60% of food waste was being put into the wrong bin in 2019.
“The whole focus of the week is in providing or upskilling the public in general about the fact that this is a resource that we can use instead of using chemical fertilisers, which would be fantastic,” she continued.
“So we can create a compost product for horticulture for domestic use, but we can also, if we’re not going to send it for composting, make green energy from which is really where we want to move in terms of a bioeconomy,” McDonogh added.
An integral part of this week will be distributing a kitchen caddy pack to households which includes a small bin for the kitchen.
“The whole idea of this is if you have a visual reminder in your kitchen, you’re going to separate your food waste into it. Once you get outside the back door to where the larger bins are, it’s too late if you haven’t separated.
“No one’s going to put their hand into a bin bag and start pulling things out and putting them into the brown bin. So we have to catch people where they’re creating this waste,” she said.
People who are starting to separate their food waste are being urged to ensure that it is done correctly.
“If you’re going to separate your food waste what we want is the food, we don’t want your packaging.
“It’s really important because once plastic gets into a composting facility, obviously it’s mulched, it shredded, it goes through the process and the plastic becomes a micro plastic as it get churned and then it’s impossible to get it back out of the system.
‘It’s really important that as the public step up to this challenge, that they do it right and that we don’t end up with a contaminated waste stream,” McDonogh said.
Fertiliser
Increasing the bioeconomy through activities such as food waste composting can help to replace imported or chemical fertilisers with a clean, organic product.
“Growing the composting ability of the country is a really sharp and solid move to make. We need, over time, to rely less on imports of these materials.
“Any percentage we can shift to creating this in our own island is a fantastic boon to price. It’s got to be cheaper than if you’re importing and we’ve seen that with the chemical fertilisers.
“But also to grow the self sufficiency or this circularity on our own island is really important,” McDonogh said.
Food waste will also play an important role in the emerging anaerobic digestion (AD) sector in Ireland.
“As we see more small-scale AD happening on farm or on a larger scale regional project projects, they’re going to need a feedstock. That feedstock will come obviously from farms, but it will also come from household food waste.
“So there’s loads of potential here as we capture this waste stream,” she said.