A Look Into Waste Management - and Where We Go From Here

November 6, 2020

A Look Into Waste Management - and Where We Go From Here

For most of us, responsibly managing waste is a never-ending battle, a problem that applies from businesses to even the personal choices we make in our homes. At Eat Purely, we too are tackling this problem, guided by the phrase “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” To us, this pushes us to always work to improve our management of waste as we create a food delivery service that meets your needs. Already, we have identified the main issues we face as we look to even more drastically reduce our waste and better our waste management while still meeting food delivery needs throughout the city.

Food Waste

We generate food waste in two areas of our production for our food delivery service. In preparing food there is always trim, scrap, or unusable product, leading to inevitable food waste in our kitchen. By projecting sales for food delivery more accurately, however, we have been able to reduce the waste generated in the kitchen by 60% in the last 6 months. Food that has been packaged for our food delivery services but not sold also contributes to our food waste - and it’s not just food that is wasted but packaging and labor too. Donating all meals not sold in our food delivery service  (with at least two days of usability remaining) allows us to prevent any of our product from going to a landfill - while allowing us to support our community as well. We have reduced waste in this area by almost 70% in 2020 alone, but we still have work to do. As organic waste in landfills generates methane, a potent greenhouse gas, we want to avoid contributing to the problem of food waste as much as possible. By composting wasted food and other organics, methane emissions are significantly reduced.

Carbon Footprint

Studying other companies and examining how they handle food distribution has been beneficial to us for two reasons. First, we want to run an operation that is as efficient as possible. Second, we are concerned about our carbon footprint because we want clean air to breathe and to slow down climate change. We are positive we can change our distribution methods and continue to deliver excellent products with great customer service. We will switch to pre-order models because it allows us to most efficiently route our drivers for delivery.  We are also making a plan to make our facility more efficient, helping us to be more energy efficient.  We are committed to tackling these issues now and in the future. We will publish our own statistics on our improvements and will always challenge ourselves to make changes even in our daily lives to lessen our impact on the environment.

Packaging

This is the most difficult issue we need to solve.  We would like to provide the most environmentally friendly packaging, biodegradable or compostable, and sustain the same shelf life of our products so that our food delivery service is convenient and accessible.  You can’t have it both ways. You will see some changes to our packaging over the next 6 months, and all of those decisions will be based on the best combination of shelf life with the lowest carbon footprint. The effectiveness of compostable packaging depends on how consumers recycle them.  We will be skeptical of all single use items. Ideally we could move towards a reusable and refillable container system.