Throughout the world, the problem of food waste keeps growing, compounding the larger problem of waste and garbage.

There are a number of ways to tackle this problem. One involves wasting less food.

Another involves better management of food waste through composting, and the incredible success of this approach in South Korea can be a model for the entire world. South Korea has managed to increase food waste recycling levels from 2 percent to a staggering 95 percent according to the linked article.

South Korea has embraced composting and linked it to urban farming, with training programs that teach people how to compost food waste.

More importantly, sending food waste to landfills is now banned, and South Koreans are required to discard food waste in yellow biodegradable bags. The cost is typically around $6 per month, which is very reasonable but also puts on cost on throwing out food. This provides an incentive to be more careful about wasting food and also encourages composting.

This is one of those ideas that should be embraced around the world. Perhaps California can start?

The amount of food wasted is staggering. Just consider how much good food is thrown away at places like restaurants, arenas, banquet halls, etc. Much of this food is high quality food, but invariably there will be more food cooked than is needed. And then it’s generally thrown away.

This article explains how a chef in Montreal has been attacking this problem, and now his process is starting to be adopted in more cities.

Here’s an important part of the process:

La Tablée des Chefs has developed a simple and sustainable process that sets a new standard for salvaging food in the hotel and restaurant industry. Here’s how the system works: Hotels, restaurants and institutions that want to donate their surplus food — on an impromptu or recurring basis — contact La Tablée. Together they figure out how much food they have to give, who will wrap it up and put it away at the end of the day, whether it needs refrigeration, when it can be picked up and where, how many people it will feed. The organization making the donation must agree to adhere to strict hygiene standards. (Not to donate food that has been left at room temperature for more than two hours, for example.)

On the other end, La Tablée fields requests from charitable organizations, both large and small, that are looking for food to supplement their programs. They are the ones who will be responsible for picking up the food and for ensuring that the “cold chain” is maintained. This means refrigerated products remain refrigerated and frozen products remain frozen at all times. They must pledge to serve the donated food, free-of-charge, in a timely fashion.

Read the entire article as it’s very informative, and then check out the organization website for more information.

Humans waste more than 1.4 billion tons of food annually. That’s a stunning number.

A new study explains how all of this ridiculous waste contributes to climate change.

We should be focusing being more efficient about using surplus food, not just to feed the hungry, but to cut down on the unnecessary production of food.

When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity.

But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels.

But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.

A hulking 10-year-old plant on the outskirts of Kristianstad uses a biological process to transform the detritus into biogas, a form of methane. That gas is burned to create heat and electricity, or is refined as a fuel for cars.

Once the city fathers got into the habit of harnessing power locally, they saw fuel everywhere: Kristianstad also burns gas emanating from an old landfill and sewage ponds, as well as wood waste from flooring factories and tree prunings.

Over the last five years, many European countries have increased their reliance on renewable energy, from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, because fossil fuels are expensive on the Continent and their overuse is, effectively, taxed by the European Union’s emissions trading system.

But for many agricultural regions, a crucial component of the renewable energy mix has become gas extracted from biomass like farm and food waste. In Germany alone, about 5,000 biogas systems generate power, in many cases on individual farms.

This is one of many ways we could be taking advantage of recycling all of the waste we have in this country.