Food Waste Recycling Education - Obeo

Editor's Notes

1. We are here today to talk about food waste. Can anyone give me some examples of food waste? We all waste food sometimes. We might get full before we clear our plates, or sometimes food goes off in the fridge by accident - I want to get you thinking about how we can reduce food waste. And I’m going to show you how important food waste recycling is. So can you guess how many tonnes (1,000 kgs) of food waste is produced in Ireland each year??
2. 1 million tonnes, that’s how much and that is just in Ireland! (300,000 tonnes in our homes)
3. That’s enough food waste to fill Croke Park to the brim, not once, not twice but….
4. 2.5 times! That’s a staggering amount of food waste. Next time your scraping your plates after lunch or dinner think about all that food waste filling up Croke Park. So now let’s move onto recycling food waste.
5. Why recycle our food waste? We know what food waste is and how much of it we produce in Ireland, so I’m going to tell you why we should recycle it. In the next half hour you’ll find out about The Food Loop, and discover how food waste can be converted into compost to help grow new food. So let’s have a think about recycling in general. Tell me how you separate your rubbish? How many bins do you have? Where does the rubbish in the black bin end up? Does anyone know what a landfill is? It’s also called the dump. It’s a big field, where they dig a hole and fill it with rubbish, then it’s covered over with soil and more layers of rubbish are added. So it’s a pretty smelly place. If food waste goes into our black bin it will go to landfill which causes serious environmental damage, polluting our atmosphere, soil and water.
6. It creates methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times stronger then CO2. Does anyone know what a greenhouse gas is? They are gases that heat up our atmosphere and change our weather patterns. This makes it hard to grow plants and crops that feed us and can also destroy the natural habitats of many animals. Food waste in landfill also creates leachate, a liquid that contaminates our soils and water. Another big problem is that we have no more room for all this food waste, our landfills are filling fast and the government isn’t building new ones. So you can see how important it is that we find an alternative to putting our food waste into the black bin!
7. The brown bin And that’s where the brown bin comes in. The brown bin takes all food and garden waste. It can even be used to recycle cooked meat and chiken bones. - Hands up who has a brown bin or a home compost bin in the garden? What foods can we put into the brown bin that we cannot put into our home compost?
8. Did you know that 1/3 of the food in your kitchen will end up in the bin! That is a lot of food. Its everyone’s responsibility not to waste food. - 3/5 or 60% is avoidable food waste e.g. plate scrapings after dinner, leftovers, food that’s passed it’s use by date- can manage this better - 1/5 or 20% is could be avoided e.g. uneaten bread crusts, potato skins- can change the habit - 1/5 or 20% is unavoidable food waste e.g. chicken bones, banana skins, pineapple - There will always be some food waste but by focusing on the first two types of food waste you can reduce the amount you waste by a whole lot- 80% - We should only take what we are going to eat, finish everything on your plate and always eat your vegetables! - We should also recycle the food waste we can’t eat.
9. The Bin Truck - You often see big bin trucks on the street picking up wheelie bins. - But sometimes you don’t think about what happens to our food waste when the bin man comes to pick up the brown bin.
10. - Did you ever see one truck picking up two different types of bins? - Some trucks have two compartments which means that they can pick up different types of waste without mixing them together.
11. Composting The bin truck delivers the food waste to an industrial composting facility. There are lots of these all over Ireland. These facilities are like a giant warehouses where the food and garden waste goes in one end and compost comes out the other. It takes 12 weeks to convert our food and garden waste into nutritious compost. So I’ll pass around some compost and you can feel how soft and nutritious it is for plants. And I’ll tell you how it’s made while you’re having a look at it.
12. Inside the facility there are big tractors that turn the compost. This adds air to the compost which helps all the little micro-organisms do their work to break down the food. Does anyone want to guess what a micro-organism is? They’re like good bacteria/bugs that are really tiny and so they’re called microscopic. Did you know that during this process the compost reaches 70 degrees Celsius, that’s really hot! At this high temperature all bacteria are killed which makes the compost safe. This is a similar process to pasteurizing milk only with compost the heat is generated naturally.
13. Crop Growth So now all our food and garden waste has been converted into nutritious compost. Local farmers buy this compost and use it to spread over their fields. The compost is mixed with the soil and all the nutrients help to grow new crops. So if plants get their nutrients from compost where do we get our nutrients from?
14. Some farmers buy artificial fertilizers made from chemicals. But its been proven that compost made from our food waste provides more long term benefits to the soil then the artificial alternatives.
15. Market Place - Irish farmers then sell their produce to local supermarkets. Next time you are in the supermarket have a lookout for all the Irish grown fruits and vegetables. Like this sticker on this pepper. Do you know any vegetable farmers? Does anyone live on a farm? What do you grow? It’s pretty cool to think that the food we buy in our supermarket could have been grown using our old food waste!
16. So why should we buy locally grown produce? Buying local means that our money stays local, helping our local business grow. It’s also good news for the environment as our food doesn’t have to travel to far so it tastes fresher.
17. Play your part! - So I hope I showed you how important it is to reduce food waste and recycle what you can’t eat. Working with the person beside you write down 2 ways you could reduce your food waste. So now I’ll give you this little box to recycle your food waste at home. This will make it easier to recycle your food waste. As sometimes the kitchen bin can get smelly and messy when there’s food waste in it. Whereas this little box is clean and tells you exactly what you can recycle. Make sure to close it over to keep in the smells. And then you just pop it straight into the brown bin. It’s breaks down along with the food waste as it’s made from compostable materials.
18. Try this at home!