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New story of food waste management: A circular economy is reframing our ideas of dumping and donating

New story of food waste management: A circular economy is reframing our ideas of dumping and donating
Angela Ludek (right) from WasteAid passes a box of vegetables to Bokashi Bran’s Bronwyn Jones (centre) after recovering vegetables from the morning market. (Photo: Shiraaz Mohamed)

A circular economy for waste management holds promise for a planet under pressure and a society with deep divisions. There are also lessons for all of us to stop thinking of surplus food as waste.

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

If ever there was a marker of modern-day middle-class excess, it has to be a pillowy bag of lettuce leaves gone mushy before they can be eaten. 

Most days, for the past six years, Hanneke van Linge, who is now managing director of the non-profit Nosh Food Rescue, spends her mornings recovering food from the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market in City Deep and a small network of supermarkets in the city. She’s after food that is safe to eat but no longer fresh enough to entice consumers.

“We have been conditioned to expect crisp at all costs and we need to start confronting why we think of food surplus as food waste or that some foods are for poor people and some food is for rich people,” she says.

Since mid-2019 Nosh has recovered just over 850 tons of food. Van Linge says one of the key barriers to getting food to beneficiaries comes from health and safety legislation that has not kept pace with changing realities of the extremes of how people consume food in the country: on one end, those who inevitably add to the estimated 30% (amounting to R71.4-billion’s worth, according to Council for Scientific and Industrial Research data from 2013), of food being dumped and, on the other end, those who rely on scavenging in dustbins for calories to survive.

Van Linge says current legislation has not created an obligation for farms, cold chain operators and retailers to donate surplus food to beneficiaries. Added to this are liability concerns for supermarkets over food health and safety, and this creates a scenario “where dumping over donating is cheaper and easier”.

“We need legislation that ensures that surplus food is donated. It helps end the indignity and danger of people having to go through bins to find something to eat,” she says.

A volunteer holds up some of the vegetables recovered from the morning market. (Photo: Shiraaz Mohamed)

Nosh Food Rescue’s bounty ends up at soup kitchens and, through their network of partners, the food gets sorted, is cooked for meals or packaged for food parcels. What’s too far gone ends up as animal feed or on the compost heap.

On a cool autumn morning Van Linge’s double-cab bakkie, full of unwashed baby potatoes, chillies, the odd Hubbard squash and spinach, makes its way to a plot in a Midrand cul-de-sac where the Culinary Passions School of Hospitality, run by chef Citrum Khumalo, is based. Van Linge, Khumalo and others are part of a small networking session organised by WasteAid, a UK-registered NGO set up by waste managers who recognise that reframing the waste management chain holds significant economic potential.

Networking can deepen conversations about innovations and solutions, and create a closed loop for waste management, a so-called circular economy that enlarges the waste value chain in the country.

Owner of the CP School of Hospitality Chef Thembinkosi Khumalo prepares a creamy vegetable ragout. (Photo: Shiraaz Mohamed)

The idea of a circular economy breaks from a reliance on extractive industrial models and finite natural resources, and focuses on building social capital that’s geared towards the regeneration of natural systems, reducing pollution and finding solutions to climate change, deepening poverty and the slump of hopelessness.

Inside Khumalo’s school there are tables piled high with separated recovered foods. There are cakes, bread and biscuits just past their sell-by dates along with packets and trays of vegetables and fruits. In the kitchens are students and a handful of volunteers cutting up veg while others eyeball and sniff trays of packaged chicken pieces recovered from a stock clear-out from one of the supermarkets.

“We have forgotten how to trust our eyes, noses and sense of taste when it comes to food because we have been told by powerful retailers and marketing what is fresh.

“When you are closer to understanding how your food comes to your plate – even the life of an animal that is slaughtered – you will trust these senses more and understand that there should be no such thing as waste,” says Khumalo.

Owner of the CP School of Hospitality Chef Thembinkosi Khumalo feeds his pigs with trimmings from the kitchen and vegetables recovered from the morning market that are not fit for human consumption. (Photo: Shiraaz Mohamed)

For Khumalo, part of a circular economy means having produce on which students can practise their cooking skills; in turn, the dishes they produce help feed people in need. During Covid-19 lockdowns, Khumalo and his students helped feed an estimated 3,000 people in the areas around Midrand, mostly from donated and recovered food. In lower lockdown levels the numbers have eased off, but he still has an SMS alert system in place to notify people in the surrounding communities when his school has cooked meals and food parcels for collection.

People in the community include waste reclaimers like Luyanda Hlatshwayo, who is part of the African Reclaimers Organisation (ARO), which has 9,000 registered members. He says: “Waste reclaimers really need the donated fruit and vegetables that are expensive for us to buy, because you can walk 30km a day and your body needs to be strong. Sometimes reclaimers are up by 3am and they don’t get back home till dark so they don’t have time to cook nutritious meals and eat junk instead,” says Hlatshwayo.

Being part of a network in a circular waste economy also helps break stigma, he says. “People sometimes think we are thieves or that we are drug addicts,” he adds.

Through the network, the reclaimers have been invited to work in some schools to teach children about recycling and they help other network partners start food gardens at these schools.

Food gardening, and more precisely the health of soil from composting, is the happy place of Himkaar Singh. Singh started Compost Kitchen as a way to ensure that organic kitchen waste can be reclaimed from households. The waste is fed to earthworms to turn organic waste into vermicompost.

“If we repair our soil we can grow healthy food and we can retain our water, which is essential in our country,” says Singh about meeting the challenges of water and food security.

Sbusiso Shongwe sorts out chicken in preparation for a chicken curry. (Photo: Shiraaz Mohamed)

Like Singh, Sbusiso Shongwe of Boom­badotmobi has been focusing on how to get communities around Diepsloot to start composting organic waste. “Our business started with looking at the problem of illegal dumping of rubble in Diepsloot and we realised it was coming from areas like Fourways so we wanted to get people to think differently about their waste and their environments.

“Now we are trying to get people to turn their organic waste into compost so that they can start small-scale farms in Diepsloot itself,” he says.

The story of waste is shifting because the days of the throwaway society are numbered. The move from a linear to a circular waste economy can be more inclusive, symbiotic and can champion locally appropriate solutions.

Ultimately it can help to erase the block in our heads about what waste actually is and why it remains our responsibility even after it ends up in a bin. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Harro von Blottnitz says:

    Indeed very important that produced food gets onto plates not the bins. This is a matter of solidarity and resource efficiency, not “circular economy”. How non-edible residues are processed to return nutrients to soils is a matter of circularity.

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