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>The bag charges also meet 60% of the cost of running the scheme Recycling metals is substantially profitable, because scrap metal is actually worth something.

>The bag charges also meet 60% of the cost of running the scheme Recycling metals is substantially profitable, because scrap metal is actually worth something. Making new metal from old metal requires far less energy than making new metals from raw ore, even factoring in the costs of transportation and processing. Does collecting and composting food waste actually result in a net reduction of our use of finite resources, or is it just a sop to make us feel better about throwing away food? Is this really recycling, or is it a waste of resources at one step removed?

AngryData 8y ago
60% of the world's crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel derived fertilizers. Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels, otherwise it just ends up rotting into the environment and polluting it just the same as burning the fuels except you aren't doing anything with it if it just rots in a landfill.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  > Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels How much fuel do you have to burn to turn that waste food into usable nitrates? If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is it not profitable?
  - AngryData 8y ago
    Or you can compost it into fertilizer. It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap and aren't paying for the externalized costs of pollution. Also, if you did it right you can also burn food directly as fuel. Haber-Bosch process isn't a free lunch where free energy just pops into existence.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > " It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap " Not that cheap. In the aforementioned metal recycling example, the energy is typically coming from fossil fuels too; refining aluminum from ore takes an insane amount of electrical power. Even if you do that with renewable energy, that's still that much power that can't be used for other things that must be supplied by another power source (e.g. fossil fuels.)
      - azernik 8y ago
        That just indicates that metal recycling is super advantageous, to be profitable even with the abnormally low price of energy.
      - Scoundreller 8y ago
        A lot of natural gas is stranded or considered a waste product of oil production. So fertilizer plants in those areas suck up that cheap CH4 to reform it into H2 and heat up the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia and then into more transportable fertilizers like urea.
      - emj 8y ago
        You place aluminium plants where the energy is cheap e.g. Iceland, it is often cheap because it's hard to export energy.
  - ajross 8y ago
    > If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is it not profitable? That was clearly intended as a zing, but it just shows you aren't thinking about this right. Conventional ammonia production is vastly less efficient than just composting your garbage. Be real here. Bacteria literally do the job at a labor cost of zero and all you need to do is keep it in a stable environment. What hurts is what always hurts: scale. If the composting facility is across town, you also need to haul the biomass around and haul the fertilizer back. If the industry is tooled up to spread pellet fertilizer it's going to see an immediate cost moving to equipment that can spread and till compost. But stop pretending that there's an "efficiency" argument to baking nitrogen into ammonia in a 20 barr, 500C pressure cooker. That's nonsense.
    - foota 8y ago
      I felt like the parent was asking the question not as a zing but an earnest question.
      - jdietrich 8y ago
        I'm a deep green (I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't drive), but I'm also a skeptical green. There is an overwhelming presumption that recycling must be good for the environment, but the evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial. The classic example is plastic versus re-usable glass bottles - plastic nearly always proves to be more sustainable than glass, because glass bottles require vastly more energy to manufacture, they're much heavier to transport, they require surprisingly large amounts of energy to wash and they have relatively short average lifespans. The plastic waste issue is quite effectively solved by just burning it - plastic waste is a perfectly good hydrocarbon fuel. http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doorstep%2029%2001%2010%20(2).pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...
        benj111 8y ago
        "someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial" I don't think anyone is, just that its less bad than the alternatives. You don't drive, presumably you walk or cycle then. Each of those activities have negative environmental externalities compared to not doing them, after all you have to consume extra calories. So while each is infinitely better than driving, they aren't environmentally beneficial. With your plastic v glass example, you seem to be using sustainability in a way that I wouldn't recognise, to me sustainability is about how long you can keep doing something regardless of how much energy it requires (up to a point, and assuming clean energy sources). The glass is infinitely recyclable, the plastic isn't. Especially when burned, so I would say the glass is sustainable.
- hopler 8y ago
  What percentage of fossil fuel consumption is that? How does food per capita compare to transportation (caets) per capita, in terms of fossil fuel use? Does converting fossil fuels into food fertilizer cause pollution? Transfering waste from an oilfield to a landfill isn't inherently unecological.
Haga 8y ago
One can extract the energy in food?
- wavefunction 8y ago
  Primarily digestion, but for "left-overs" or food waste and scraps there's vermiculture and composting. I guess we have mass digesters now too to turn the material into heat.
- gambiting 8y ago
  I mean, that's exactly how kcal count is measured - a portion of food is burnt and the energy released is then measured.
  - the8472 8y ago
    You can't measure nutritional values like that. Not everything that can be burned is available to the human metabolism. Cellulose being one obvious example.
    - kraftman 8y ago
      Isn't that how all food is measured though?
      - Isamu 8y ago
        It is burned to measure total energy and then a model is applied to approximate the calories available to the body.
      - the8472 8y ago
        no, foods are analyzed for their digestible contents (fats, fiber, carbs, various kinds of alcohos etc.) and their energy content is then looked up in reference tables. The reference tables are in turn populated with more careful experiments that take digestion, waste products and metabolic efficiency into account. Directly measuring the physiological energy content for millions of food products would be impractical.
tgb 8y ago
It certainly can be a reduction if you can compost at home. The result is useful. The effort is very minimal if you don't need it to compost quickly. It doesn't need to be transported to a landfill. And my understanding is that it breaks down into carbon dioxide instead of methane if you compost instead of landfill, which is a win for climate change.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  I compost and one selfish advantage is I now never run out of space in my bin. That food waste takes up a lot of volume.
- crispinb 8y ago
  I live in a rural area without refuse collection. Having to deal with it all yourself really focuses the mind on keeping waste of all types to a minumum. I suspect more fees for waste collection is what would do likewise for urban dwellers.
  - SteveGerencser 8y ago
    We live in a rural area as well and we have to take any trash either to the dump or a convenience center. Since we compost, recycle, and raise a significant percentage of our food, we only actually need to take trash to the dump once a month at most.

AngryData 8y ago

60% of the world's crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel derived fertilizers. Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels, otherwise it just ends up rotting into the environment and polluting it just the same as burning the fuels except you aren't doing anything with it if it just rots in a landfill.

jdietrich 8y ago
> Recycling food is recycling fossil fuels How much fuel do you have to burn to turn that waste food into usable nitrates? If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is it not profitable?
- AngryData 8y ago
  Or you can compost it into fertilizer. It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap and aren't paying for the externalized costs of pollution. Also, if you did it right you can also burn food directly as fuel. Haber-Bosch process isn't a free lunch where free energy just pops into existence.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > " It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap " Not that cheap. In the aforementioned metal recycling example, the energy is typically coming from fossil fuels too; refining aluminum from ore takes an insane amount of electrical power. Even if you do that with renewable energy, that's still that much power that can't be used for other things that must be supplied by another power source (e.g. fossil fuels.)
    - azernik 8y ago
      That just indicates that metal recycling is super advantageous, to be profitable even with the abnormally low price of energy.
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      A lot of natural gas is stranded or considered a waste product of oil production. So fertilizer plants in those areas suck up that cheap CH4 to reform it into H2 and heat up the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia and then into more transportable fertilizers like urea.
    - emj 8y ago
      You place aluminium plants where the energy is cheap e.g. Iceland, it is often cheap because it's hard to export energy.
- ajross 8y ago
  > If it requires less fuel than the Haber-Bosch process, then why is it not profitable? That was clearly intended as a zing, but it just shows you aren't thinking about this right. Conventional ammonia production is vastly less efficient than just composting your garbage. Be real here. Bacteria literally do the job at a labor cost of zero and all you need to do is keep it in a stable environment. What hurts is what always hurts: scale. If the composting facility is across town, you also need to haul the biomass around and haul the fertilizer back. If the industry is tooled up to spread pellet fertilizer it's going to see an immediate cost moving to equipment that can spread and till compost. But stop pretending that there's an "efficiency" argument to baking nitrogen into ammonia in a 20 barr, 500C pressure cooker. That's nonsense.
  - foota 8y ago
    I felt like the parent was asking the question not as a zing but an earnest question.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      I'm a deep green (I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't drive), but I'm also a skeptical green. There is an overwhelming presumption that recycling must be good for the environment, but the evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial. The classic example is plastic versus re-usable glass bottles - plastic nearly always proves to be more sustainable than glass, because glass bottles require vastly more energy to manufacture, they're much heavier to transport, they require surprisingly large amounts of energy to wash and they have relatively short average lifespans. The plastic waste issue is quite effectively solved by just burning it - plastic waste is a perfectly good hydrocarbon fuel. http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doorstep%2029%2001%2010%20(2).pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...
      - benj111 8y ago
        "someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial" I don't think anyone is, just that its less bad than the alternatives. You don't drive, presumably you walk or cycle then. Each of those activities have negative environmental externalities compared to not doing them, after all you have to consume extra calories. So while each is infinitely better than driving, they aren't environmentally beneficial. With your plastic v glass example, you seem to be using sustainability in a way that I wouldn't recognise, to me sustainability is about how long you can keep doing something regardless of how much energy it requires (up to a point, and assuming clean energy sources). The glass is infinitely recyclable, the plastic isn't. Especially when burned, so I would say the glass is sustainable.
hopler 8y ago
What percentage of fossil fuel consumption is that? How does food per capita compare to transportation (caets) per capita, in terms of fossil fuel use? Does converting fossil fuels into food fertilizer cause pollution? Transfering waste from an oilfield to a landfill isn't inherently unecological.

Haga 8y ago

One can extract the energy in food?

wavefunction 8y ago
Primarily digestion, but for "left-overs" or food waste and scraps there's vermiculture and composting. I guess we have mass digesters now too to turn the material into heat.
gambiting 8y ago
I mean, that's exactly how kcal count is measured - a portion of food is burnt and the energy released is then measured.
- the8472 8y ago
  You can't measure nutritional values like that. Not everything that can be burned is available to the human metabolism. Cellulose being one obvious example.
  - kraftman 8y ago
    Isn't that how all food is measured though?
    - Isamu 8y ago
      It is burned to measure total energy and then a model is applied to approximate the calories available to the body.
    - the8472 8y ago
      no, foods are analyzed for their digestible contents (fats, fiber, carbs, various kinds of alcohos etc.) and their energy content is then looked up in reference tables. The reference tables are in turn populated with more careful experiments that take digestion, waste products and metabolic efficiency into account. Directly measuring the physiological energy content for millions of food products would be impractical.

tgb 8y ago

It certainly can be a reduction if you can compost at home. The result is useful. The effort is very minimal if you don't need it to compost quickly. It doesn't need to be transported to a landfill. And my understanding is that it breaks down into carbon dioxide instead of methane if you compost instead of landfill, which is a win for climate change.

quickthrower2 8y ago
I compost and one selfish advantage is I now never run out of space in my bin. That food waste takes up a lot of volume.
crispinb 8y ago
I live in a rural area without refuse collection. Having to deal with it all yourself really focuses the mind on keeping waste of all types to a minumum. I suspect more fees for waste collection is what would do likewise for urban dwellers.
- SteveGerencser 8y ago
  We live in a rural area as well and we have to take any trash either to the dump or a convenience center. Since we compost, recycle, and raise a significant percentage of our food, we only actually need to take trash to the dump once a month at most.