Tag: Rochester City Public Market

Two groups have come together at the Rochester City Public Market to make sure tons of food waste are used for animal feed or turned into compost instead of being trucked to a landfill.

The joint efforts of Flower City Pickers, which has been recovering food waste at the market for four years, and Impact Earth, a company that focuses on reducing waste, began a few weeks ago.

“It’s a dance of community partners,” said Evan Lowenstein, assistant market supervisor. “Everyone’s a contributor and a beneficiary.”

The city is one of those beneficiaries, as Lowenstein estimated it saves $10,000 a year in disposal costs because of food removed from the waste stream that’s still good enough to eat.

Flower City Pickers, an all-volunteer organization, makes rounds of the market to collect unsold food after the sales for the day are done. They sort it and donate the best stuff to organizations that feed the poor, or – if it’s no longer fit for use by people – to farmers who feed it to their animals or use it for compost.  The farmers save on feed and fertilizer cost by using what they pick up at the market.

But every so often, farmers are not able to pick up the waste at the market. Evan Zachary, director of development for the Pickers, said a broken-down truck or a scheduling conflict has prevented farmers from picking up waste food at the market in the past.  That happened one day last year when the Flower City Pickers had a record 14,000 pounds of recovered food, so several tons went into the trash.

“We don’t throw away good food,” Zachary noted. But as one of the groups’ missions is to reduce food waste, throwing away what could be composted or fed to a farm animal is still painful. He estimated that a little less than half of what the Flower City Pickers receives goes to people; the rest is composted or used for animal feed, unless there isn’t anyone available to take it.

That’s where Impact Earth comes in. A company that grew out of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Venture Creations incubator, Impact Earth is all about reducing waste. For the last year it has run a residential compost program in which residents collect their food scraps and bring their filled buckets to specified locations to exchange them for empty ones.

As a result of customer suggestions, Impact Earth recently decided to set up a collection station at the public market and also staff a table to sell some of its waste-reducing products, such as reusable food wraps. It has five other collection sites in the county.

“The Public Market is one of those locations people visit already,” said Cassidy Putney, a co-founder of Impact Earth and director of sustainability.

Impact Earth gained a spot in the new D-shed at the market, less than a football field away from Flower City’s sorting setup.

“We had this humongous ‘aha’ moment,” Lowenstein said. Putting together the two organizations was a simple and elegant solution that the market’s officials had been mulling over for years without a solution.

The market had been considering starting a composting operation on site, but realized it would require a long-term financial commitment and staff the market didn’t have. It considered trucking food waste off the premises to a composting operation, but that would have required having a fleet or paying for one to transport the waste.

Lowenstein said every option the city considered had an obstacle that made it impractical.

“We were trying to figure out how to make this work,” he said “With the Pickers and then the arrival of Impact Earth, the loop closed and we couldn’t be happier.”

Now when Impact Earth staff arrives at the market to set up a table of waste-reduction items and accept residential compost buckets, they also bring 96-gallon receptacles like the ones people use for curbside trash pickup and leave them with Flower City Pickers. At the end of the day, they truck them away to be used at a nearby farm for animal food or compost, or a worm composting operation.

Putney said if Flower City Pickers has an especially big day at the market, Impact Earth’s headquarters is close enough that someone can go grab another load of containers to fill with compostable food waste.

The city pays Impact Earth roughly the same as it would pay to bury trash at a landfill — $60 a ton.

“That works great for us,” Lowenstein said. “We feel like we’re spending that money way more wisely.”

Zachary said in these first few weeks, the amounts taken by Impact Earth have ranged from 100 pounds to more than a ton. Seasonality has something to do with that, as a greater volume of sellers and buyers operate at the market in the spring and fall. Even if volume doesn’t change, the contents can shift, causing more to be diverted to compost.

Pigs tend to eschew citrus fruits and peppers, for example, so if a wholesaler drops off a pallet of either of those, anything that’s already a bit off goes directly to compost, he said.

Food safety regulations on rescued food also prevent distributing prepared foods, even including bagged salad mixes and baby carrots, Zachary said. The Flower City Pickers end up removing the prepared produce from its wrapping and composting it.

“We were very fortunate when the Flower City Pickers arrived on the scene on their own initiative,” Lowenstein said. “One of the heroic things the Pickers do for us, is not only do they collect stuff, they prevent or solve contamination.” By carefully sorting out packaging and other non-compostable materials, the pickers guarantee what Impact Earth or a farmer takes is safe to compost.

Flower City Pickers is unlike most other food rescue operations, Zachary said, because it operates from a single location. That’s partly because Rochester has a vibrant outdoor market. Before expanding to other locations, he said he’d like to see Flower City Pickers gain a greater share of food waste produced by the market’s farmers and wholesalers.

“We know there is food (waste) at the market that doesn’t pass through us.” Zachary said. “There are still pallets flying around here.”

The market currently requires vendors to recycle cardboard, but it doesn’t have such a rule for compostable food waste. Lowenstein said it would be hard to guarantee the resulting product would be contamination free with so many people with varying attitudes toward recycling participating.

“A lot of them, it’s just easier to toss … than to figure out something, “Lowenstein said. He attributed the lack of composting ethic to the long hours and pace of work that vendors experience at the market. On the other hand, he said, “We certainly don’t want vendors to stick us with large quantities of waste. We really are trying to prevent vendors from leaving us with literally tons of waste on pallets.”

A new state law could change that, requiring composting as a partial solution for food waste by 2022.

“With the New York State Food Waste bill now in place, people are going to have start composting everywhere,” Putney said.

Such a law ultimately could also result in more food for soup kitchens, homeless shelters and others.
“When Vermont passed a similar law, food bank donations tripled,” Zachary said.

[email protected]/(585) 363-7275.