Andrea Zelinski
I think a lot about where my food
waste goes. Maybe a little too much.
For years I was lucky enough to
have a compost bin just for food waste in addition to my regular garbage cans;
the city picked it up every week. I set aside my banana peels, eggshells, rotisserie
chicken bones and any other scraps into that bin and rolled it out to the
street with the peace of mind that I wouldn’t contribute my share to
the millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S.
from food waste. The EPA contends that those emissions are equal to the carbon dioxide
emissions of 42 coal plants.
But it was extra work every day to
manage that waste: I had to walk outside to the compost can every time I cracked
a few eggs, or I had to stow the waste in the freezer until garbage day.
Imagine what that looks like when you buy as many as 450 pallets of food to
last seven days at sea.
I interviewed Bill Burke, chief maritime
officer for Carnival Corp., for our Travel Weekly cover story this week about
how food waste is handled across the industry. He told me how the company works
to refine its method for managing the full lifecycle of food on its ships with
the help of food-waste digesters that turn leftovers and unusable parts of food
like pineapple cores and chicken bones into an organic pulp the consistency of
lemonade.
That pulp is an improvement over the
food waste chunks of yore that were as big as an inch or so in diameter, and
much further from being fully decomposed, when they were discharged into the ocean.
“The rationale for going into this
was purely to be better stewards of the environment,” Burke said. “I think
we've hit on the best thing available, and I think we're trying to try to take
it one step further.”
By the end of last year, Carnival
Corp. had more than 600 food waste digesters installed across all nine of the
company’s brands, including Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland
America Line, Seabourn and Cunard Line. That year the company said it
digested more than 80 million pounds of food waste, turning it into an organic
pulp released into the waters while in motion and at least 12 miles from land.
Had that been put into a landfill, it would have produced about 30 million tons
of carbon dioxide, Burke said.
This is a major advancement for a
company that was fined for repeatedly violating pollution laws by dumping gray
water and allowing plastic mixed with food waste to be dumped overboard in the
2010s.
Since then, Carnival has worked
to clean up its act. Not only is the company using the food digesters, but some
of those digesters include extra tools like grinders to further break food
down. The company is also experimenting with dehydrators that would dehydrate
fat and other foods like cantaloupe and lemon rinds. Once they’re dehydrated
they can be put into grinders to be ground into smaller pieces.
“We're not at the end of this
process, but what we've done thus far has been very good,” Burke said. “We're
seeing other opportunities to minimize the amount we send to the landfill.”