Food Waste Costs NYC $180M Annually - A Startup Explores Solutions

Future of Food - Let's Eat Better for Ourselves and the Planet

Tinia Pina, the Founder and CEO of Re-Nuble, talks with us about how to all that waste in a way that won't kill the planet. How much waste are we talking about? 12,000 tons of food waste is produced annually in New York City. That much food waste would take 800 fully loaded garbage trucks to remove. And the city of New York is spending $180 million a year to get rid of it.

The numbers sound crazy when you first hear them. New York City is spending $180 million annually to deal with food waste. For a while, it was being loaded on barges and shipped off to China. Today, capacity is still an issue as NYC food waste is shipped off to neighboring states. There are commercial storage facilities to help out, but there's still a lot of food waste with nowhere to go. Tinia Pina thought there had to be a better way. Her startup Renuble has joined the list of innovators who are recycling food waste into organic compost, as a soil amendment.

When you think of food waste, you might think of the scraps you scrape from your plate or the food that restaurants throw away but there is also food waste created when food is processed, even before it makes it onto your plate. Wholesale food distributors buy directly from farms and re-package food to sell to schools or restaurants, they often throw out the stuff that's less than perfect. Food waste is 75% liquid. A company called Industrial Organic can go to your processing facility, draw out the liquid, digest and sterilize the food waste, leaving you with organic fertilizer. In another approach, Misfit Juicery, based in DC, is sourcing food waste all the way from New York City and turning it into a cold pressed drink. In LA, Pulp Pantry is using the post-juice pulp from your favorite juice bar and turning it into fiber-rich granola.

Soil is lost at a rate of 10 to 40 times as fast as it can replenish itself. Conventional farming is stripping soil of carbon and nutrients and 70% of the earth's topsoil is vanishing, because of erosion. To feed the world that soil has to be replaced, that's where fertilizer comes in. Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.

Key Takeaways

• Buy groceries according to your needs. Supermarkets buy produce based on projections. If you find that you're buying more than what you actually need and wasting about 20% of it, then that waste also is translated upstream to the supermarkets.
• Plants like good dirt. Crops need organic fertilizer to thrive, instead of the chemical "junk food" they often receive with industrial farming. Turning food waste into nutrient-rich organic fertilizer helps solve the waste problem and also helps the plants that feed us.

Listen to my conversation with Tinia Pina about how she is changing what happens to food waste and building a better story for food and the supply chain that feeds us all.

Click the podcast player in the header to hear the whole episode, or in the interactive transcript below, click on any play button to hear that part of the conversation.

Jonathan Bloom wrote in American Wasteland that about 40% of the food we produce ends up being thrown away. The annual cost of that, he says, is $100 billion.

What can you do about it? Tinia has some suggestions for you in the podcast.

I feel like this is my purpose and in addition to the experiences that I've had, it has supported my dedication to it. So I'm a huge environmentalist and just, kind of, as hard as agriculture can be, I really feel like this has kind of been just something that I'm here for and that's why I kind of remain dedicated to it. - Tinia Pina