The Food Recovery Challenge: Earth's life saver

Photo of presenters Luke Wolfgang, Athena Lee Bradley and Kara Thomas (From left to right)

Today marks the start of this year’s annual Focus Frostburg event. For today’s events I covered the presentation and discussion given by Athena Bradley from the Northeast Recycling Council and Luke Wolfgang, the Sustainability Coordinator of the program and US EPA for Region three. The discussion was held in the Lane University Center room 232. The presenters were accompanied by Kara Thomas, the supervisor for the program. The presentation was about Sustainability and how recycling food can be a great deal of help for the environment. The presentation focused on how small towns have taken part of the Food Recovery program which Wolfgang explained as “a recognition-based program used to educate people and to increase food waste diversion.” The program asks big businesses to report their trash disposal annually to find ways of making compost for animals more efficiently.

The Food Recovery challenge has been a growing change in many small towns like in Vermont and Maryland and its main goals are to raise awareness of waste disposal and to have food for animals that would lead to healthier living for the environment and people themselves. The process is as follows: 1. People recycle their food and other recyclable waste products. 2. The waste is then turned into compost for animals like chickens to eat. 3. When farmers prepare the chickens for consumers the cycle begins all over again. It’s quite an easy program to partake in and isn’t hurting anyone to try it and help the earth as well.

Photo of presenter Athena Lee Bradley speaking on the importance of recycling during the presentation

The main organization mentioned throughout the discussion was the Grow Compost of Vermont. This is one of the organizations that’s helping in food recovery and compost production. Athena Bradley stated that “Small towns spend so much money for trash disposal.” One of the main issues with recycling waste is that many small towns are charged to dispose of trash. If these towns must pay so much just to remove waste, then people won’t worry too much about recycling for compost. Bradley also stated, “The food race problem is a matter of convenience.” What Bradley means by this is that people are doing what’s convenient for them. So, if you’re someone who doesn’t recycle and there’s no real reason why you don’t do it is due to convenience. Doing something that’s out of the way of what you’re used to makes people not want to do it. Most people just put all their waste together and dispose of it rather than taking the time out to recycle and sort things accordingly.

Recycling is important, and I found that both Bradley’s and Wolfgang’s explanation of why it’s important was informational and was a good way to spread the word about the procedures they’ve taken to get more people to take action. Bradley emphasized on the fact that local food is fresher and healthier because it’s mostly from healthy produce and recycled materials that make for a healthier environment. Everyone should think about the long-term effects of recycling and how could help not other others but themselves. People should take more interest into things that could help the environment around them and whatever it takes to have a healthy Earth should be worth it. For more information on the Grow Compost of Vermont please click the link to the website.