Tag: Janet Boscarino

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News News Blog

Leaders Aim to Cut Food Waste by 2030

CREDIT: Kroger

Kroger

Justin Fox Burks

Food waste is in the crosshairs of city officials and local environmental leaders with a plan to reduce it by 50 percent by 2030.

The Memphis Food Waste Project is led by the nonprofit Clean Memphis and joined by a coalition of private and public partners, including the City of Memphis, the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Sustainability and Resilience, Memphis Transformed, Project Green Fork, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Compost Fairy, Epicenter, Kroger, the Mid-South Food Bank, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. Together, the groups will push to reduce food waste to save money, improve the environment, and help ensure fewer Memphians go hungry.

Clean Memphis executive director Janet Boscarino said food waste and packaging now comprise 30 percent of landfill volume. It also produces the most methane gas (the most harmful gas), she said. These reductions will aid city leaders to meet goals detailed in the Memphis Area Climate Action Plan.

“The City of Memphis can service as a leader in developing a more sustainable food systems approach, reducing wasted food, and the resulting wasted labor, land, and money, as well as increased pollutants by supporting waste diversion and generating useful products such as finished compost with this diverted food waste,” reads a December proclamation from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.

Justin Fox Burks

Dirty work: the BFI landfill near Millington

Food waste can be diverted from restaurants, hospitality providers, and other food producers in the city, according to the proclamation. Food from those sources has “great rescue potential” for food “that would otherwise go to waste.” The food could be retrieved and donated to those in need, Strickland said in the proclamation.

Boscarino said the United States spends $218 billion (or about 1.3 percent of the gross domestic product) growing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten. She said the waste numbers are staggering given that one in eight Americans are food insecure — lack reliable access to food because of money and other concerns — and that one in five Memphians are food insecure.

Waste occurs along nearly every stop in the food supply chain here, Boscarino said. Some food spoils as farmers can’t move it to market quickly enough. Some food is tossed as it may not meet cosmetic standards, even though it has the same taste or nutritional value. Food continues to spoil as it moves through the supply chain to grocery stores, restaurants, and hospitality venues, she said. But the largest food-waste sector “by far,” she said, is in homes.

“We over-purchase, we don’t store things rights, we don’t eat leftovers, we don’t use all parts of the food, and we’re not composting at a level we need to,” Boscarino said.

To combat all of this, Project Green Fork will be working with restaurants, hospitality venues like hotels, and event spaces like FedExForum to donate their food and avoid waste. Memphis Food Waste Project members will educate residents on how to more sustainably shop for groceries, how to store food, how to freeze food, and how to “fall in love with leftovers,” Boscarino said.

Test your food waste knowledge with an online quiz at www.cleanmemphis.org.

Read Strickland’s proclamation here:
[pdf-1]

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

This Sucks

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

Bruce VanWyngarden has gone fishing this week. His column returns when he does.

A few years ago, I was having lunch with a coworker who proceeded to go on a long and sort of crazy rant about how much she hates it when restaurants bundle their straws with silverware. After that, when someone complained bitterly about something of no consequence, “straws” became a sort of shorthand dismissal.

So where do we stand, Memphis, on plastic straws? Is this as an issue “straws”?

Bianca Phillips

As a single-use plastic, plastic straws are pretty bad. Millions and millions of plastic straws are used each day in America and then tossed out to litter our lands and shores. Some cities, like Malibu and Washington, D.C., have already banned them. In New York and Hawaii, legislation is pending.

In Memphis, we’re seeing more and more restaurants abandoning the plastic straw.

Janet Boscarino, executive director of Clean Memphis, which oversees Project Green Fork, estimates that about half of Project Green Fork members (about 40 restaurants) have given up plastic straws. But, as of now, Project Green Fork does not include anything about straws in their “6 Steps to Certification” for local restaurants.

“We certainly push for the elimination of single-use plastics, which straws would fall into that category,” Boscarino says.

For Earth Day, Project Green Fork did a program they called “Don’t Suck,” which highlighted recyclable options for straws, including paper and bamboo. “We are certainly trying to raise awareness around eliminating [straws],” she says.

For Boscarino, straws are just once piece of the puzzle in reducing food waste — from bags to food containers to the food itself.

Deni Reilly, owner of Majestic Grille with her husband Patrick, says that restaurant has been straws-by-request since it opened 14 years ago. They only began to use coated paper straws about two years ago. (They go through 12,000 to 14,000 straws in a month.)

Reilly says they’ve always leaned toward being environmentally conscious. They don’t provide water, except for large parties. Their to-go glasses are biodegradable.

She says with a laugh that they do it for the sea turtles.

Octavia Young, the owner of Midtown Crossing Grill, began backing away from straws in 2016 about a year after she opened. She says she was thinking about joining Project Green Fork and started looking at what she could do. She then put up a sign: “Straws are a one-time use item that never biodegrade. Your server will only provide straws upon request in an effort to reduce our footprint. Thank you.”

Young says reaction was mixed, but ultimately, no one can argue, because as the sign says, if they want a straw, all they have to do is ask.

“Hearing about how much [waste] a restaurant produces and actually looking at it for myself, I wanted to be a better neighbor in the community that we serve,” she says.

Scott Tashie has been thinking about straws a lot lately. Tashie is owner of City Silo and three area I Love Juice Bars.

“It’s something we’ve been trying to come up with a solution on for a while, actually,” he says. “And it’s super challenging. Obviously, when you’re in a beverage-heavy business, you want to always take care of your customers, and we’ve tried different options. It’s been challenging to find something that actually works.”

At one point, Tashie was using glass straws, but then his source stopped making them. He tried a bring-your-own straw approach, too. He admits that a straw is not something that’s particularly easy to carry on you, like a reusable bag.

Tashie has been experimenting with different types of straws. Forgoing them completely won’t work because of the smoothies he sells. He recently settled on corn straws that he hooked up with through his association with Malco. (He has family ties to the movie theater chain). Malco is currently working to get corn straws at all of its theaters.

Tashie doesn’t mind the extra cost of the straws. For him, it’s worth it. “There’s only one Earth,” he says. “You can’t really put a price on it.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Clean Memphis Takes Over Project Green Fork

Back in 2007, Margot McNeeley noticed most local restaurants were still using Styrofoam takeout containers. Upon further inspection, she also realized most weren’t recycling. So she set out to do something about it.

McNeeley founded Project Green Fork (PGF), a restaurant sustainability certification program that helps restaurateurs commit to recycling, using Earth-friendly takeout boxes, and green cleaners.

It’s grown to include 75 PGF-certified restaurants, catering companies, and coffee shops across the city. Since 2008, those restaurants have recycled more than four million pounds of plastic, glass, aluminum, cardboard, and paper and more than 200,000 gallons of food waste.

But as of the first of the year, McNeeley is stepping down as PGF’s executive director, and the organization, which was previously a stand-alone organization, is being merged into the programs at Clean Memphis, a grassroots nonprofit that organizes volunteer cleanups and does sustainability outreach education in schools and in the community.

“I’m ready to take on something new. And I think I’ve taken Project Green Fork as far as I can take it as a one-woman show,” said McNeeley, who has operated the organization by herself since its 2008 founding. “Clean Memphis has a much larger budget and more resources than we ever did, and they have a bigger staff and the capability to take it further.”

PGF certifies restaurants that promise to adhere to six steps: 1) convert disposables to compostable, biodegradable products; 2) recycle all recyclable items; 3) develop a composting process; 4) use nontoxic cleaning products; 5) make efforts to conserve energy and water; and 6) maintain grease traps and kitchen hoods to prevent overflows and emissions to sewer and storm systems.

Under Clean Memphis, McNeeley says PGF will maintain the six steps to certification.

“I don’t want people who have supported this for so long to think it’s going away,” McNeeley said. “It’s continuing and will be taken to the next level, whatever that next level may be.”

Janet Boscarino cofounded Clean Memphis in 2008, along with her neighbor Darrin Hills and his boss Mark Lovell, to organize volunteers to pick up litter. The organization also does outreach education work in schools, and they developed a Sustainable Schools program to certify schools in much the same way that PGF certifies restaurants.

In the program’s 20 certified schools, students volunteer for cleanups, plant vegetable gardens, learn about watershed health and water quality, and participate in other sustainable initiatives.

“When we were developing that program, Margot was one of the people I reached out to because of her work with sustainability in restaurants,” Boscarino said. “We grew our understanding of each other’s missions and vision of what we would see Memphis becoming with restaurants and schools moving toward more sustainability.”

Boscarino said, when McNeeley approached her a few months ago about merging the organizations, she knew it would be a good fit. The boards of directors for both organizations discussed the matter, and a decision was reached to pull the PGF program into Clean Memphis’ fold.

“At this point, we don’t see any changes to the program,” Boscarino said. “It’s been very successful, so especially for the first year, we would bring that program under our umbrella and get to know it and understand the ins and outs, as opposed to making any changes.”

Clean Memphis is currently searching for a program coordinator to run PGF. That person will run the day-to-day operations, like McNeeley did, but Clean Memphis will handle the administrative tasks associated with PGF, something McNeeley had to manage on her own before the merger.

“The new program coordinator can just focus on building the program and promoting the restaurants and sustainability,” Boscarino said.

As for what McNeeley will do next, she won’t say yet: “I have three things I’m working on, but I’m not ready to announce any.”