Jane Boehm - Food Waste Action Plan, 5 Years in the Making

[00:00:00] Adam: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

[00:00:21] Adam: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Dominique, the sustainability expert. We bring in guests who saw the potential for impact of their job or community and did something about it.

[00:00:30] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists, activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant some new ideas.

[00:00:39] Adam: Today, Dominique and I are joined by Jane Boehm. She is the Food Waste Programs Administrator at SWACO, Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio. And she coordinates the Central Ohio Food Waste Initiative, which is a collaboration of businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies within Franklin County who represent the food, farm, education and health sectors all working towards a single common goal of eliminating food waste. And I'm very excited. Last time we got to dive in to Jane's story of just how she got into food waste. We heard about her journeys to Governor's Island where she worked on composting and back to Columbus, where she really dug into this topic of how we're using her farmlands. how that food is going into our waste system.

And today we are gonna dive into the food waste action plan that she's been developing. So Jane, welcome back on.

[00:01:29] Jane: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:30] Dominique: this is the sustainability success story portion of getting to chat with you and there's so much to talk about. So we're gonna have to focus on like what's most important. But I wanna just key up the fact that I wanna talk about the Food Waste Action plan. I wanna talk about some like standout projects that have been a success to really showcase what it really means to make effort in this space and to make progress and who's doing it? 

But first, could you remind us why is it really such a huge problem that so much food waste is going into our landfill?

[00:02:00] Jane: Food waste or food scraps, as I really like to call it, are a valuable source of nutrition for the soil, if not for people who could eat that food that is still good for eating. So our main goal is to reduce the amount of food that is wasted. 

I'll start by saying this actually that wasted food represents a waste of the resources, all of the resources that went into creating it. So the fuel, the other energy sources, the labor that went into growing the food and processing it and getting it to the store and getting it onto your plate, your hours spent cooking it. All of that effort and time and money is wasted on food that is wasted. 

That's a concept that is very tangible to people. Waste is waste. But in addition, food waste represents a valuable resource of nutrients that should be recycled back into soil to grow more nutritious food that is wasted when we throw it out into the landfill.

[00:02:59] Dominique: And I really wanna just play that devil's advocate for a second of thinking of some of our listeners who maybe haven't really asked some of these questions and maybe think that what they know is true. 

 People often think, and people have told me that, oh, at least if it's biodegradable or it's food waste and it goes to the landfill, it will eventually break down. And it's good that it's biodegradable, or it's organic because it'll break down faster than the other trash it is near. And that is good, you know. 

Because we think that plastic takes a long time to break down, but food doesn't. 

Can you share why that's not true? Why is it not true that when I put a banana into the trash that I should not feel like, well, it will at least break down faster than its neighbors?

[00:03:41] Jane: Yeah, absolutely. So, food technically does break down in a landfill. Any kind of organic matter will break down over time unless there is a total absence of air and water. However, when organic material breaks down in the landfill, it does so in an anaerobic environment, in an environment without oxygen, and it releases methane, and methane is a really potent greenhouse gas. And so while there is kind of eventual decomposition of a landfill, that's actually why it sags over time. If that gas isn't captured and essentially burned off in order to turn it into carbon dioxide, it's emitted as methane, which is really, really bad.

Our landfill actually has a really extensive system to capture the methane from the landfill, and we use it for energy, which is a really neat, awesome project. And I believe a lot of the more modern landfills have these kind of systems that do capture some of the gas. Now, even in that method, the nutrients and the food and that banana are lost forever. The material is truly wasted.

[00:04:58] Dominique: And I know that when I went to the landfill to do the landfill tour, they were showing me like newspapers and paper products that had been preserved basically by being in the landfill for like a hundred years or something crazy.

[00:05:12] Jane: Yeah. It's completely fascinating. I have a newspaper from I think the eighties on my desk that is readable that we pulled out of the landfill when we were doing some construction. But yeah, that's I think the other fallacy that a lot of people have. When it comes to things breaking down. Things break down very, very, very slowly because there's largely an absence of water and air, so it really is like a preservation cell inside of the landfill.

[00:05:41] Dominique: I was gonna say. Yeah. And I've also heard that like to mitigate how much methane gets emitted, they try to not allow things to break down in there because it's actually worse for the environment when you think about it like that. So yeah, I, whenever I throw away something into the landfill bin, I think about it as like that thing is being like entombed forever and like preserved. 

[00:05:59] Jane: It's a trash time capsule. 

[00:06:01] Dominique: Yeah. And it, but it, it makes you feel differently by the fact that like, your footprint is so important and the impact we're all making every single day. Because it's not a matter of like, "Oh, in 10 years all the trash I've created will be gone. No, it's gonna be there." And like, because you needed that one thing for five minutes, it'll be sitting there forever.

[00:06:20] Jane: Absolutely.

[00:06:20] Adam: What percentage of waste comes from food?

[00:06:24] Jane: So, 15% of what we find in our landfill is food scraps. And about 27% back in 2018 at least, was compostable material. And that's pretty consistent with what we find across the country in terms of when we look into the composition of trash.

[00:06:41] Adam: Cool.

[00:06:42] Dominique: Can we dive into the Food Waste Action Plan? I'm curious.

[00:06:45] Jane: So the Central Ohio Food Waste Action Plan version one was published in 2019. This was just a little bit after SWACO did a waste characterization study in 2018. We came up with that 15% food scrap, it is making up the landfill. And our director at the time was really passionate about the topic and we had been having lots of conversations with partners and identified that many people cared about this topic. 

So we brought them together in a couple of formal meetings, and together we said, "We care about this issue and we wanna work on it, and we want a formal way to do so." So that's how the Central Ohio Food Waste Initiative was developed. And so there were over a hundred partners, some national partners, some mostly local partners represented by restaurants and different types of businesses and schools across the county and, I mean, lots of organizations. Everyone who touched food, food rescue, composting in any way was at the table providing, deliberating on solutions. 

And so the outcome of those meetings was an action plan with 20 items across prevention of food waste, donation of still edible food in composting that continues to guide our work today.

[00:08:10] Adam: And what sort of things does it actually solve? Like how does it make a difference?

[00:08:14] Jane: So, the initiative is really a networking structure, supportive structure. SWACO convenes the initiative and we do a lot in terms of providing funding, helping to ideate different programs, helping to just provide the technical assistance to do programs. 

So, one really big program that we're really excited about over the last five years has really grown is our food waste drop off program.

And so we offer some grant funding to communities and some other non-profits who want to start collecting food scraps. And a lot of communities have taken, have gotten really excited about this and opened up community drop off sites. So the first one was in 2019. Now there are 11 communities within Franklin County with a total of 23 sites that are free to use for residents, 

If you were to wake up in three months and open your computer and like the Food Waste action plan was successful, like you were like done for some reason, you were done. I'm just curious, like what would that look like? Like what would you be visualizing for like success to have been reached?

I think that success would look like every single person having access to a composting option, maybe a curbside program or a community curbside program. At this point, the infrastructure is still somewhat limited, but that would really feel successful for every single person to have the ability to conveniently and affordably have their organic food scraps recovered. For every single business to kind of develop a environment where the business community understands that before diverting food to composting that there are donation options that are available. That's really some of the things that we're working on. 

How do we educate businesses? How do we elevate apps like Too Good To Go that help businesses sell the food that would otherwise go to waste. Donate the food that would otherwise be composted and compost the material that can't be eaten. Working with all of these stakeholder groups to make sure that they have all of the systems in place and the support that they need to reduce food waste, to prevent food waste and reduce it in all of the ways that they touch food is really the goal and what we work towards but it's so hard to imagine. You know, it will take a real big culture shift to see that ingrained in every single space where we work.

[00:10:58] Dominique: Okay. 

Can you walk us through an example of a success story that's happened in the past few years with this action plan and the partners you work with?

[00:11:06] Jane: One really amazing organization is Columbus Food Rescue. They used to be a part of a national branch called Food Rescue US. In the last year, they have branched off and joined a local organization called Local Matters that they now work under. So Columbus Food Rescue rescues food that would otherwise likely be thrown out and redistributes it to people in need. And, they have been working for, I believe, 10 years in Columbus. They had just one position that was shared across two people. And these rock stars Emily and Susan have, I mean, their impact is amazing. I think last year they redistributed like a million pounds of food and,

[00:11:56] Dominique: That's two people.

[00:11:57] Jane: Two halftime people. It's really one person, right?

[00:12:01] Dominique: That's true. And from what I know, they use their personal vehicles.

[00:12:04] Jane: Totally. So these are just two people who are super committed to what they do, making a huge difference already. They have been involved in coffee for a long time. And SWACO has been able to support them with some grants to improve their app, to make it easier for folks to sign up and you know, sign up for a rescue. You can become a rescuer. It's really easy. It's super easy for a business to sign up for a rescue. And so we've helped them with the funding that they need to do the work that they need to do. 

And so recently, this is outside of what we've helped them do. But they also received funding from the state. Governor DeWine saw La Soupe out in Cincinnati. They have a what's called a transform kitchen. They process food that's about to go bad and turn it into really nutritious meals that's largely given away to people who can't cook for themselves. And so Emily and Susan pursued some of this funding and got it, and have opened up a organization called Ro's Kitchen where they're doing very much the same thing. So the food that Food Rescue can't redistribute right away, they get pallets of produce sometimes that is gonna rot because there's not the distribution system to get it to people in need or there's not the cold storage space. So they process that food and get it out to people. And they just are having an amazing impact just from the number sense of things.

[00:13:34] Dominique: It's it's a beautiful intersection of food waste and you'll being hungry in a very concrete, local impact way.

[00:13:42] Jane: Yeah.

[00:13:43] Adam: Well, I love that too. And you said they divert a million pounds of food waste a year. I remember in our last podcast you shared that there's a million pounds of food waste each day being generated.

[00:13:53] Jane: Yes.

[00:13:53] Adam: So that's actually pretty significant in terms of, you know, the impact that they're doing. We just need to multiply that by 364 and

[00:14:01] Dominique: I mean it is, but that's, like you said, that's one person basically working for years. If you think about like we know what the solution would be in that scenario is just we need more people doing that.

[00:14:12] Adam: That is really cool.

[00:14:13] Jane: Totally. And that is something that as an organization, we really wanna think about how do we support that. 

Because of there being so many intersections with food waste and public health, right? Feeding people, hunger, addressing hunger, addressing natural resource issues, urban farming. There's so many related issues that food waste touches and so I have an amazing network of colleagues who work at the city of Columbus at Franklin County at the Department of Public Health. And it's awesome to be able to work collaboratively on projects. 

So when it comes to Food Rescue, the city of Columbus is looking to get some grant funding for additional storage, cold storage space so that when there is a large amount of food that is available for rescue, it can be aggregated in a couple of spots in the city, and rescue groups can come to that spot and take that food 'cause what often happens is that there's just not a place to keep the food in a controlled environment for long enough before the food goes bad. And so it's working on these kind of really cool, big projects with other partners that I'm really excited about. And, you know, potentially projects like that will enable us to multiply our impact by 364 times.

[00:15:35] Adam: So there's restaurants, there's grocery stores, there's schools, there's regular people. 

Are there certain areas within those that need more attention in terms of diverting food waste?

[00:15:47] Jane: 

So in the first couple of years of our initiative, we really focused on raising awareness and specifically within residents. And then we started helping to provide those drop off sites. So our focus really started off in kind of the general residential space and the community space Now we're really starting to focus in more on businesses. I believe 60% of what comes to the landfill overall is commercial as opposed to residential.

So the kind of commercial industrial sector has a lot of material that could be diverted better. 

Businesses have to identify diversion solutions for themselves and it's very piecemeal, so every individual business will have to look for those waste and recycling services themselves. There's no kind of group purchasing, which comes with some cost savings, obviously. It's just a little bit like the Wild West when it comes to businesses.

 it takes a lot of internal inertia from businesses and a lot of help oftentimes to get them to shift towards something that is more conscious and sustainable just because the infrastructure and the policies aren't set up in a way to create a pathway for them to do this stuff easily.

[00:17:06] Adam: So it sounds like one big thing is creating a pathway that just makes it easier and cheaper for businesses to divert their food 

[00:17:12] Jane: And one way. So we're working on just doing some pilots at this point, working with businesses to help them start a donation program, start an organics diversion program. And internally we're thinking about how to create an incentive program and a technical assistance program that really helps businesses who at least are already wanting to do something to do it.

[00:17:36] Dominique: We're talking a lot about Columbus and the Central Ohio focus. How does this area compare to other US cities or international cities when it comes to how we're tackling our food waste initiative and how our partners work together?

[00:17:50] Jane: When it comes to reducing food waste across the country, there are a couple of places specifically out west that have banned putting organics in the landfill, which really speeds up food waste diversion.

[00:18:05] Dominique: Yeah.

[00:18:05] Jane: For places that haven't done that, there are other policies, there are multiple policy approaches that can be used to kind of push the needle there, including just mandatory reporting when it comes to, well, how much material is being thrown out, when it comes to food waste, as well as other materials. And that can be a gateway to actually reducing 'cause if you don't know the makeup of your stream, you're not gonna know how to improve those metrics. We kind of keep tabs on other counties and solid waste districts and the programs that they have for reducing food waste.

What's a big challenge is just the cost of compost hauling, or organics hauling rather, is that it's expensive and, you know, on top of trash service, a lot of businesses just don't want do it. It's expensive. It's understandable that they maybe even can't do it. And so that's a big hurdle that we have here in Columbus, Ohio right now.

[00:19:02] Dominique: Does our area maybe follow another city in particular, or do we look at any other similarly sized or similarly progressive cities when we are building out plans like this? 

[00:19:13] Jane: We do have a lot of conversations. Like every time I give a presentation about our drop off program, there'll be folks in different cities that are interested in how we're doing it and learning from us and vice versa. We've developed something called the Save More than Food Campaign. We have a website. I guess I'll side note and just say savemorethanfood.org is the hub for resources for our area, for Franklin county that we've developed for prevention, donation and composting for both residents as well as all of those other stakeholders that I've talked about. 

So that website, the name of the website is also the name of our campaign. We have a campaign called Save More Than Food, and it's just a way for us to try to get the message out about food waste, but also what people can be doing about reducing it. We've had a lot of interest from different communities about that campaign. a lot of folks are interested in how to engage their communities about food waste, and so we've had a lot of discussions about how do we tailor this to different stakeholders. And so that's one of the projects that we have that we've shared a lot about. 

[00:20:22] Dominique: What's in the horizon for the Food Waste Action Plan?

[00:20:25] Jane: A couple of really cool things. The City of Hilliard school district got a grant to work on a district roadmap for how to manage and reduce all sorts of materials that come into the school district better. So they're interested in the furniture, the construction, demolition type material that we're gonna have after we do a renovation. The recycling and the food waste. All of that material that is generated in our school district, how do we manage it better? What are the best diversion options for all of those?

So they're creating a roadmap for all of these materials with numbers on what's it gonna cost and what are real solutions that they're looking to inform the way that they're entire district manages materials. And also they're gonna be sharing that with other school districts. So that's a really cool, big project that has potentially big impact, I think. Another cool thing that I'm working on right now is I'm leading a school work group with representatives, their teachers and some school staff administrators. We're working on how to increase food donation in schools and also the use of share tables.

There's a lot of material that gets thrown out at the end of the day and at the end of the lunch period. And there are really simple ways to just get that food into the hands of kids or people in the community who need it. And, it's tough though. We'll be working with a lot of big administrations with lots of bureaucracy, but like I said, I love the challenging place of, everyone has their individual priorities or generally supportive of an idea, how do we make it happen. So I'm excited for that.

[00:22:10] Adam: Wonderful. This is really cool. I mean, thank you so much for just walking us through the Food Waste Action plan, kinda what that means, the complexities of bringing so many different people to the table, and some of the big wins that you've been able to have here in Columbus around that.

[00:22:24] Dominique: My last question for you is if someone's listening, and a lot of this felt really exciting to hear how much progress is being made, kind of like behind the scenes, but they feel like, wow, I'm really part of this, I'm part of the problem. I could be part of the solution because everyday people are also part of it. What would you say to them? Like, what would you say maybe should be top of mind for someone listening and this landfill information felt new. The scale of our food waste problem felt new. What can they be doing?

[00:22:53] Jane: Well, I would invite them on a landfill tour. I would invite them to check out savemorethanfood.org.

So if you're interested in how to reduce food waste. There's just so many ways. There's not a single magic bullet solution. It's a little bit of a lifestyle change, but I think a lot of people who are, at least to some degree, aware of wanting to be more sustainable are already thinking this way. So if you're looking to get a little bit deeper into it, you can check out our website, get on a tour, can find a tour@swaco.org, so SWACO.org. 

Come to the landfill, come see where your trash goes to live forever, and then be a part of the initiative. And that can look like composting in your backyard. That can look like joining a community drop off site, it can look like reaching out to us for some technical assistance on how to start a program in your business.

Reach out my website or my email is on that website. You can contact me at foodwaste.org. Foodwaste@swaco.org.

[00:24:02] Adam: Alright, cool. Now, can you find that Food Waste Action plan there as well?

[00:24:06] Jane: Yes, absolutely. It's on there.

[00:24:09] Dominique: And if someone's listening and they're not part of the Central Ohio Food Waste Initiative group, can they also join? How do they learn about that? How can they be, if they're ready to be a part of it and they are entity that that would be interested, how do they do that? 

[00:24:20] Jane: So we're actually working on a more formal way to be involved. In the past it's really been anyone who's kind of like reached out to us and we've worked on a project together. We put them on a listserv, but we're gonna be setting up a public listserv for folks to be able to sign up and just keep in touch with the initiative. 

So get on that website, you can sign up for the current newsletter that we have on there.

 Stay tuned. We'll be having some website updates and we'll have more information up there soon.

[00:24:49] Dominique: Well, thank you so much for chatting with us. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing. I think it's so tangible and pressing and real. I mean, we're, we talked about like literally getting food waste. Redirected to feed people who are hungry and like if time is the issue, how are we just cooking it in a kitchen that then they can come and eat?

I think that that there's just so much amazing work to be done and you're doing so much of that and I'm so grateful. I also wanna mention for anybody listening that is interested, but they've felt like maybe this isn't happening in their community. I wanna echo that. The resources you've created are agnostic of the community.

The resources you've created are tips and tricks and resources and pieces of knowledge I think anybody could learn from intake. So it's also exciting to see that what you're creating can also inspire other communities or lead the charge and help them jump 10 steps ahead because of the things you've been able to put together.

[00:25:41] Jane: Thanks, Dominique. Thanks Adam. Thanks for having me. 

[00:25:44] Adam: Yeah. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:25:45] Dominique: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:25:58] Adam: You can find our episodes thegreenchampions.com. If you want to stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website, thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll dig into another sustainability success story in our next episode. 

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