Our Single-Use Life: Tales from the Food Waste Dumpster

By Abbie Beane

We have to have the eyes of an ant — and the eyes of an elephant. 

We must at once be able to spot the tip of a clear straw in a pile of raw ribeye while maintaining enough perspective to believe we're doing something larger than picking trash. So when people call me "trash girl," it doesn’t break down so well. The act of hauling and weeding through waste might be most impactful on the public eye, but aside from zero-waste events, The OffsetProject also focuses on renewable energy projects, offsetting carbon emissions, responsible purchasing and re-purposing strategies for events and businesses. You can even become certified through the Council for Responsible Sport or Sustainable Event Alliance.

A Monterey Peninsula Foundation grant funded one such new program that goes beyond a single zero-waste event. The Offset Project was able to set up a permanent food waste program at Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca at the end of July. First we supplied each of eight U.S. Red Bull Grand Prix caterers with five 32-gallon barrels for food and other compostable waste. It was up to us to educate the caterers in sorting, which entails slinking stealthily around the kitchen grabbing food waste out of trash bins, pushing compost barrels toward prep cooks, and gently encouraging proper and maximum compost barrel usage. The only way to save scraps of your own dignity from the same green barrel is to have an indefatigable sense of purpose and a humorous sense of self-loathing. You have to look like a hard laborer (and wear a radio) to win respect, but also maintain the educator persona to separate yourself from the haulers. This was Star Sanitation's job, and by Sunday, they were catching on to the new food waste route.   

There is a distinctly effective way to wear latex gloves — like a woman (not a lady) with an urgent sense of purpose. Your litter picker is your confidante and should also be used with an urgent sense of purpose as it can be easily confused for a scavenger's tool. When picking "contamination" out of food waste dumpsters, some jobs are too big even for the litter picker. The only thing to do is truly dive — feet first — into the 2-yard dumpster and grab out the largest and most unwieldy spoilers. When stewards pour 100 pounds of wet food into a plastic bag, they might not envision two 100-esque pound girls jumping in the dumpster to pull it off, slipping and sliding and screaming under the weight of messy sweet potatoes and half-eaten pots of creamed spinach. There is always a dirty diaper as a bonus. When we finally get the bag out, we're not sure whether to feel triumphant or suicidal.

When the dumpsters are "clean" of non-compostables contamination and the event is over, the waiting begins. Until Waste Management haulers arrive, we vigilantly bounce from bin to bin, shielding our food-waste babies from scraps of aluminum foil, balls of plastic wrap, and the dreaded load of miniscule twisty ties camouflaged in green. We also babysit the food waste dumpsters, guarding them from fencing and Sterno cans as vendors tear down post-event.

It is an arduous, punishing exercise in detail — and in irony as we grapple with thousands of pounds of unwieldy and wet food waste that may or may not offset the emissions we spent driving around to set up the project. It is actually an upfront emissions investment. Over time the food waste component will be incorporated and net emissions will decrease as trash dwindles.

Many thoughts and questions come to mind. The dumpster is a quiet place to despair about the environment, then to become inspired. While the problems seem infinitely large and require large solutions, the results come down to getting the details right and moving in inevitable baby steps. Where will we find the balance?

We should tax environmental externalities, focus on creating products with fewer lifecycle impacts, pass extended producer responsibility legislation to ensure that products are reused or do not pollute after their normal useful lives, change purchasing habits, and so much more. At the same time, even when law is passed, results on the ground could vary. Who is remembering to label containers, who is reminding the labelers, who has the heart to dig through poop — literally poop — to do the right thing? Someone has to learn by doing and pass that information on to legislators. Someone has to create change from within; create company, government and public buy-in; someone has to build capacity. Capacity building — these aren't just graduate school words.

At the end of the day, there is somehow, something still inspiring and motivating about life inside the dumpster. And the awareness and inspiration that spills out of it when everyone else is watching. In that moment you have to own it. That is the moment when onlookers could go from disgusted to smitten!