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Abstract Drawing on research with food waste recycling facilities in New England, this paper explores a fundamental tension between the eco-modernist logics of the circular economy and the reality of contemporary waste streams. Composting and digestion are promoted as key solutions to food waste, due to their ability to return nutrients to agricultural soils. However, our work suggests that food waste processors increasingly find themselves responsible for policing boundaries between distinct “material” and “biological” systems as imagined by the architects of the circular economy—boundaries penetrable by toxicants. This responsibility creates significant problems for processors due to the regulatory, educational, and structural barriers documented in this research. This paper contributes to scholarship which suggests the need to rethink the modernist logics of the circular economy and to recognize the realities of entangled material and biological systems. More specifically, we argue that if circularity is the goal, policy needs to recognize the barriers food waste processors face and concentrate circularity efforts further upstream to ensure fair, just, and safe circular food systems.
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What to Do with All This Food? Examining the Emerging Food Waste Hauling Network in Western New York State
Given the recent interest in food waste recycling from a sustainability perspective and the impending New York State (NYS) policy banning the disposal of food waste in landfills, the demand for food waste hauling services will soon increase in NYS. Commercial establishments generating two tons of food waste per week will be subject to these new regulations, but will expect to pay no more than their current disposal costs for food waste collection. However, new services will face more complex decisions than traditional waste hauling due to the variability in food waste generated and material constraints of food waste recycling facilities. This paper considers the shift in transportation practices to meet the complexities of food waste management. Current transportation perspectives exist to help waste hauling companies solve their allocation and routing decision problems, but material blending during network routing is relatively new. A formulation that presents allocation and blending of food waste to different recycling facilities is presented and applied to Western NYS, showing a small transportation cost decrease. As promising as the results from this example are, future work should focus on combining allocation, routing, and blending of food waste to create a complete picture of waste hauling in emerging food waste recycling networks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1639391
- PAR ID:
- 10073105
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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