Friday, June 5, 2015

Composting Food For Thought On World Environment Day #WED15

The relationship between dairy packaging and composting is not that obvious because much dairy packaging involves plastics, which currently are not compostable.

In honor of World Environment Day, and to clarify some of the issues around the composting of dairy packaging, and also composting terminology, I wrote an article, "On World Environment Day, think about this: Composting for dairy packaging may becoming sooner than you think" as a guest blog piece for Dairy Foods.

Compostable packaging will figure strongly both with exhibitors as well as with speakers at the IFTAnnual Meeting and the Global Food & Beverage Packaging Summit that are coming to Chicago in July, 2015

According to Daphna Nissenbaum the CEO of TIPA, who is a speaker at the Global Food & Beverage Packaging Summit, "As more municipalities develop a food waste collection infrastructure for composting, or as cities like New York encourage consumers to take food waste for composting to drop off sites as a part of the NYC Recycles program, the possibility of including compostable flexible packaging with food waste will have a major impact in diverting this type of packaging from landfill."

For brand owners and companies interested in composting the US Composting Council (follow on Twitter @USCompostingCou), offers useful fact sheets and free reports as does the Michigan State Extension (@MSUExtension) and GreenBlue (@GreenBlueorg), an environmental nonprofit dedicated to the sustainable use of materials in society.

The City of New York (@NYCgov), through the NYC Department of Sanitation (@NYCRecycles), oversees NYC’s waste prevention, recycling and composting programs, and offers drop-off sites throughout the five city boroughs as well as a Master ComposterCourse.