At nearly 14 percent, food waste in the U.S. now represents the single largest component in the municipal solid waste stream. In 2010, this amounted to 34 million tons of food, less than 3 percent of which was recovered or recycled. This staggering amount of food waste is driven not only by individual households, but also restaurants, including those which cater to travelers.

Over the past two years, HMSHost, a subsidiary of Autogrill, has been working with its vendors at Tampa International Airport to reduce the amount of food they discard. Over the past two years, more than 64 tons of day-old prepackaged food—including sandwiches, salads, fruits, cheeses and yogurt—have been donated instead of being thrown away. Feeding America picks up the food on weekdays and delivers it to after-school programs at the YMCA and local Boys and Girls Clubs. On weekends, Pinellas Hope serves the food to the homeless. In a January press release, HMSHost estimated the value of the unsold food to be roughly $12,000 per month.

More than just a great example of humanity and corporate citizenship, donating food, rather than throwing it away, is much better for the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that when food is disposed of in a landfill, it quickly decomposes and becomes a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Furthermore, its isolation from natural land deprives it from feeding the soil. Donation also ranks well on the EPA’s Food Waste Recovery Hierarchy (think of it as the six “R’s” for food), coming in second place after source reduction. Though ideal, source reduction above a certain threshold is not always feasible for restaurants due to demand fluctuations.

Since being implemented in Tampa two years ago, 13 other airports have adopted similar programs. According to Perry Kranias, director of food and beverage operations for HMSHost in Tampa, collecting the unsold food “required retraining staff, but not a lot of extra work.”

Anyway, last week we had snow in Tokyo. The next morning, as I was walking to the train station, the sun had just risen and its rays were warm enough to start melting the light dusting that had fallen on the treetops. Throw in a little wind and the result was a flurry of light snow falling all around the woods while the sun shone in a blue sky on a crisp day. The video below doesn’t do full justice, but does pick up a bit of the atmosphere. Crows can be heard in the background and the whole scene was one of serene calm amid the sprawling suburbs of Tokyo. This is why I walk through the park everyday on my way to work.

While we may have insulated ourselves somewhat from the chaotic and harsh whims of nature and the elements, we have become almost too far removed from it at times. For all it’s destructive and awesome force, the natural world is gorgeous, whether it be at the tiny scale of a lady bug on a leaf or at the hard-to-take-in vast scale of the Grand Canyon. If we are to truly become sustainable, we cannot forgot our dependence on and inseparability from nature. In the precious 3 minutes of calm and quiet I walk everyday through a small park in the largest metropolitan area on earth, that fact perhaps hits home more than ever.

[Image and video from author]

The map…was built from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD), released in 2011. It depicts the concentration of biomass—a measure of the amount of organic carbon—stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees. The darkest greens reveal the areas with the densest, tallest, and most robust forest growth. Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface.

Check out the big map below to find out how dense the trees are in your part of the country. The old growth California redwoods, the oldest and largest living organisms on the planet, can be seen densely covering parts of the northwest. Also, you may find some areas of the U.S. more brown or green than you expected. According to the article above, “forests cover about 30 percent of the planet’s surface, and as much as 45 percent of the carbon stored on land is tied up in forests.”

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They also claim, “it’s a challenge to create a K-Cup® portion pack that is recyclable and delivers an extraordinary cup of coffee.”  Sustainability is always the last priority, but this is why we have so many environmental, economic, and social issues currently.  By not thinking of sustainability with initial development we end up paying the price in the end, or the environment (or our children) pays the price.

Keurig also states, “We are very sensitive about the waste created by the K-Cup® portion packs and are investigating alternative materials. Finding a solution for this is a priority for us, and one we hope to have before long.”  I find this hard to believe since their entire product is based off of wasting individual cups every time you make a cup of coffee.  If they were really concerned, they would have not made the product in the first place.

Another thing that needs to be noted is if the coffee in the K-cups is even sustainable.  Also, all these plastic cups first originate from oil – the most unsustainable product we use today.  So please, if you care about sustainability, do not buy into one of these unsustainable contraptions and stick to making individual cups of coffee.