So, my neighbor (who is on our town's select board) made the excellent suggestion that places that are more rural should invest in providing low-cost or free composters for folks to compost their own food waste (something that #ecomaine encourages)! Some more urban areas use #GarbageToGarden or #WeCompostIt services [see next post] to deal with food waste, which is sometimes where #Agricycle gets involved! #EcoMaine has been partnering with Agricycle since 2016!

Ecomaine Launches Food Waste Recovery Service

Maine Public | By Patty Wight
Published September 7, 2016

"Open up a refrigerator and the chances of finding limp lettuce or soggy squash are pretty high. Here in the U.S., it’s likely that this food will find its way into the garbage — according to the USDA, at least 30 percent of the nation’s food supply is wasted.

"A new program launched Wednesday by ecomaine aims to get that food out of the trash and give it a second life as #compost or energy.

"When confronted with produce past its prime, says ecomaine’s CEO Kevin Roche, there’s really one major roadblock that steers people toward dropping it in the trash versus a compost bucket.

" 'The ‘ick’ factor is what I call it,' he says.

"Rotten food is messy, it smells and it attracts fruit flies. But Roche says ecomaine now has a unique way to manage the ick factor: by sealing that food waste in a clear plastic bag.

" 'You go to the grocery store, and when you buy your oranges or your head of broccoli, and the first thing you usually do is put it in a clear bag. And we feel that could be an avenue for us to contain the ick factor and get a second use out of that plastic bag,' he says.

"Starting Wednesday, ecomaine accepts food waste knotted up in plastic bags. Ecomaine doesn’t collect the bags itself. It consolidates waste picked up by commercial services, such as Garbage to Garden or #WeCompostIt!, at a cost of about $55 a ton.

"On Wednesday morning, a collection truck from #AgriCycleEnergy unloads a giant salad of rotten corn, peppers, tomatoes and other produce at ecomaine’s facility in Portland.

" 'We’re collecting from restaurants, colleges, hospitals, and a variety of other generators of food waste,' says Dan Bell, manager at Agri-Cycle Energy in #ExeterMaine, where all of this produce consolidated at ecomaine will eventually go.

" 'A special machine at Agri-Cycle Energy removes the plastic bags, which are returned to ecomaine to be burned for electricity. The food waste, meanwhile, is blended with an equal amount of cow #manure from a nearby dairy farm, then heated and churned for about 30 days using a process called anaerobic digestion.

" 'We have two large domes, and it’s essentially enclosed, so we’re capturing all of the gases in the process of breaking down food waste,' Bell says.

"The #biogas is used to produce heat and electricity. And the food waste, he says Bell, turns into #fertilizer and animal bedding.

" 'This is material that’s been in the waste stream forever. And it always will be. And it’ll always be something that has to be handled. But pulling it out and removing it and source separating it allows companies like ours and other #digesters across the country to put that material to work for us, versus just sitting in a landfill,' he says.

"Because food generally doesn’t break down in landfills. A couple years ago, Roche says ecomaine dug down into one of its landfills.

" 'We found chicken breasts that were 25 years old, tomatoes, Ruffles potato chips that were 25 years old,' he says.

"Roche says businesses and consumers can prevent food waste through correct planning. But when lost or forgotten food is discovered in the dark recesses of a fridge, that’s where ecomaine’s food waste recovery program comes in.

"Initially, he says, it won’t account for a huge chunk of what ecomaine processes, which amounts to 170,000 tons of trash and 45,000 tons of recycling per year.

" 'Even if we can get upwards of five tons a year, we feel that would be a good start to our program,' Roche says.

"It’s an important step, he says, toward reaching Maine’s statewide recycling goal of 50 percent by 2021."

[I'm wondering how close Maine is to that goal?]

Source:
https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2016-09-07/ecomaine-launches-food-waste-recovery-service

#SolarpunkSunday #Digesters #Composting #ReducingWaste #Landfills #Maine #Recycling #WasteToEnergy #Compost

"I used AI. It worked. I hated it." by @mttaggart https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

This is a really good blogpost. And I"m sure it'll make some people unhappy to read whether they're pro or anti genAI. What's good about @mttaggart's blogpost is he talks honestly about how using Claude Code did actually solve the problem he set out to do. It needed various guardrails, but they were possible to set up, and the project worked. But the post is also completely clear and honest about how miserable it was:

- It removed the joy from the process
- If you aim to do the right thing and carefully evaluate the output, your job ends up eventually becoming "tapping the Y key"
- Ramifications on people learning things
- Plenty of other ethical analysis
- And the nagging wonder whether to use it next time, despite it being miserable.

I think this is important, because it *is* true that these tools are getting to the point where they can accomplish a lot of tasks, but the caveat space is very large (cotd)

https://browsergate.eu/

Another data scandal, this time it's LinkedIn... Send it to people that use LinkedIn on work computers...

#BrowserGate #linkedin #privacy #privacyrights