If you've never considered what happens to the remnants of the fully loaded plate of enchiladas, chips and salsa you grab from the buffet at an all-inclusive Mexico resort, you might be in for a shock.
Mexico's Velas Vallarta produces a veritable ton of food waste each day, but rather than dumping it into the trash, the Puerto Vallarta resort delivers roughly 700 pounds of it, each morning, to a hog farmer down the road to use as feed.
Much of what doesn't go to the pigs is composted on site and then used to fertilize the resort's verdant gardens. Ultimately, the combo of food waste, leaves, and grass trimmings are returned to the soil, while diverting waste from Mexico's overloaded landfills. Compost is also shared with staff, for use at their homes.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly a quarter of food purchases in hotels and restaurants are simply thrown away. While food waste is a hot topic in the U.S., it's a particular challenge in low-income nations where food is sometimes a scarce resource to begin with. Some resorts are doing their part to address it — even when governmental regulations and a general lack of awareness make that difficult.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
4 comments:
One of the New England state cities has a thing going with food and food waste. The local prison/jail has a farm that grows vegetables that are sold to the local public hospital, which takes the scraps from the kitchen and sends them back to the prison farm for composting after sanitizing it all. I read about this over ten years ago and don't know if it's still happening, or if it's happening elsewhere.
I worked at Safeway 30 plus years ago. We would save vegetable s and bread for local got farmer. He paid a small amount for free food several times a week.
Maryland stopped sending all the tons of food scraps to the hog farmers years ago. It seems the people that sell feed to the farmers were unhappy about the competition.
2:13 - unbelievable (not your comment, but just the lack of common sense out in the world)
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