Who is Responsible for Food Waste? We All Are.
Landscape of Food Waste in the City, from Dumpster Diving to Education
Every Monday through Friday while her four kids are in school, Tiffany She’ree goes through dumpsters to find discarded goods that are perfectly fine. It was Texas in 2017, when She’ree found a video of girls ‘dumpster diving’ at Ulta, a beauty store chain. Seeing them getting perfectly fine products, She’ree gave herself a try at Ulta too, and found makeup and skincare products with a retail value of $1,500. Continuing dumpster diving in the following years, she now considers herself a full-time diver.
“Lately it’s been Party City. The amount of stuff they are tossing is absolutely insane. I was told they are doing inventory, everything from party supplies to toys,” said She’ree. “Honestly, I could open my own party store just with the stuff I have gotten from their dumpsters. And it’s not just one store doing this. They’re all doing it!”
Known as ‘Dumpster Diving Mama,’ She’ree is posting her dumpster diving videos on social media, garnering 2.4 million followers on TikTok. Yet she remarked that she still gets shocked when she finds massive amounts of edible foods in dumpsters.
“I really hate how wasteful this country is. It’s truly sad,” said She’ree. “When people on TikTok see the amount of food waste, they get pretty upset. Some are furious. There are people starving and this country just tosses food like it’s nothing. It’s ridiculous.”
What She’ree described as ‘waste culture’ has merit: In New York City alone, residents produce 12,000 tons of waste daily, with a recycling rate of 17 percent. When it goes to landfills, it produces a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and carbon dioxide that are detrimental to the environment, accounting for one third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Waste — apart from having drastic environmental devastation — is also simply a nuisance to residents. New Yorkers are paying more than $300 million per year to export their garbage, and approximately 3.9 million tons of food waste in New York go to landfills every year. Meanwhile, almost 1.5 million New Yorkers are experiencing food insecurity, including one in four children.
Such a huge amount of food loss and waste is a result of overproduction and overconsumption: 68 percent of all food discarded in New York is still considered edible. Among all food waste, 43 percent comes from homes, 40 percent from restaurants, grocery stores and food service companies and 18 percent from production, according to RTS. So to solve this issue, every sector — from the government to individuals — will need to step up.
Food Waste, through the lens of Dumpster Diving
To help those in need, She’ree always shares whenever she finds fresh uneaten foods from dumpsters.
“I check Panera near me pretty often because that location is known for tossing a massive amount of over baked goods. There have been a few times that I’ve come across dumpsters full of not expired, still frozen food,” said She’ree. “In this case, I let everyone know so they can go get what they would like. I hate seeing perfectly good food being tossed. I always let my local drivers know if I come across food like this.”
Dumpster diving, also known as freeganism, is one of many ways to minimize the detrimental impact on the environment through foraging instead of buying. But dumpster diving carries a stigma, said DD Freegan, an anonymous dumpster diver based on the East Coast. Like She’ree, she is also popular on TikTok as ‘Dumpster Diving Freegan,’ with more than 464,000 followers.
“I have been homeless. I have been food insecure most of my life, so for me to see literal dumpsters full of good, packaged food that could have gone to people in need, it angers me to a point that I can’t even explain,” said Freegan, who wouldn’t give her name because of that stigma. “There’s much more we could do about this, everything from supply chain management to making it available to people at a discounted price.”
In addition to the $3000 she makes from dumpster diving, Freegan donates foods to local communities with the one rule: donate clean, uncontaminated package foods only. Still, she is not content with the impact she has made.
“There’s just no excuse for hunger when this much is being wasted. I want to bring awareness to the waste and see if there is a way that we can change it,” she said. “I want there to be more done. I want to be more lenient for donating food, more regulations around it if possible or just a better way of food waste management,” she added.
What have big institutions been doing?
The United States announced its goal to reduce food loss and waste in half by 2030. In addition, New York City also announced its zero waste challenge called OneNYC, aiming to send zero waste to landfills by 2030. But food waste can’t be reduced solely by dumpster diving. To achieve these goals, every sector from individuals to corporations needs to make collective efforts.
Christopher Schlottmann, clinical professor of environmental studies at New York University, said he suspects very little has improved over the last decade; rather, he argued, larger entities should bear the biggest responsibility to change their actions.
“Corporations and governments have tremendous power to address these problems, as they are more centralized and have more resources,” said Schlottmann. “They are much more likely to reduce food waste than any consumer-driven movement. That we often focus on consumer responsibility is in part a function of corporations attempting to preempt regulation, and results in a deep misunderstanding of how we can reduce food waste.”
In response to such voices, Cities and states across the U.S. are recently starting to act. New York, for example, enforced Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law this year, mandating large institutions to compost food scraps and donate edible food. Nina Sevilla, a program advocate for food waste and food systems at NRDC remarked that it needs time to have noticeable effects, as infrastructure needs to accommodate the new law.
“It is a little too early to see the impacts of these laws and it just takes some time for industry and infrastructure to adapt,” said Sevilla, also mentioning the colliding law between the state and city government that makes the new law hard to adapt.
“Another reason you might not notice a lot of changes in New York City specifically is because the law does not apply to New York City, which already has a local law in place requiring the diversion of food scraps from disposals,” she said.
But even if new laws are enacted, loopholes that generate more waste are still rampant. For example, implementing food labels — Best by, Use by, Sell by, etc. — are up to manufacturers’ discretion who apply date labels for a variety of reasons. These different labels, however, can cause confusion to consumers who rely on the information to shop for groceries. Michael Blakeney remarked in his book, Food Loss and Food Waste, that some consumer behavior is conditioned by the practices of retailers. And such confusion is often a significant driver of food waste.
To fix this loophole, the country needs a standardized system of food labeling, said Sevilla.
“This variety and lack of standardization leads to perfectly good food being thrown out,” said Sevilla. “The date labeling on food is all different because, currently, there is no national law standardizing it. To address this, we need action on the federal level to standardize date labels and educate consumers about what they mean,” she added.
In lieu of the government, nonprofit organizations have helped fill the void of action. Sanitation Foundation, a nonprofit partner for the city, has been implementing a number of programs for New Yorkers to reduce their waste footprint. Food Waste Fair is one of them: the biannual event brings a broad range of professionals to address the issue. Last summer, due to the COVID, it was held mostly online.
“It was different but also great. We were able to reach a wider audience and a global audience and turn what had been a one-day expo of food waste solutions into an always-on web-based resource guide for businesses and residents,” said Julie Raskin, executive director at Sanitation Foundation.
Along with the city’s Brown Bin program, Sanitation Foundation is working closely with the city, offering communities ways to volunteer for the composting program.
“We take our volunteers to neighborhoods with street trees that could use some love and have them spread DSNY-made compost around the tree bases,” said Raskin. “This serves as a natural fertilizer and also educates volunteers and passers-by about what positive things can happen when you put your scraps into food scrap drop-off locations.”
Companies have been passive towards reducing food waste. Recently, reacting to such various efforts from all sectors, many corporations have started to utilize the latest technologies to minimize food waste, such as maximizing expiration dates and monitoring food from digital labeling. Imperfect Foods is one of them, cutting down unnecessary supply chains by connecting consumers and local farmers, and delivering surplus produce directly from customers. Maddie Caywood, a public relations associate at the company, said they have rescued more than 150 million pounds of food.
“Consumers enjoy a fully customizable service that is more affordable, and more environmentally friendly, than the average trip to the grocery store,” said Caywood. “Every decision made at Imperfect Foods ladders up to the goal of reducing waste, ensuring that its operations are as efficient as possible, while continuing to find innovative solutions to further reduce waste and emissions.”
Zooming in Communities
Every Sunday morning, one can see a group of people laughing, talking and socializing at McGolrick Park and Transmitter Park in Brooklyn. Comprised of nearby residents, a group of volunteers from North Brooklyn Compost Project are waiting for neighbors to drop off their food scraps.
When all the options for people to compost — the city’s curbside Brown Bin program, composting at Greenmarkets — were shut down at the start of COVID in 2020, volunteers from North Brooklyn Compost Project gathered to talk about the project, hoping to continue the practice of composting. As she always took compost to the local Greenmarket for drop off, Katie Zwick didn’t welcome the news. So she started as a volunteer, and is now a coordinator for the project.
A few months later, they started collecting food scraps at local parks to provide community options for compost.
“It’s nice to be able to hang out in a park and talk to people,” said Zwick. “It’s not only a source of feeling you’re doing something good, giving back and building a stronger, healthier greener city but also just being able to have social time,” she added.
Composting takes more time to be processed than going to landfills; from as little as a few weeks to more than a year. So it could be a less convenient way to process, but Zwick said people dropping off food scraps come with a passion for the environment.
“We get a good variety of people who drop off with us. There are people who are trying to live more sustainably and trying to follow good practices. And compost is just a part of that for them,” said Zwick. “We collect about 2,200 pounds of food scraps on average per week. Since we started in June of 2020, we have collected a lot, quite a bit of 200,000 pounds,” she added.
Both the curbside Brown Bin program and composting at Greenmarkets returned last year with the alleviation of the pandemic. But there are still hurdles for individuals to jump over if they want their building to have composting: Currently, the curbside brown bins are only available in selected neighborhoods. If they want their buildings to join, residents have to sign up for the program with the authorization of building representatives and then be approved by city officials. A new bill, introduced by Senator Brad Holyman hopes to establish universal composting in the city that is available in all residential buildings.
For those who don’t have the access in their buildings, Zwick continues to come out to the park and do the service for the community.
“As a group, we are just continuing to try to galvanize the community and our volunteers,” said Zwick. “We need to be a decade ahead of where we are right now in terms of access to compost for every person in the city. It’s a high goal, but it’s something that we are thinking about a lot.”
What is more important than composting, however, is to reduce food waste in the first place. One of many ways is serving food insecure people throughout the city. Jorge Negron started as a volunteer at NY Common Pantry in 2017 to serve New Yorkers who are starving. NY Common Pantry is a volunteer-led nonprofit organization that aims to reduce hunger and food insecurity, in 2017 to serve hungry New Yorkers. Falling in love with the organization and its mission, Negron carried on and now he is an assistant director at the organization.
“We contribute through a lot of different factors. We see about 2,000 families within the pantry programs each week,” said Negron. “We provide a substantial amount of fresh produce and canned goods to the community. We distribute over 3,000 packages a week for the five boroughs through the mobile pantry program itself.”
NY Common Pantry has various programs, including multiple pantries and psychiatric services, for neighborhoods as well as for the environment, providing millions of meals that would have been wasted otherwise. Negron remarked that he is satisfied to be able to feed people.
“I’m really happy about continuing to grow and learn more things. I am hoping that we’re able to expand the program a lot more to serve more families,” he said. “I would love to see more pantries, more locations in the city to see people investing in their neighborhoods.”
But whether the public is aware of the issue is a different story. A survey shows that 76 percent of people think they throw out less food than the average American and 70 percent believe changing their behavior would barely alleviate the issue. But FoodPrint, a nonprofit organization that focuses on consumer education around a sustainable food system, believes the opposite. Ryan Nebeker, a research and policy analyst at FoodPrint, believes in the impact of people’s behavior change in fighting food waste.
“A lot of our philosophy is based on the fact that people’s choices do matter,” said Nebeker. “We have a lot of content that’s just geared towards people, helping people learn about the food system, and helping people learn about how they can make more sustainable choices at home.”
Researchers also noted that progress can be made at household level: 21 percent of food waste can be avoidable at home, which amounts to saving an average of $1,766 a year. And it can come from a number of lifestyle changes from cooking and shopping to composting. Nebeker said such changes not only can save money but also reduce food waste.
“At a household level, you can actually do a lot. There are some quick fixes that you can make to gesture on buying behavior so that the food you’re buying is more in line with what you actually eat,” said Nebeker. “A lot of those small behavioral changes to how you approach the kitchen can ultimately cut back on the amount of organic waste you’re going to generate,” he added.
But he acknowledged the difficulty of bringing awareness to people, as there are systemic difficulties such as confusing food labels and cumbersome compost programs that make it hard for people to take action. Nevertheless, he emphasized that through education, a lot of improvements can be made.
“Most of the food waste that we see happens long before the food ever gets to you, so it gets a little thorny when we’re talking about what individuals can do to help with these problems. But I think there are reasons to be optimistic,” he said. “There’s a ripple effect that comes from people feeling like they have some ownership over their own behavior to where they want to and see those positive changes in society.”
And perhaps that ripple effect is unfolding. Esther Chinwuko, a resident in the Upper East Side, tries various practices to live more sustainably. From not using disposable utensils to using alternative delivery apps such as Too Good To Go, Chinwuko said she grew up practicing many things that she can do to reduce food waste. But even when programs and infrastructure are available to people, it seems not a lot of people have access to or know such resources.
“I didn’t know such programs existed in the city. I wish I knew it earlier because I would have definitely signed up for it,” said Chinwuko, who didn’t know about the city’s compost programs. “I think something needs to be done in order for people to know about such programs.”
As Chinwuko noted, the brown bin program hasn’t been promoted to the public enough, unless they manually search for it. Due to a lack of interaction with the government’s programs, Chinwuko said she wanted to see a bottom-up, rather than a top-down — more approaches that center communities and put people in charge of where their waste goes.
“I know that New York, it’s better than other states because when I was in the Midwest, they don’t recycle at all. So it is great to start from the city, but maybe we should start focusing on the people.”
