By digging through the garbage, MU researchers are working to find the best method to reduce waste.
Roughly 35 million tons of food is wasted every year in the U.S. According to a 2009 study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the average American wastes 1,400 calories of food per day. That amounts to 150 trillion calories total per year.
Christine Costello, assistant research professor of bioengineering, and Ronald McGarvey, assistant professor with a joint appointment in industrial and manufacturing engineering systems department and the Truman School of Public Affairs, have been the lead researchers on the project, which started in January.
They are looking at a variety of solutions and are weighing the sustainability benefits against the economic costs of each proposed method of waste disposal.
During the spring 2014 semester, the pair worked with Campus Dining Services. While the dining halls were already weighing food waste, Costello and McGarvey went a step further by sorting the garbage into “edible” and “inedible” food waste with the help of undergraduate students.
This helped them determine how much of the total food waste was actually consumable as opposed to things like chicken bones and watermelon rinds, which are not going to be consumed by students.
Knowing how much of the food waste is inedible is important in determining how much can actually be reduced, McGarvey said.
Later on, they started to look at the different kinds of edible foods being wasted and their effects on the environment.
The researchers sorted the food waste into categories like grains, fruits and proteins. They used other studies to determine that wastes like meat had a higher upstream carbon emission, meaning they had a more substantial impact on the environment during production.
McGarvey said they have been very fortunate and people have been more than willing to collaborate with them on the project, even by giving them lab space for their smelly sorting.
Building on the successes of the spring semester, the study is expanding to include Intercollegiate Athletics and the University Hospital with a $82,000 grant from Mizzou Advantage this semester.
Junior Trevion McGhaw, an industrial engineering student working on the project, said having a bigger sample size is a great opportunity to expand the scope of the study.
In addition to working in collaboration with several other sustainability projects toward zero waste in athletics, junior Nick Boshonek said he is looking forward to sifting through the University Hospital’s garbage.
Students will be trained for dealing with the privacy issues surrounding sorting hospital waste, Costello said. The waste data gathered from that source may be important in contributing to the diversity of garbage used in the study.
By studying trash from a variety of sources, the group hopes that it can find a way to help others discover what waste management method, or combination of methods, works best for its situation, Costello said.
The team also hopes to study other kinds of organic waste off campus in the future.
“We want to be careful here to not identify a single point solution that is going to be great (only) if the next thirty years work out exactly as we planned,” McGarvey said.
