Scientists around the world are working to turn agricultural waste into food, packaging and more

May 14, 2019 — When we pick up a piece of fruit, bar of chocolate or package of flour, we don’t often think of the massive amounts of agricultural waste — the stems, leaves, seed pods and more — that never make it off the farm.

Empty cacao pods. 

Yet the scale of agricultural waste is huge. Globally, crop residues — the plant waste left in the field after harvest — totaled 5 billion metric tons (5.5 billion tons) in 2013, according to a 2018 Brazilian study. A study from South Africa reported that crop residues retained in the field are responsible for 13% of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

Some of that material is used for organic fertilizer, soil enrichment or animal feed. But plenty is still available for other uses.

Read the Ensia story by Andrew Wight - “Scientists around the world are working to turn agricultural waste into food, packaging and more."

The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster

Late in the summer of 2012, while walking his coffee groves on a hillside rising above Santa Ana, El Salvador, Mario Mendoza Corleto noticed something unusual: the leaves on some of his trees were coated with an orange fungus and had begun dropping to the ground. It was “leaf rust,” a form of blight that had pestered coffee farmers in El Salvador since the 1970s. Normally, spraying the trees with fungicide once or twice a year would keep the disease at bay. Not anymore. “This year it was totally different,” Mendoza recounted to me recently. “Spraying didn’t help.”

Illustration: Jordan Moss

As the days wore on, the problem only worsened. By September, many of Corleto’s once-bushy trees stood completely bare. Their green fruit hardened in the sun, never ripening into the candy-red cherries that Mendoza’s workers would pick and process into coffee beans destined for specialty roasters. That year, half of the trees on his family’s 100-year-old farm died. The next year, as Mendoza’s remaining trees continued to struggle, he laid off most of his workers. The harvest was a quarter of its usual size.

What happened to Mario Mendoza Corleto played out all across El Salvador, as well as Honduras and Guatemala: ground zero for the Western hemisphere’s most prized coffees.

Read the Medium story by Elizabeth G. Dunn- “The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster.”

Scrap value: Leftovers join green bin collection in war on food waste

Lawn clippings, leaves, prunings from the garden - that's what most people put in their green bins.

Lynton Tapp and Jessica Alice, aka the Leftover Lovers,
hold a cooking demonstration at Beaumaris Farmers Market.

But now residents in a handful of Victorian municipalities can throw in all manner of food scraps for collection.

At the same time, businesses and organisations are increasingly repurposing organic waste to reduce landfill costs and improve their environmental credentials.

Glen Eira Council in Melbourne's east is the latest to jump on the food recycling bandwagon.

It will change its green waste collection from May 1 to include such items as fruit and vegetable scraps, soiled paper and cardboard, and even meat and fish.

Read the story from The Age by Debbie Cuthbertson - “Scrap value: Leftovers join green bin collection in war on food waste."