Page 47 - RealDirtENG2020

What about plastics and packaging?
There’s no denying that a lot of single-use plastics are used across the food supply chain. But as awareness grows about their harmful environmental impacts, farmers and food producers are taking action to use less or different products and to recycle where they can.
Many farmers wrap hay bales in plastic wrapping to help preserve the crop, but guring out what to do with the wrap once it’s no longer needed has always been a challenge. Farmers in Northern Ontario, for example, are involved in a pilot project to recycle the material into light diesel fuel104.
Career Pro le
Product Development Specialist Sustainable Packaging
Luci Faas
Before moving to Ontario in 2008, Luci Faas lived and worked in many different places, including Japan and the USA. Faas studied environmental education in university and has carried that passion into her work as a Product Development Specialist with Nature Fresh Farms, a large greenhouse near Leamington, Ontario. “Environmental stewardship can be personal,” said Faas, and that “making small choices in your daily life that are more sustainable can make a big impact.” That’s why developing a newly launched 100 per cent Home Compostable Cucumber Wrap has been such a passion project for her. The compostable wrap both prolongs the shelf life of the cucumbers, while reducing harmful plastic waste; it was recently announced as a nalist for The Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s 2020 Innovation Awards.
Faas enjoys the unique challenge of collaborating with many other departments including marketing, operations and quality assurance to research and test new packaging concepts, with a special focus on nding more sustainable options. “It’s rewarding to nd a solution that is environmentally-friendly, and that doesn’t compromise the quality or become too costly for the consumer.”
Photo courtesy of Nature Fresh Farms
An organization called Cleanfarms has spearheaded the recycling of more than 126 million plastic agricultural containers into new products, instead of then going into land lls105.
And the Canadian Produce Marketing Association has set up a plastics packaging working group to determine how to reduce the use of plastics without compromising produce quality or safety. Examples include biodegradable food wrappings, or moulded ber punnets and trays for cucumbers, berries, mushrooms, and tomatoes106.
Wrapping a greenhouse cucumber in lm increases its sellable shelf life from around three days, to 15 to 17, because the lm limits how the vegetable breathes and keeps it hydrated, thus reducing food waste.
The food we waste
According to the United Nations, one-third of all the food we produce is lost or wasted each year107. Food loss usually happens during food production, storage, processing, or distribution, whereas food waste happens at the end of the food chain, when food that is of good quality and t for consumption is discarded.
A 2019 study estimated that 11.2 million metric tons of avoidable food loss or waste occurs across the food value chain in Canada––equivalent to a value of $49.5 billion108. The average Canadian household wastes about 140 kg of food annually, the equivalent of throwing out more than $1,100 each year. That amounts to almost 2.2 million tons of edible food wasted each year, costing Canadians more than $17 billion109.
Farmers and food producers, particularly in the produce sector, are investing in solutions to help reduce food waste, like smart sensors and intelligent packaging that extend shelf-life.
They’re also nding creative ways to nd new uses for food waste, like producing environmentally friendly energy, using an extract from mushroom stems to create a natural preservative110, or using the high-in-antioxidants coffee cherries—the fruit whose pit is the coffee bean and is discarded once the bean is extracted—to make a type of tea. Livestock can be fed by-products of human food production, like distillers’ grains (waste from brewing and ethanol production), canola, and soybean meal (what’s left after the oil has been removed) or beet pulp that’s leftover after sugar beets are processed to extract sugar.
Here are some things you can do at home to reduce food waste too:
• Ask for smaller portions
• Keep leftover food for another meal
• Buy “ugly” fruits and vegetables—they are just as good to eat as the pretty,
regularly shaped ones!
Chapter 6: Environment, climate change and sustainable farming 47
DID YOU KNOW?
Almost half of all the fruits and vegetables produced in the world are never actually eaten—they’re just wasted111.