The statistics are staggering. Every year in the US, more than $218 billion, or 1.3% of GDP, is spent on growing, processing, transporting, and disposing food that is never eaten, according to ReFED, a group that was established to rethink food waste with economics and data. The organization also report that nationwide food waste equates to 52 million tons of food sent to landfill annually, plus another 10 million tons that are discarded or left unharvested on farms.
Three food experts address the issue at all levels of the supply chain during this presentation at the Building Sustainability Forum hosted at the Greenbuild Conference and Expo.
First was Jeffrey Huber, assistance professor at the School of Architecture at Florida Atlanta University and a principal at Brooks + Scarpa Architects who was the co-lead on an award-winning project on Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario, a look at urban design implications. He contends that a lack of nutritionally dense food is moving us more to a local growing economy and to retool urban areas.
What does retooling urban areas look like according to Huber? He breaks it into five main initiatives.
- Vertical farming – vertical farming can be done in much less space and can provide a healthy supply of local produce for an urban area.
- Nutrient management infrastructure – many of the nutrients that we waste are valuable and should be reintroduced into the local agriculture. This would lead to designs that include compost campuses.
- Growing media and infrastructure – Water sustains life and bodies of water can be the premise for new neighborhoods that can subsist on aquaculture.
- Waste recovery infrastructure – there is a need for regeneration so that biofuels can be used purposefully to run more of the energy needs of a city. For instance, vertical farming can make sense connected to waste treatment because of the symbiotic relationship between them.
- Food processing/distribution formats – in the complicated arena of processing and distribution, Huber contends that the industry can develop technologies and innovations in order to create supply for the demand of local produce. This means hybrid food that will be able to grow where it was never conceived possible before.
Huber was followed by both Brian Maynard, marketing director at Whirlpool's Jenn-Air, and Eugenio Garcia, the CFO at Innit who lend unique perspectives on the supply chain, technology and ultimately consumer interaction. Maynard and the Whirlpool team are hyper-focused on sustainability into the future. The team’s vision of future refrigerators requires a high level of connectivity that lead to food preservation and less food waste. Plus, new advances in cooking, like induction, require much less energy.
Garcia, although not intentionally focused on sustainability, has developed new technologies at Innit that will lend to less food waste, lower cook powers and times and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The technologies include image recognition and artificial intelligence in order to identify food without human involvement, so there is no scanning or typing. This allows a kitchen, driven by the software, to help families cook more, eat healthier and live better.
After the kitchen recognizes the food that you have, it can create recipes from the resources at hand. Which, of course means less food waste, but it also can connect to the user’s health to recommend food or recipes that have the right combination of necessary vitamins or minerals.
From urban design to kitchen design, these technologies and concepts contend to decrease food waste.
