Tis’ the Season: Reducing Food Waste During the Holidays
By Jasmine Crowe
Tis’ the Season: Reducing Food Waste During the Holidays
By Jasmine Crowe
As millions of people around the world go hungry, over 35 million Americans each year, the EPA estimates that 70 billion pounds of food waste hit our landfills each year, accounting for 24% of municipal solid waste. Aside from the fact that much of this wasted food is still edible, its presence in our landfills produces carbon emissions and means the energy, water, and resources that were used to produce the food have all gone to waste as well. Wasted food contributes to landfills being the third-largest source of human-related emissions in the United States, according to the same EPA release.
Sadly, as we enter the holidays, the situation worsens. During the holiday season, the average American household will produce 25% more waste during the holidays, while millions of people continue to experience food insecurity. Food insecurity becomes especially challenging for families with kids during this time of the year since many children do not have access to free school breakfast and lunch programs during their holiday breaks. As a result, the holidays give us the unique opportunity to implement new habits that can help us reduce our food waste and even provide food to those going hungry.
I founded my company, Goodr, with the mission to feed more and waste less. While we work largely with restaurants and large food vendors to rescue excess edible food and divert it to awaiting non-profit partners, there are things that families and businesses can do to help reduce their waste, providing immediate benefits to public health and the environment. For many of us, 2021 marks the first holiday season in two years that many of us will feel safe enough to gather again. With that in mind, here are some of my tips for making sure less food goes to waste over the holidays:
Shop at Home First
Often, when we are planning for a gathering or celebration, our mind goes to all of the things that we need to buy to complete the meal. Before you head to the store, take time to “shop” your fridge and pantry first. Take stock of all of the items that you already have and how you can use those items before buying more.
Buy with A Plan
When you are ready to start your shopping, resist the ‘more is better’ mindset that we all fall victim to when shopping for gatherings and only purchase what you need. Once you’ve “shopped” at home, then you can easily build your shopping list based on items you know you’ll need and use. It can also be helpful to try grocery shopping for the meal vs. shopping for the full week. If you decide to shop for the meal, stick to a shopping list and fight the urge to run to the store for extra food.
Use All of Your Groceries
Throughout the prep process for meals, we often throw away vegetable and meat scraps. Consider storing bones, vegetable peels or other scraps from your groceries in the freezer for future use like a soup or broth.
Consider Composting
Start your resolutions early and make a plan to compost. When food waste is thrown in the garbage and sent to a landfill, it is unable to properly break down and results in increased carbon emissions. Composting allows inedible food and food waste to be repurposed as useful organic material for soil. Consider composting at home or find a local organization that will pick up or allow you to drop off your compostable items. You can even encourage your offices, schools and local businesses to implement recycling and composting programs.
Donate to Food Rescue Organizations
I often say that hunger is not an issue of scarcity but a matter of logistics. With that principle in mind, the holidays are a great time to reach out to local food rescue organizations and discuss how you can safely make a food donation. Social media apps like NextDoor.com can be a valuable resource for locating programs that cater to those in need.
My hope is that these tips will help you consider the role we can each play in reducing the food waste that happens all over the country and the world, especially during the holiday season.
🎙Startup Series
This week’s guest is John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna. Soluna is the leading developer of green data centers for batchable computing, powered by wasted renewable energy. John outlines why renewable energy can be inaccessible and the future of a connected energy grid in the clean future. We also dive into Soluna's competitors, customer base, and recent acquisition.
✨Highlights
Community News
We added the great Yin Lu to the MCJ team, as our first Operator-in-Residence. Welcome, Yin! 🎉
We had our MCJ Town Hall this week, and you can find the recording here (password: E&sm?%N7). We went through the results of the Community Understanding Project (well done, James Gordey and Jim Russell!), and shared 20+ ideas for what could make the community experience better.
Main themes: 1) Adding more diversity to the community 2) Helping people wayfind/organize information 3) Making member onboarding+connecting experience better 4) adding events/resources and ensuring those are easily found.
If you are looking to get more involved and work with Yin (and team) on making any of these ideas come to life, you can sign up to volunteer here. And if you have other ideas not listed, let us know those, as well!🎧MCJ member, Laura Kania, launched a free weekly newsletter that summarizes key highlights of recent climate podcasts— it's like CliffsNotes for podcasts, called PodSnacks. This is the latest PodSnacks as a sample. To receive the free weekly newsletter, sign up here.
Joro just released “2021: A Year of Decarbonizing with Joro.” A deep dive into our year of data shows that people who track the footprint of their spending with Joro lowered collective emissions by 21%. About half of carbon savings (49%) came from reducing emissions based on what and how much people buy; about half of savings (51%) came from offsetting emissions. To learn more check out the report here!
📚Are you looking for meaningful and sustainable holiday gifts for the kids in your life? Healthy Earth is an educational coloring book that explains sustainability to children without causing eco-anxiety. Packed with practical daily tips that empower kids with environmental knowledge, this is a great holiday gift. Grab a copy here: www.hellohealthyearth.com
Climate Jobs
For more open positions, check out the #climatejobs channel in MCJ Slack.
Wunder Capital is hiring three Director roles across Sales & Account Management, Project Development, and Asset Management, as well as a Senior Recruiter
Forerunner is hiring an Account Executive to help us scale our resilience platform to communities across the U.S.
Burnt Island Ventures hiring a Community & Communications Manager
BiodiversityCo is looking for a mathematical ecologist to help design and model ecological sampling methods that will be carried out using imaging, bioacoustics, and ML
Benchmark Labs is a venture-backed start-up working on improving weather forecasts for the agricultural and energy sectors and is looking for a Chief Customer Success Officer
Urban Future Lab, a non-profit, part of NYU Tandon, on a mission to help young companies with market-ready climate solutions to scale is looking for one more talented manager for our accelerators and incubator programs, primarily our Carbon to Value Initiative
ReSource, who is making chemicals sustainably from CO2, is hiring a Process Engineer
CarbonCure is growing their Carbon Finance team, looking to hire BizDev Associate, BizDev Manager, BizOps Associate, and Customer Ops Manager
Remora is hiring new team members — from growth to policy to recruiting to all manner of engineers (software, electrical, mechanical, chemical). Plus, executive team, starting with directors of logistics, supply chain/manufacturing, mechanical engineering, R&D, and controls/electronics. Jobs page
Down Ballot Climate Project, based on the idea that in the US there are some super local elections that have an outsized impact on the climate, is hiring a Chief of Staff
Announcing 2 new cluster searches in Stanford's new school of climate & sustainability. One in sustainable development + environmental justice, aimed at senior social scientists. Other is open rank search in climate science
Climate Events
For more community events, check out the #events channel in Slack or the MCJ Calendar on Luma.
Women in Climate Take Action (Thursday, 1/6 at 12 pm ET)
Climate Changemakers and Women in Climate Meetup are teaming up to host their own Hour of Action with a (zoom) room full of all women working in, or passionate about, solving climate change. (You do not need to be an MCJ member to attend) RSVP here!
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