“I know what you’re thinking – what is international action star Ed Begley Jr. doing talking to his blossoming children about sex? Well as a matter of fact, I’m saving the world!”

So begins one of three new PSA videos featuring Ed Begley Jr., an actor known for his appearances on the television series “St. Elsewhere” and Christopher Guest’s series of mockumentaries like “Best in Show.” But Begley is also an avid environmentalist: he previously co-hosted the green living reality show “Living with Ed” with his wife Rachelle Carson from 2007 to 2010, and now he has teamed up with the Center for Biological Diversity to add a dose of humor to the fight to increase awareness of some serious ecological issues plaguing our planet.

The new PSA series follows a simple but amusing premise. Each begins with Begley in a strange scenario: dumpster diving, wearing night vision goggles to read in his darkened living room, or, as in the above quote, lecturing his adult children on the best ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies (he cites socks-and-sandals and fedoras as two great tips). But the funny lines don’t obscure the true message of these PSAs: that issues like energy waste, food waste, and unsustainable population growth are wreaking havoc on the environment, and that there are effective actions that people can undertake every day to be part of the solution.

The PSAs are aptly titled “Better than Ed.” While Begley offers unsustainable (or frankly odd) responses to such issues as the fact that the United States wastes 40 percent of its food supply, calling on people to dumpster dive and enjoy such delicacies as pizza with Cheerios and Goldfish and Band-Aid tacos, the PSAs also offer real-life ways that consumers can combat these problems.

“You don’t have to dumpster dive like Ed Begley Jr. to save the planet,” offers an off-screen voice, noting that people should simply be aware of what they buy and endeavor not to waste food at home.

Similarly, reading in night-vision goggles may not be the most convenient way to fight the fact that the United States uses four times as much energy per year as the global average (nor is it “some new sort of Hollywood method acting,” even if, as Begley notes, he is “saving energy and looking fleek.”) But people can, for example, speak up for cleaner, smarter energy and promote the installation of solar roof panels.

“Sometimes you have to poke fun at serious problems to draw attention to real solutions,” says Ed Begley Jr. of the new PSAs. “But you don’t have to eat garbage or be famous to help save the world.”

Adding a touch of humor to these real-life solutions helps make them more approachable and – perhaps most importantly – starts a conversation.

“Most people know that runaway growth and waste have terrible environmental consequences, but it can be tough to know how one person can make a difference,” says Stephanie Feldstein, the Center’s population and sustainability director. “These are big, complicated issues to tackle, but with Ed’s help, we hope to show that everyone has a role to play in solving them.”

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These days, climate change has a lot of us thinking about the way we treat the environment. But our minds often drift to the obviously offensive images: factory pipes pumping clouds of toxic grey smoke into the otherwise pristine sky. But pollution runs deep, from producers all the way down to consumers, and it can be a result of something as subtle as your last meal. In fact, recent research found that the majority of food waste — a detriment to the environment as well as wasted calories that could feed millions of people —  happens at home.

How Does Food Waste Pollute?

There are two categories when it comes to food waste’s effects on the environment: upstream and downstream. Upstream effects are a result of the production of greenhouse gases through the supply chain of production, storage, manufacturing, and distribution of food. The downstream effects are witnessed after food has been thrown away, either by the consumer or retailer (and often the farmers and distributors themselves). Wasted food is sent to landfills to decompose anaerobically, or without the presence of oxygen. This is when methane is formed.

Food waste is the single biggest occupant in U.S. landfills. When it is discarded and broken down, it produces carbon dioxide. But even more alarming is that it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25-times stronger than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Each kilogram of food waste produces 3.8 kilograms of greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, food waste pollutes the land. Many countries around the world are running out of landfill space. How do they remedy this? They destroy more land to accommodate it. The underground water and runoff is then infected with the food waste. The overuse of fertilizers creates excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, which poison drinking water and aquatic ecosystems.

11 Facts About Food Waste You Can’t Ignore

1. In the U.S., agriculture itself emits 9% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, American farmers are throwing away as much as 50% – half! – of all produce because it doesn’t live up to consumers’ aesthetic standards. Imagine how much food waste and agriculture sector green house gas emissions we could cut by learning to love ugly fruits and vegetables!
2. About 60 million tons of produce – $160 billion – are wasted by retailers and consumers each year. This constitutes one third of all foodstuffs.
3. An American family of four wastes $1,600 worth of food each year.
4. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-third of the world’s food is lost or wasted. That amounts to nearly $3 trillion.
5. If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases with a carbon footprint of 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2.
6. Food waste is economically driven. Fresh produce makes up 15% of supermarket profits. Reducing food produce waste by 50% would cause supermarkets to go from a 1.5% profit margin to a 0.7% one. And losing 50% of consumer waste would result in a loss of $250 billion in economic activity.
7. According to the UN, reducing food waste by just 25% would be enough to all the currently malnourished people.
8. About 1.4 billion hectares, or nearly 30% of available agricultural land, is used to grow or farm food that ends up wasted.
9. Consumer waste per capita is between 95 and 115 kilograms each year in Europe and North America. Consumer waste per capita in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia is only between six and 11 kilograms per year.
10. In the US, 25% of all the freshwater consumed annually is associated with discarded food.
11. Despite America wasting 50% of total produce, nearly 42 million Americans live in food-insecure households. That means millions of children don’t know where their next meal will come from.

How to Solve the Food Waste Problem

It’s a much longer and more difficult road to start transforming the agriculture sector by targeting farms and distributors. As consumers looking for the prettiest fruits and vegetables, we contribute to their dilemma. How do we expect to transform farming and distribution practices if we continue to refuse to purchase an apple with a minor blemish, even if its quality and taste is completely unaffected by the blemish? Let’s embrace ugly fruits and vegetables and demand them from our local grocery stores. Meanwhile, let’s also download a shelf life cheat sheet and learn about the true lifespan of our favorite foods. Then, let’s purchase food and plan our weekly meals accordingly, understanding how long food stays fresh before spoiling as well as proper storage methods.

Re-use your leftovers as a rule and whenever your fruits or vegetables are rounding their last leg, turn them into a juice, a casserole, soup, fruit pie, or fruit bread. In the meantime, seek out local “ugly” produce companies that make the best of otherwise tossed fruits and vegetables. Companies like Imperfect Produce, Perfectly Imperfect, and Fresh Direct are leading the charge.

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The post 11 Alarming Food Waste Stats That’ll Have You Licking Your Plate Clean appeared first on EcoSalon.

D’Artagnan’s Green Circle chicken line combines heirloom chicken breeds and modern, sustainable practices to remain at the forefront of sustainable meat production, and the line’s increasing popularity proves founder and CEO Ariane Daguin knows what she’s doing.

Ariane Daguin: A Pioneer of Sustainable Meat and Poultry

When D’Artagnan was first founded in 1985, free-range and natural were far from the omnipresent buzz words they are today. But Daguin already believed that humane, sustainably produced meat tasted better, and she did everything in her power to make it a reality.

Daguin was raised in the Gascony region of France, where her father, Chef André Daguin, was famed for his artistry with foie gras and other Gascon specialties. It’s no surprise that when, in 1985 Daguin launched D’Artagnan, she became the first purveyor of game and foie gras in the U.S.

But Daguin’s expertise is not limited to this controversial French delicacy. She has long been at the forefront of the organic movement in America, pioneering free-range chicken production and distribution in the States. Not only did Daguin receive the French Legion d’Honneur in 2006 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bon Appétit in 2005, but she was recognized one of the Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company in 2014, a title she strives to live up to every day at D’Artagnan.

The Green Circle: Closing the Food Waste Gap with Heirloom Chickens

D’Artagnan’s newest venture is Green Circle Chicken, a line that brings an element of Daguin’s roots to the United States.

The inspiration for the line was bringing that farm-fed, robust flavor back to chicken, a flavor that Daguin knew would be best developed by feeding the animals real vegetable scraps.

“Where I come from, in Gascony, chickens roam around the farm and eat scraps of vegetables and bits of insects,” says Daguin. “I wanted to see how we could do that here.”

The first step was to choose an heirloom chicken breed, which, Daguin notes, would be better equipped to digest veggie scraps instead of the grain mash that many of our industrialized breeds have been raised to consume.

“I went back to a very sturdy breed from the Landes region,” says Daguin: a Brune Landaise or Landaise Brown chicken, beloved by chefs like Antoine Westermann of Le Coq Rico for their texture and flavor.

To feed the chickens, Daguin began a system of recuperating buckets full of produce scraps from chefs when slaughtered chickens were delivered, an ingenious albeit complex system that lent the Green Circle line its name.

“It was very exciting, but it was very complicated,” says Daguin, chuckling. “We lost a lot of buckets.”

Eventually, Daguin decided to streamline the process by sourcing her scraps, not from chefs, but from Amish markets in Lancaster county.

“Those markets were very happy to give us the leftovers at the end of the day, so instead of peelings, we got just the ugly vegetables,” she says. Chefs who receive Green Circle chickens now compost their scraps instead, which she notes is even more sustainable than constant scrap shuttling.

The Future of Green Circle

While Green Circle is an extremely popular line at D’Artagnan, Daguin still has some ideas for improvement.

Daguin’s next step will be to streamline the delivery process, which she calls “one of her biggest concerns.” She recently hired two people whose sole job is to coordinate delivery logistics to ensure that trucks are as efficient as possible. The company is also experimenting with hybrid trucks to reduce its carbon footprint even further.

While Daguin and D’Artagnan are indeed models for sustainability, with guaranteed antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken and the coveted Certified Humane label, make no mistake: this Frenchwoman’s first order of business will always be flavor. Luckily, Green Circle delivers there as well.

Green Circle has won countless blind taste tests, including one in the New York Times, and when Michelin-starred Jean-Georges Vongerichten first tasted Green Circle chicken, witnesses claim he was on the verge of tears.

Aged versions of the chicken are now available as well. Chef Westermann requests that the chickens be kept alive for 110 days before slaughter – a full month longer than baseline Green Circle Chickens and nearly three times as long as conventionally raised American chicken – for a chicken that is textured and full of flavor.

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Science has finally discovered a fool-proof way to detect just how ripe a tomato is.

And, yes. Humans can figure out if a tomato is ripe with their hands and eyes. But this technology is so advanced it could reduce large-scale food waste.

The technology

Researchers at the University of the Basque Country discovered the new technique. The highly specific procedure uses a portable Raman spectrometer, which Modern Farmer says can measure the ripeness of a tomato down to a granular level.

The spectrometer is so precise that in time, it could help farmers pick produce at the best possible time, which would allow fruit to ripen when it gets to a market—not after.

Is this technology necessary?

It may not seem like this new technique is necessary. After all, humans have been detecting tomato ripeness on their own for years.

But because this technology is so precise, it could reduce food waste.

“Grocery stores won’t sell over or under-ripe tomatoes,” Maat van Uitert, backyard gardening expert and author, says.

“So if a farmer can determine when their tomatoes are about to reach peak ripeness, chances are that a higher-quality, and healthier, product will be delivered to the consumer.”

In addition to reducing food waste, tomatoes picked at the height of ripeness contain a higher nutritional value than over or under-ripe tomatoes, van Uitert adds.

Tips for home tomato growers

Not all of us are lucky enough to have technology that can help us find perfectly ripe tomatoes. Luckily, all you really have to do to find ripe tomatoes in your garden is use your hands and eyes.

Easily discover if a tomato is ripe by gently squeezing it with your thumb on one side, and your four fingers on the other. The tomato should have a little give. So, if there’s no give, it’s not quite ripe, Varda Epstein, part-time gardener and communications writer at Kars4Kids, says.

A tomato is over-ripe if its skin has split, it smells sour, or is overly soft.

And remember: Don’t refrigerate tomatoes. Store them stem-side down and eventually, they’ll ripen. You can help the process along by placing under-ripe tomatoes in a sunny window or a paper bag.

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The post This Super Precise Technique Could Reduce Food Waste in a Major Way appeared first on EcoSalon.

When we think of food waste, we usually think first about our own consumption, and that’s a great start. But it’s just the start.

From commercializing “ugly” produce that once never would have made it to the supermarket to revolutionizing expiration dates, the developed world has been making leaps and bounds in reducing its food waste. But there’s another, less visible but even more important problem: two-thirds of the food that is lost or wasted on the planet happens at the production or distribution level. This is happening mainly in emerging economies due in large part to a lack of reliable cold chain.

“We grow and produce enough food today to feed 10 billion people,” explains John Mandyck, Chief Sustainability Officer at United Technologies Corporation. “We live on a planet of 7 billion people. And only about 6 billion people are getting enough food.”

What is a Cold Chain?

A cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain allowing perishable food to be transported in a refrigerated environment from where it is produced to where it is consumed.

In the developed world, the cold chain is a well-oiled machine. Truck and trailer units in the United States and Europe can cool a single truckload to three different temperature points, allowing distributors to transport frozen fish, fresh meat, and delicate strawberries all at once.

In the developing world, where such technology is not available, countries often use an open pickup truck to transport food to open-air markets, meaning that perishable food is less likely to make it all the way to its destination without at least some spoilage.

“In some countries, 50 percent of fruits and vegetables are lost before consumers can have access to them,” says Mandyck. “The International Institute of Refrigeration has estimated that less than 10 percent of the world’s perishable foods are refrigerated today.”

Finding a Solution to Cold Chain Woes

In order to reduce the amount of food waste caused by cold chain problems, the solution seems clear: introduce refrigerated transportation technology to the developing world. Of course, this is not nearly as easy as it sounds.

The distribution systems that work so well in the developed world are difficult to translate to developing countries, due to a lack of appropriate road infrastructure for transport vehicles of this size, lack of support infrastructure for servicing them, and the price tag on these technologies.

That’s where Mandyck and his team come in. They have been working to reverse engineer their products to develop high-quality yet simpler refrigeration systems that would cool to just one temperature point. These smaller, more affordable systems have already helped jump-start the cold chain in developing economies like India, where United Technologies Corporation has already successfully introduced such vehicles.

Financing the Cold Chain

Of course, there is one issue: even with a lower price point, these vehicles are often still too expensive for those who need them. There is, however, one major incentive for governments to invest in them: climate change.

Given the extremely intensive way in which we produce food – from electricity for water pumps to diesel for transport vehicles to methane produced by intensive animal agriculture – food waste worldwide produces 3.3 billion metric tons of CO2, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We’re encouraging countries to look at food waste as the sleeping climate issue,” explains Mandyck. “It is the only climate policy that will reduce significant greenhouse gases, feed more people, save water, and promote national security. There is no other climate policy that can do that.”

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The post Growing the Cold Chain: An Essential Key to Reducing Food Waste appeared first on EcoSalon.

At first glance, the association of charitable organizations like food banks and the capitalist free market economy may seem backward, but the truth is, the free market economy is one of the best things to have happened to food banks, at least, if you look at Feeding America as an example.

Feeding America is the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief organization, providing more than 3.6 billion meals to people throughout the United States. It is, at its core, a food bank network, connecting 200 food banks to 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, providing them with donations from grocery stores, food producers, and farms.

But while Feeding America may be a charity, the source of its success is rooted in the very idea of the free market economy and the intervention of a team of economists from the University of Chicago, including Canice Prendergast.

The Implementation of a Free-Market Strategy

According to a Slate article, when Prendergast arrived, the organization, then known as Second Harvest, used a far more regulated market system for food distribution, which is in-line with food banks around the world. A donor company would notify the association that a load of food was available, and it would be offered to an individual food bank based on need and proximity to the pickup locale, also taking into account the quota of food that each food bank was entitled to each year. While the system was good, it was far from optimized, and that’s where the team of economists came in.

The system, as it was, treated all food the same and worked based upon pounds of food rather than variety or type. There were frequent errors whereby one food bank would end up with far too much of one type of food or with a type of food that couldn’t be adequately stored, i.e. milk, where there was no refrigeration, and would have to be discarded.

Prendergast and his team believed that they had the solution to these problems: a system of credits or points allocated to each individual food bank that would be used to bid on individual shipments, based on the need of each bank. The idea was unpopular at first, especially with smaller food banks afraid that they would be squashed by the larger banks with more credits, but with a few modifications, devised by sociologist Harry Davis, the system took its final form.

As opposed to a bidding war, a sealed bid auction would be held for every donation, and the shares from the winning bid would be attributed to the other food banks in the Second Harvest network. With the psychology of the market changed from a rat race competition to a win-win situation for all, the plan suddenly seemed far fairer, and it was put into place.

The Results for Food Banks

Today, in large part due to the fast turnaround of its free-market strategy, Feeding America is instrumental in rescuing some of the approximately 6 billion pounds of fresh produce that are wasted every year in America. Individual banks request only the donations that they can distribute effectively, meaning that far less of this food is wasted. Last year, 967 million pounds of fresh produce were distributed to people in need.

This is a huge contrast with other countries, such as the UK, where fresh produce is nearly never distributed because of an inability to store and hand it out in a timely fashion. Ninety percent of 70 UK food banks surveyed in 2015 said that less than a quarter of their food was fresh; a third were unable to hand out fresh food at all, according to the Independent.

Feeding America is able to distribute far more food than before on the whole. After the implementation of this free-market economy style of distribution, the supply of food donations increased by 50 million to 100 million pounds, 12 million of which can be traced directly to the experiment.

While the heart of Feeding America remains resolutely that of a charity organization, letting some elements of capitalism slip in has actually made it more productive and better able to serve the hungry.

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The post Yes, Food Banks Embracing the Free Market Economy is a Really Good Thing appeared first on EcoSalon.

Forget expensive designer clothing. Your next gown could be constructed out of upcycled food waste.

We probably don’t have to tell you that an exorbitant amount of food is wasted every year, but to drive home our point, get a load of this depressing statistic: “The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that 1.3 billion tons of food go to waste each year,” TakePart reports. And all that food waste creates “an annual global carbon footprint of 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.”

Okay, so we know food waste is a problem and we need to discover different ways to use this food. And although a lot of it can be eaten and donated, there’s still some that can’t be consumed because it’s not edible. So, that’s why using food waste to make clothing is so awesome—even if it seems incredibly strange.

Second generation food waste—things like orange peels, coconut husks, and salmon skin—can be transformed into synthetic fibers and then used for constructing fashionable duds.

So, which companies are using these food-based materials? Let us introduce you to a few of them.

1. Nau

This Portland, Oregon-based sustainable clothing company uses alternative materials, such as 37.5 Technology insulation, to insulate its jackets. The insulation—it’s made from coconuts—provides wicking, and temperature and odor control.

2. Tidal Vision

Fish waste is still a problem for sustainable fisheries. That’s why Craig Kasberg, a former commercial fisher, decided to try and upcycle aquatic leather and chitin/chitosan. After a lot of trial and error, Zach Wilkinson and Kasberg successfully launched Tidal Vision’s line of sustainable wear, which includes vegetable-based tanning products, salmon-leather wallets, and belts.

“Additionally, Tidal Vision developed a way to transform crab shells into chitosan textile fiber,” TakePart adds.

3. Ecoalf

This company collects leftover coffee grounds to make shoes. Weird, but once the process is explained, it makes sense… kind of:

“Since 2009, Ecoalf has been collecting leftover coffee grounds, primarily from a Taiwan-based restaurant chain,” explains TakePart.

“The still-humid compounds are taken to a recycling plant to dry and have 11 percent of their oils extracted to maintain a microporousness that allows for binding with other materials. The result is a nano-powder that’s mixed with either recycled polyester or nylon polymers to create yarn.”

4. Qmilk

Anke Domaske discovered a zero-waste way to make her company’s unique, milk fiber. Domaske created a process, using 100 percent natural ingredients with casein, a raw milk product.

“It only requires a maximum of two liters of water per kilogram of fiber and a maximum processing time of five minutes,” Domaske says.

Once perfecting the process, Domaske launched Qmilk in 2011. Qmilk is a biodegradable yarn that can be used in bedding, carpets, paper, and medical textiles.

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The post Designers Turn to Food Waste to Make Upcycled Fashion appeared first on EcoSalon.

That purpose: to be enjoyed and eaten.

The video below is a cute and, honestly, kind of sad representation of what happens when we leave food in our fridge. Let’s not deny strawberries their life purpose — or their apparent love for limes.

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We love John Oliver but hate food waste. So, we’re really happy that he gets that ugly food isn’t trash and food waste is lame.

On this past Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver explained to the world that most food waste isn’t actually waste, or trash, but totally viable meal options that just look a bit weird. Mashable picked what could be considered the best quote of the entire show:

“Our produce aisles have become a lot like Leonardo DiCaprio’s penis: exclusively accessible to the physically flawless. And it’s not right.”

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The post John Oliver Brilliantly Schools Viewers on Food Waste [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

We work hard not to waste food — or are we fooling ourselves?

We all know that every time you waste food, an angel doesn’t get their wings. (Kidding. Sort of.) But while most of us know that food waste is kind of a big deal, and do our best to reduce our part in the equation, new research has revealed almost three quarters of Americans believe they waste less food than the national average.

This finding is mind-blowing, especially since 31 to 40 percent of the American food supply is wasted, costing us $161.6 billion annually (no, that’s not a typo).

“Americans perceive themselves as wasting very little food, but in reality, we are wasting substantial quantities,” lead study author Roni Neff, Ph.D., said in a statement. “It happens throughout the food chain, including both a lot of waste by consumers, and a lot on our behalf, when businesses think we won’t buy imperfect food. The root causes are complex.”

The study, from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, surveyed 1,010 American consumers in April 2014, and covered topics like awareness, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors linked to wasted food.

Surprisingly, only 10 percent found environmental concerns when people waste food to be “very important.” They felt saving money and setting a good example for children to be the biggest motivators in not wanting to waste food.

Top reasons for throwing food out before eating it included food safety concerns, and preferring to eat only fresh food. Meanwhile, 41 percent of respondents who composted weren’t concerned about how much food they waste.

“The survey results are especially relevant for three groups,” said Neff. “For educators working to reduce food waste, a key finding is that highlighting financial savings may resonate more with consumers than other types of messaging. But there is still a need to explain the environmental effects of wasting food. For policymakers, our findings suggest a priority on making date labels clear and consistent, and encoding sell-by labels so they do not mislead consumers. And for businesses, the survey highlights changes consumers want, like offering re-sealable bags and smaller product sizes, and discounting damaged or near-expiration foods.”

Wasted food is a slippery slope—not only does it cost us billions of dollars each year, but it’s also a massive drain on our resources: In 2010, about 30 percent of the fertilizer, 35 percent of fresh water, and 31 percent of the cropland in the U.S. was used to grow food that was never eaten. Kinda makes you lose your appetite, doesn’t it?

“Consumer waste of food in the U.S. represents a powerful quintuple threat; reducing it may improve food security, nutrition, budgets, environment and public health,” said Neff. Small things you can do include planning meals and portion sizes ahead of time, buying food as-you-go instead of making bulk buys, regularly checking in on your inventory and using it before it goes bad, and freezing what you’re not able to use right away.

How do you cut down on food waste?

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