Composting is a common outlet for finding a use for kitchen scraps, including potato and carrot peels, leftover food, stale bread, and other foods that can’t be eaten. But what if composting isn’t part of your daily routine? The innovators at Tour de Fork in Milan, Italy are designing ways to use food byproducts in new ways to help consumers deal with food waste.
The “Second Chance” product line being developed by Tour de Fork—which is still in the prototype phase—offers consumers fresh ideas for the byproducts of goods like coffee, oranges, and apples. The model shown here is a way for oranges to perform double duty: when the orange is eaten and only the peel remains, slide the citrus rind onto the mountable wire for a homemade air freshener.
Other products include a hanging basket which uses old coffee grinds to neutralize refrigerator odors and a “Apple Peel Grower” that uses the natural properties of apple peels to aid yeast or sourdough production.
According to author Tristram Stuart in Chapter 9 of State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, 25-50 percent of food is wasted, making the innovations developed by Tour de Fork more important than ever before.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
