The Daily Agenda: Waste not, want not
The Daily Agenda: Waste not, want not
City officials estimate that food scraps make up 20% of Tucson's residential waste … A local event aims to raise awareness about food waste and highlight solutions … Cosmic discoveries on their way.
Arizona leads the nation in food waste, discarding $9.5 billion worth every year. Meanwhile, one in 10 Arizonans struggles to find their next meal.
It’s hard to believe that food waste and food insecurity can coexist in communities, but that’s the case for most of the United States, including Tucson.
City officials estimate that food scraps make up 20% of residential waste and that 40% of the waste in Los Reales’ landfill is compostable. And let’s be honest: Most of us are guilty of throwing out food, probably more often than we care to admit.
That’s why several local efforts are underway to raise awareness to the problem and highlight solutions, one of which coincides with this year’s Food Waste Prevention Week. The annual event was launched in 2021 that includes more than 600 organizations and businesses across the country.
For this year’s celebration, Sustainable Tucson has teamed up with a half-dozen other local groups to host a “Come Celebrate Scraps” food drive and party on Saturday afternoon at MotoSonora Brewing Company.
Attendees who bring a non-perishable food item to donate to Casa Maria Soup Kitchen will get $1 off their beer. They’ll also be treated to cooking demos, games, a raffle and education about how to reduce food waste at home.
“We’ll be showing artwork focused on food waste made by third graders from Manzo Elementary School and the cooking demos, done by students from Tucson Valley Farm, will focus on cooking with leftover foods, scraps and instruction on how to cook with minimal or no waste,” Sustainable Tucson volunteer Donna Corbin told the Tucson Agenda.
Sustainable Tucson is hoping that “Come Celebrate Scraps” will become an annual event that brings together nonprofits who work with food waste and insecurity, with Corbin saying there’s a critical need to raise public awareness.
One of the other groups involved in the event, Borderlands Produce Rescue, has spent decades trying to combat the problem. The Nogales-based nonprofit has been working in this space for nearly 30 years.
Borderlands was founded in 1996 by Nogales, Arizona native Yolanda Soto. Growing up in Ambos Nogales, Soto was very aware of the role the produce industry played in her community, but also the amount of food being discarded in the Rio Rico Landfill.
Every year, nearly a third of the produce consumed in the United States is processed through Nogales and at the distributor level, roughly 5% of total produce is discarded, mostly due to cosmetic flaws or consumer-driven demands, according to Borderlands’ website. That means it’s still very edible, but when it’s sent to the landfill, it rots and produces harmful gasses (more about that later.)
Coupled with the prevalence of food insecurity, Borderlands believes this is a lose-lose situation and works to divert that food from the landfill. The group rescues 20 to 30 million pounds of produce each year and makes it available to communities across the U.S. through a variety of programs.
Borderlands’ largest redistribution program in Arizona is Produce on Wheels With-Out Waste, a partnership with more than 30 nonprofits that host seasonal Saturday markets across the state. In exchange for a $15 cash donation, supporters will receive up to 70 pounds of rescued produce.
In its 29 years, Borderlands has rescued 780 million pounds of produce, supplemented 1.3 billion meals with fruits and vegetables and diverted 58 million pounds of methane gas.
And with food waste estimated to account for one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gasses, the environmental impact of programs like Borderlands’ is a big deal, according to Corbin.
“Many Americans are familiar with the environmental issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, overuse of water resources, and the proliferation of disposable plastics, but studies have shown that far fewer are aware of the dangerous environmental effects surrounding the food we eat or more accurately, the food we don’t eat… food that ends up in our landfills,” Corbin wrote in an opinion piece in the Arizona Daily Star.
Corbin used tomatoes as an example, citing data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that shows that 31% of fresh tomatoes purchased by American households each year are discarded, to the tune of $23 billion. And that’s just one fruit.
The EPA has estimated that discarded food accounts for nearly 25% of solid waste in the United States and that each year, it emits as much carbon dioxide as 45 coal-fired power plants.
But composting can help reduce greenhouse gasses by 50%, according to Tucson officials. That’s why the city launched a home composting pilot program earlier this year, which allows community members to drop off food scraps at a handful of locations around town.
If you ask former Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, community members are way ahead of the city when it comes to dealing with food waste. He cited the popularity of the months-old FoodCycle at Home program as evidence.
As of the end of February, 3,950 pounds of food scraps had been collected from the six drop-off sites, according to the latest edition of Councilman Richard Fimbres’ newsletter.
The early popularity of the program points towards what Kozachik believes is the future for multi-stream curbside collection in Tucson, although Los Reales officials caution that it won’t be happening any time soon.
“We’re inching towards that one piece at a time,” Kozachik said. “And that’s because we have a community who is willing to do the sorting at home.”
Missed deadline: Pima County Supervisor Matt Heinz is two months late on filing his campaign finance report, the Green Valley News’ Dan Shearer reports. Heinz said the reports are usually filed by a campaign staffer and there wasn’t much fundraising activity, but he would look into it. The law says late filers should pay small fines, $10 or $25 a day, but the fines are often waived.
One big question: Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock questions the wisdom of holding a public forum for the three applicants vying to replace retiring Pima County Treasurer Beth Ford. The treasurer job needs to be done right, but treasurers don’t make policy. Morlock’s recommendation: Ask the candidates if they have any idea what a county treasurer actually does. If nobody does, then the supervisors should just appoint Patti Davidson, the former chief deputy in the office who already threw her hat in the ring.
Rocks in a hard place: The City of Tucson and the Arizona Department of Transportation put large rocks along two Interstate 10 underpasses to discourage loitering, the Arizona Daily Star’s Charles Borla reports. Officials said they wanted to keep the underpasses clear to allow for vehicles and pedestrians to pass through easily. It’s a pilot program and officials said if it works, they’ll start doing it at other I-10 underpasses.
Heartbreaking tale: A Syrian mother who fled a civil war made her way to Tucson, where she likes to drink coffee and chocolate to remind herself of her home country. The Arizona Luminaria’s Samantha Callicutt recounts the ordeal of Dalal, one of 2,000 Syrian refugees who’ve come to Arizona since a civil war broke out in 2011. Her husband, brother, and father protested the Syrian government and endured prison and torture because of it, so she fled with her children.
Still surprising after all these years: There is still a lot to learn about the universe, a team of physicists from Tucson and elsewhere found, the Star’s Henry Brean reports. In what likely will be the first of many discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, data gathered by the telescope strongly supports the idea that the universe is expanding much faster than scientific models predicted.
Exports abound: Arizona is doing much better with exports than the rest of the country, Arizona Public Media’s Paola Rodriguez reports. The state reported $29 billion in exports last year, an increase of about 5.5%. The rest of the country saw their exports drop by 2.2%. The big-ticket exports for Arizona were metal ores, semiconductors, electrical equipment, and aerospace parts. Where did that go? The top destinations were Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, China, and the United Kingdom.
7 billion pounds: The amount of produce coming through the Nogales, Arizona Port of Entry each year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.