Food Bank, Composting

Yesterday with the  Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Charleston Program I was able to visit the Charleston  Foodbank, hear from Crisis Ministries, Trident Literacy, and Trident United Way. All of these organizations are vital non profits that I didn’t know too much about until yesterday.

The food bank is worth a visit to see what they do there (free tour, no appointment needed). Among other things, they  receive  food items whose packaging has been damaged in shipping, or ones near expiration, or bulk food that has not been packaged because there was no buyer available. They make this food available to the people that need it in the coastal communities through various programs, one especially good one is called backpack buddies. It provides a weekend meal for children in schools.

A few facts that were thrown out by the staffers that are almost hard to believe:

40% of food produced never makes it to the consumer level.

Trash audits in Charleston indicate that in certain parts of the Charleston County area as much as 30% of waste is  food.

Up until now there has been no composting of food waste at the Charleston Landfill. There has been only yard waste composting, which is pretty good, but this is better.

Let’s hope this program makes it through. I know my household  could divert 20-30% of our garbage from the landfill and into the composting pile. This percentage comes from having done it for 3 years. Living  in   San Francisco before returning here I had become accustomed to composting food and paper items. Surprisingly, it’s less smelly than I thought it would be. It doesn’t smell any more than your household trash if you set it up right.  We had a compost bin next to our outside trash can, and I’d empty the compost we had in our house (collected in a paper grocery bag) on a nightly basis. It was collected once a week along with the trash and recycling and taken to the landfill, composted, then sold as soil. This diverted a huge amount of waste from the landfills. Happy to hear that Charleston is now starting a beta program with Wal Mart, the Charleston Food Bank, and one other group that I forget. It integrates food waste in with the current yard waste compost, which of course diverts food waste from the landfill and has the added benefit of speeding up the composting process. The sooner this happens the better for me.