Recycling food boosts bottom line at Bates

LEWISTON – Bates College has demonstrated that recycling food waste can help its bottom line, a lesson that state officials say could prove beneficial to restaurants and institutions throughout Maine.

In most cafeterias, uneaten food left on plates is funneled into a garbage disposal and ground up as trash, designated for a landfill or solid-waste incinerator.

But at the Bates dining hall, the waste is collected in a stainless steel strainer before being sorted and trucked to a pig farm in Sabattus and a farm compost operation in Lisbon.

While a similar-size dining hall might spend $50,000 to $84,000 on waste disposal, Bates spent only $11,000 last year, said Christine Schwartz, director of dining services at the college.

Only 15 percent of all dining-hall waste at Bates College now goes into the trash.

Later this week, the state will launch a yearlong campaign to convince employers that they can both cut costs and help the environment by paying more attention to table scraps and other food waste.

State officials are impressed that Bates kept more than 272 tons of refuse out of the landfill last year.

Maine generates roughly 1.8 million tons of municipal solid waste each year, which must be sent to a landfill or incinerated at great cost to taxpayers and the environment. The State Planning Office estimates that 10 percent of that waste – 180,000 tons – is food, and that much of it could be recycled through programs like the one at Bates.

On Thursday, Schwartz will explain the details of her program to restaurant owners, supermarket managers, farmers and other businesspeople at the state’s first Food Waste Symposium at Bowdoin College in Brunswick.

The symposium will kick off a yearlong effort by the state to bring together farmers, community waste handlers and large-scale food-waste producers. A series of regional seminars will be scheduled in York County, Portland, Augusta and other areas.