Evaluating sustainable food waste options
This is the opinion of Ryan Imm.
After a successful week of promoting the need to focus more on food waste on campus, the Sustainability Office continues to encourage the partnership between St. Ben’s, St John’s and Barthold Farms, where the majority of our food waste ends up feeding local pigs.
For 14 years, our campuses have sustained relations with Barthold Farms, a family-owned and operated company that specializes in the processing and service of waste that goes on to feed to pigs.
Partnering with Barthold Farms not only supports a local business but also allows CSB/SJU to reduce its carbon footprint by utilizing the waste hierarchy.
As the Sustainability Office Coordinator, Rachel Brodeur describes this hierarchy as an ethical guideline to follow to practice carbon emission reduction. She states that the categorization starts at the top with “food to people” and continually follows with “…food to animals, food to compost and food to landfill.”
Paying to have our waste picked up two to three times per week bypasses the chance of producing a large amount of methane gas that would have otherwise been produced in a landfill, contributing to the rising amount of greenhouse gas emissions.
By partnering with Barthold Farms, we are not creating new food waste along the hierarchy because what students don’t eat, the pigs will. All in all, the relationship our campuses have with Barthold Farms seems both ecologically healthy and environmentally friendly. So this raises the question: What are the downsides to sending our food waste away, and what about composting?
For starters, not everything we throw away can be fed to animals. Most of the compost we have on campus is a compilation of student-resourced food waste that may unintentionally contain non-consumable products that would be unsafe to give to the pig farms.
While the Sustainability Office has tried endlessly to educate the student body on what can be composted and what cannot, not everyone follows the important guidelines.
This confusion leads to a tainted pile of waste that takes time, effort and money to sort through. This is not a service that Barthold Farms provides, and therefore we compost.
The main downside to sending our culinary food waste to farms like Barthold is transportation. The pickup service is costly and is not without carbon emissions and the burning of fossil fuels.
Though it sounds like there is little hope in reaching a carbon-neutral way of processing, servicing, sorting and transporting (if necessary) food waste, plans are in the works to make this dream a reality even if it might take another decade to come to fruition.
The Sustainability Office is currently partnering with the Stearns County Solid Waste Department and the city of St. Cloud to find a better long-term solution for our food waste so we can expand composting across our campuses.
Plans of attaching an anaerobic digester to the wastewater treatment plant in St. Cloud would ease our schools’ multiple different forms of waste transport and create a more sustainable connection between all our sources of waste.
Another positive trend we have seen recently has been the decline in the amount we are wasting. In just three years, from 2018 to 2021, our schools have cut the pounds of food wasted in half.
With 116,450 pounds accumulated in 2018, only 54,910 pounds were collected last year.
While we can celebrate this reduction, this brings us back to the waste hierarchy and where we should be putting our waste.
All things considered, the partnership CBS/SJU retains with Barthold Farms produces the most effective, sustainable option for ridding our campuses of the food we waste and agrees with the waste hierarchy.
Through the simple solution of just not wasting food in the first place or being more self-sufficient here on campus with composting rituals, we should take pride in the actions our schools have taken to ensure that sustainable goals are being met.
With ecologically positive messages like these coming far and few between, especially since the pandemic, take a moment to realize that climate anxiety is not indefinite. Yet, let’s not stop the progress here—there is no planet B.