Food & agriculture – June 24

-Order Your Chicken Rare: Nearly Lost Breeds Make a Comeback
-Qatar’s Renewable Energy Solution to Middle East Food Security Problem
-New York’s ‘Food Recycling’ Program Could Be The Future Of Waste And Energy
-15 Websites Saving the Environment by Changing the Food System
-Local Foodshed Mapping Tool for New York State

-50,000 Bumblebees die after neonicotinoid pesticide use in Oregon

Scraps and the City

Food and other organic material (by which I mean yard waste and prunings) make up a whopping 25 percent of New York’s residential waste stream: that’s a huge amount to potentially divert from landfills and incinerators. Compost it instead and we’d be saving the city money (New York spends more than $330 million a year hauling waste to landfills) and avoiding the generation of the greenhouse gas methane, which is produced when organic material rots in the airless confines of a dump.

Getting passionate about a load of Rubbish

I was quite surprised when I went to my first Transition Town Shrewsbury Hub meeting at how many projects there were to do with waste. My previous Transition experience had led me to believe that very few people were really that interested in waste, except for the possibility of upcycling it into something else. My time in Shrewsbury has already proved how wrong I was…