The Country Winning The Battle On Food Waste

Pepperdine University is having some trouble as they try to go about achieving the goal set by the California government stating that 75% of waste must be diverted by 2050. This article covers the specifics of the conservation efforts at Pepperdine, and also looks at more successful programs going on at UCLA and Santa Clara University. Some effective tactics include a comprehensive education plan on recycling, requiring faculty and staff to dispose of landfill waste themselves by only collecting recyclable waste, and partnering with athletic teams to champion conservation.

Green Era's biodigester facility processes food waste in a closed, oxygen-free system that captures methane and converts it into renewable natural gas while producing compost. The system, which launched in spring 2025, accepts packaged food waste from restaurants, food banks, grocery stores, and residential composting services. The facility diverts approximately 85,000 tons of food waste annually from landfills and supplies enough renewable natural gas to Peoples Gas to power up to 3,000 homes.

AgriProtein, a large-scale maggot farm in Cape Town, is one of many companies addressing the “long on waste and short on protein” problem the world is facing. Maggots provide protein sustenance for animals like fish, poultry, and pigs while also eating organic waste. While the facilities are costly to make, the industry has been booming as the world shifts how it thinks about waste and sustainability.

Les Alchimistes is a social enterprise outside of Paris that turns the 900,000 tons of food waste produced every year into compost that is then sold to farmers. The group is supported by industrial composters named Tidy Planet who have managed to speed up the natural composting process from 6-12 months to less than two weeks. The Alchimistes have six composting sites across France, and they rely on city cyclists to pick up the food waste from each participating restaurant.

Loyola University Chicago's Searle Biodiesel Lab converts approximately 9,000 gallons of used cooking oil annually from campus dining halls and local institutions into 8,000 gallons of cleaner-burning biodiesel, which powers eight campus shuttle buses and produces 1,500 gallons of hand soap as a byproduct. Since 2013, the lab has created learning opportunities for students and operated as a financially self-sustaining enterprise.

Companies and research initiatives around the world are developing and testing new toilets that can collect human urine and turn it into fertilizer. These urine diversion toilets have been implemented in places like South Africa with mixed results. However, researchers in Sweden are using portable toilets to gather the urine, dry it into fertilizer pellets that are then used to grow barley for beer. This work could show how to implement these kinds of toilets on a large scale.

The electricity powering 3,000 Perth homes might have started out as moldy bread and rotting lettuce. The city of Cockburn collects food waste from supermarkets and restaurants to be fed into a mechanical "stomach" that converts the waste to energy. Methane is trapped and used to power electric generators. The remainder of the "digested" food is turned into compost and liquid fertilizer. The operation has recycled 43 tons so far, removing 81,000 kilograms of gases that otherwise would escape landfills and warm the atmosphere.

Mason & Greens is a zero-waste store that reduces environmental impact by selling package-free items, from shampoo bars to organic produce. Dry goods and the wines, oils, and kombucha on tap are bought with reusable containers and priced by the ounce, which reduces plastic waste and allows customers to buy only what they need. In addition to minimizing products' carbon footprints, the store has been profitable since it opened and the owners say that, while prices are initially higher for consumers, reusable products may be less expensive in the long run because they don’t have to be replaced as frequently.

A growing number of bug breeders in the United States are raising black soldier flies to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, and food waste. The larvae can convert waste into fertilizer for crops, while also reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In one experiment at Louisiana State University, about two tons of cafeteria food waste is processed by the fly larvae. Creating a similiar system on a larger scale for municipalities can be expensive, but the flies could be a multifaceted solution to the country’s trash problem.

The University of Notre Dame installed three Grind2Energy systems, which aims to reduce the amount of food waste from the campus’ dining halls. The systems process the waste and send it to a local dairy farm where they break down the material to produce biogas that is used to generate electrical power for 1,000 homes each day in Plymouth, Indiana. While not everyone at the university has committed to the sustainability efforts, these systems can be scaled to be used on other college campuses.