Composting, digestion with or without methane capture, reuse as animal feed and even incineration are well-documented technologies. Although the technical aspects of diversion are well attended to, diversion rates achieved in practice are low. The research described here studies the life cycle of basic food items in order to discover the reasons for the low landfill diversion rates of this material. The result points to management failures at key points of the cycle as basic obstacles to higher diversion rates. The study looks into commercialization procedures of fruit and vegetables before consumption, into consumption proper and into after-consumption disposal procedures for food scraps in the Brazilian context.
Results are surprising.
Before consumption, the rate of lost fruit and vegetables stands at 13 weight percent of the total quantity commercialized. During consumption by residents, the waste rate of food amounts to 28 weight percent of all collected household garbage. In the after-consumption lap of the cycle, biodegradables represent 72 weight percent of all household garbage collected by official means in a typical Brazilian town. These numbers produced by the study are impressive and clearly identify landfill diversion of biodegradables as a management problem. The authors faced the challenge and experimented with original proactive administrative procedures which led to more surprising results.