Acquiring a Taste for the Circular Economy
Originally published in Best Practice Winter 2015 issue
Food waste is a growing scandal which now has the public’s full attention. In the United States and much of Western Europe, food scraps constitute around 19% of the waste dumped in landfills, where it ends up rotting and producing methane, a greenhouse gas. This is not only undesirable in terms of sustainability and environmental impact but costly for food retailers paying high disposal costs.
So imagine if this food waste could be turned into zero emissions energy which in turn is used to manufacture the food sold on the supermarket shelves. This is the neat solution being pioneered by the Helsinki based Finnish retail conglomerate Kesko Corporation which has more than 1,500 stores across Scandinavia, the Baltics, Russia and Belarus.
Kesko’s unavoidable edible food waste is already largely distributed to charities as food aid. Now food which is no longer fit for human consumption – is moldy or rotten or has been in some other way contaminated – and which has previously been composted or burnt, is collected and turned into 100% renewable Finnish biogas which is piped into the factories producing Kesko’s popular Pirkka own-brand foodstuffs.
