• Austin, Texas: Restaurants banned from throwing away food
    18 replies, posted
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/409594-restaurants-in-austin-now-banned-from-throwing-away-food Under a new policy that began Monday, all food-permitted businesses in the city are required to keep organic material, such as food scraps and soiled paper products, from landfills. Businesses can dispose of their food waste by donating extra food, giving scraps to local farms for animals, or composting, the city government said in a press release announcing the policy. So the restaurants have to give their excess to the poor, to the animals, or to the plants. This'll have a good impact on the environment, but I wonder if there will be any downsides to this?
I'm surprised that this happened in Texas of all places, but then it is Austin Texas.
I once worked for a Walmart supercenter that threw away a whole pallet worth of fresh produce every day.
Yeah, Austin's like the polar opposite of the rest of the state
downside is wait for Texans to flip out and do something stupid like pass a law making it illegal to give away waste food for consumption.
Don't be dramatic, Texans are pretty on board with measures like this at large. Food waste is complained about extremely often here.
All busnesses should be required by law to be as conservationist as possible. Recycling, food donation, ect.
Since restaurants don't donate food more already because of fear of lawsuits, I think donation levels are going to rise just slightly and most of that (perfectly edible food) is gonna become feed or be composited.
"Composting" business will boom.
And it wasn't even some intrinsic evil of running a huge grocery store. I worked for a Kroger with an equally sized Produce department after that, and it didn't have that waste problem. Kroger was ordering just enough food on a daily basis to get regular small shipments that would keep the shelves stocked. Walmart was ordering INSANE truckloads of food, far faster than it could be sold, leading to waste of the ripening food. And besides that, all of the food on the shelves was of poor quality leading to even more waste, since we were not allowed to put the newer fresher food out on the shelf until the old shriveled stuff finally had its chance to sit on the shelf for a day before also getting thrown away. When you're getting pallets full of peaches in every single day, that means perfectly good peaches sitting in the cooler until they're covered in mold, just so we can sell near-rotten peaches on the shelves. Mismanagement by sociopaths leads to insane food waste in America.
The reason this isn't more commonplace is that many areas in the US have laws that would make the stores liable for food that they give away for free, and they're afraid of getting sued for someone claiming food poisoning.
The Kingdom of Outer Space takes food pretty seriously.
I dunno, the governor has been pretty loud his beliefs that texas cities have been going too far with their legislation.
Imagine if ever store had a methane engine running off the compost. That would certainly put a dent in grid demand.
The supermarket I worked at sometimes donated food to shelters. They were very picky and refused a lot, so we stopped doing it.
I know that all the food place that I’ve worked at said they don’t donat the food because they’re scared of getting sued, in case the food makes someone sick.
I donate most of the waste where I work. But it's 80% feel good bullcrap. I scan out things at the end of the shelf life and throw it in a freezer and it sits there for a week before being picked up by lord knows who. This is refrozen bread, cookies, and other bakery items., and by the time it gets to wherever it's donated, odds are it'll start producing mold by the time its unfrozen. It's disgusting and sad that this is allowed to occur. Instead of focusing on the feel-good that every corporate entity seems to follow, we should be reducing waste as a whole by stopping this whole over ordering fiasco that every store, restaurant, fast food joint, etc. perpetuates. It disgusts me when I produce 20 loaves of bread with a one day shelf life, then I 'donate' out 15. By the time I get my hands on them, they're ridiculously hard and stiff, and I have personally seen after a day, the items are starting to have mold. Its a part of a much larger problem which I'm surprised there is less attention to with the sustainability fads being pushed where I live. I highly doubt by the time the products get to the food pantry or wherever, that they are even edible items of food.
From my experience in a well known Texan grocery chain bakery, the amount of waste is extreme around the holidays like Thanksgiving and X-Mas because the donation trucks don't run around that time. It's disgusting when I had to throw away over 3 baskets of perfectly good bakery goods, all in the name of never having an empty spot on the floor during Thanksgiving.
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