What A Wonderful World Of Waste!
Literary: Ask not what recycling wasted food can do for you. Ask how it can change the way we produce valuable chemicals that contribute to everyday life. The latter question can be answered simply; turning food waste into solid gold! Ok, not gold. How about succinic acid?
Almost 1.5 BILLION tons of food goes to waste around the world each year, and it probably wouldn’t shock many to find out that the U.S. is responsible for 40% of that number. For you mental mathers out there, that’s about 600 million tons of food wasted by ‘Mericans alone. Talk about pride in one’s country.
Carol Lin, a biochemical engineer from the City University of Hong Kong, is developing a way to recycle organic food waste into usable biofuels and other chemicals such as succinic acid. For those of you who don’t know about succinic acid, –don’t be shy to admit it, because I sure didn’t –it is a key component of biodegradable plastics and is also used in all kinds of things ranging anywhere from laundry detergent bottles to car parts to food additives.
The current method of producing the acid using petrochemicals is detrimental to the environment, leaving behind a harmful carbon footprint. Lin’s new kind of biorefinery would eliminate the harmful byproducts using bio-based processes, already being looked into by companies in Europe, Asia and the U.S.
Because food waste rots quickly, the biggest challenge is transportation. Another issue is the fact that for every ton of food waste processed, only 81 kg of succinic acid is produced. Now take into account manufacturers’ demand of 44,000 tons each year. The hard part is building a facility large enough to work with that kind of volume. That’s a whole lot’a garbage, folks.
Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council it is important to keep up the effort of a cleaner tomorrow. “No single undertaking is going to address all the waste we generate,” said Hershkowitz. He’s right, but we need to start somewhere. For Mother Earth’s sake.
Quote: “No single undertaking is going to address all the waste we generate,” said Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Don’t tell that to Carol Lin, a biochemical engineer from the City University of Hong Kong, who had discovered a more environmentally friendly way to produce biofuels and other valuable chemicals using that stale, half-eaten muffin in your garbage from last Sunday’s brunch.
Variation of “Waste Not; Can old food really be repurposed?” by Alice Park. Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 2012.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2123317,00.html