The one-day audit is a self-examination of how much waste we produced as an individual. Nationwide “ Australian’s waste 4 million tonnes of food each year. This is enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks, which is sufficient trucks to span the gap between Australia and New Zealand more than three times.
In NSW alone, over 1.2 million tonnes of food is thrown away, and most of this (i.e. 800,000 tonnes) is from households. “(Craggs 2014)
As an international student that lives on my own and happening to be busy at most times, my food diet tends to be not as healthy. Most of my food sources are take away food or any other quick access food delivery services such as Ubereats, Deliveroo or foodora.
Which you can see the unhealthiness from my 24-hour food audit diagram below:
Through this activity, it helps us as an individual to realise where these foods come from before we putting in our mouth and how much waste it is produced to create these foods. For example, to cook these delicious fried potatoes, chips would produce organic waste from the vegetable farm, marketing, food preparations and eventually becoming the food on the table.
What happens with these organic wastes?
Personally, I tend to finish my meal and reduce as much waste as possible. In this food audit, the only organic waste I produced was the chicken and duck bones. Other than the organic waste, the most waste I have produced probably are the amount of taking away containers for the whole day than the food waste.
Since we all know that the food waste is going into the green bin and gets break down and recycle into our gardens, I decide to look at what another potential of these chicken bones can be use in a different way. Moreover, this is what I have discovered:
(Farooq. M & Ramli. A & Naeem. A 2015)
This diagram shows that the idea of using chicken bones as a heterogeneous catalyst with cooking oil to produce biodiesel it is a lot more economical and sustainable than the using homogenous base/acid catalysts. In Australia, there’s already companies that use cooking oil to produce biodiesel although this chicken bones method as not yet use in the industry due to the business itself it is already hard to convince the others, and it would affect the cost of the petrol oil.
Food Audit from the canape
Couple weeks ago, we went to the canapé at the UTS book Lunch as a whole class. The food at the canape is all vegan and consider as organic food. The set up for the food were appealing to the visitors as the food presented in a way that was suited the topic.
For the entrée, it was a series of organic raw vegetables in the hummus sauce and olives to give an image of a garden. Although towards the end of the canape, there were an incredible amount of hummus left in the container and there was no more vegetable left to go with the sauce.
It was a real sad moment that I had to secretly dip my finger into the leftover sauce before they are taken it away. Other than the sauce it was a great experience to eat healthier and have a different aspect as the food that is vegan can also taste as good as other food we ate in daily life. Also, consider of using cardboard made straws rather than plastic made were outstanding as reviewing the environment not only through food but also the kinds of serving equipment.
Reference:
Cragg, E. 2014, “EPA, Love food hate waste project- $2.5 billion”, “UTS Insearch, Design Thinking DDTH, Power Point Presentation, UTS Insearch, Sydney, viewed 2nd April 2017
Farooq. M & Ramli. A & Naeem. A 2015, “Renewable Energy” Volume 76, April 2015, page 362-368, viewed 4th April 2017 <http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/science/article/pii/S0960148114007575>
Terzon.E .2016, “Biodiesel: The great crash of Australia’s ‘fish and chip cooking oil’ renewable fuel industry’, ABC News, viewed 4th April 2017 < http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-28/why-australia-cooking-oil-biodiesel-market-crashed/8121100 >
Wealth From Waste 